Tag: Brent Taylor

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Catching Up

Protesters gathered on President’s Day to condemn President Donald Trump and his administration. (Photo: Chris Davis)

The Tennessee Board of Professional Responsibility had good news last week for Shelby County DA Steve Mulroy regarding four distinct matters charged against him by his persistent adversary, state Senator Brent Taylor, who had included them in his proposed resolution to seek legislative removal of Mulroy. 

The board found Mulroy legally blameless in:

1) His decision to take the death penalty off the table in the murder case of Michael Sample, when two different experts concluded that the defendant was intellectually disabled and thus ineligible, under the law, for the death penalty.

2) His decision not to oppose a reduction of a 162-year sentence for a string of nonviolent forgeries in the case of Courtney Anderson. 

3) and 4) Two separate allegations that he had engaged in improper “ex parte” communication with a presiding judge outside the presence of opposing counsel. 

OUTMemphis placed third at the 12th Annual TEP Gumbo Contest. (Photo: Courtesy Jonathan Cole)

• The OUTMemphis organization, whose booth is pictured here, was one of several winners in the annual fundraising gumbo contest sponsored by the Tennessee Equality Project.

The 12th annual TEP event was held Sunday at the Memphis Sports and Events Center at Liberty Park, drawing a large crowd of entrants, attendees, and public figures who braved the frigid weather.

Proceeds from the event support a variety of projects which, in the words of TEP, “advance the well-being of LGBTQ people and their families here at home in Tennessee.”

Among the elected politicians on hand were state Senator Raumesh Akbari and state Representative Gabby Salinas. Senator Akbari served as one of five primary judges for the event.

This year’s event was held amid several pending developments in both state and national government of direct interest to the LGBTQ community and on the eve of hearings in the state General Assembly on HB 315/SB 0737, the “Tennessee Covenant Marriage Act.”

That legislation, as described by its chief sponsor, state Representative Gino Bulso (R-Williamson), would allow marital unions “between a man and a woman,” requiring compulsory counseling and excluding “irreconcilable differences” as reasons for divorce.

Bulso said the bill would also challenge the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling that enabled same-sex marriages.

• President’s Day weekend was notable in other ways as well. On Monday, a sizeable crowd of protesters gathered Downtown to convey their sentiments regarding ongoing actions by the Trump administration.

Former Flyer staffer Chris Davis was there and took the photo below. 

(Photo: Chris Davis)
Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog Politics Feature

Political Dominoes

(left) Marsha Blackburn; (right) Bill Hagerty (Photos: United States Senate, Public domain | Wikimedia Commons)

To remind the faithful readers of this space: In our year-end issue, we offered forecasts about the shape of things to come in the political arena.

One circumstance noted for the record was the fact that both of Tennessee’s incumbent U.S. senators — Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty — would strongly consider running for governor in 2026.

That is what our pipeline said, and that is what we reported, even though it seemed passing strange, even to us. Why? Because the customary rites of passage flow in the opposite direction — with the gubernatorial office more often serving as a springboard for Senate, than vice versa.

That is definitely the pattern in our neighboring state of Arkansas, where such eminent recent members of the Senate as Dale Bumpers and David Pryor (both now deceased) served what amounted to apprenticeships as governor before going on to become senators.

To be sure, ambitions may figure differently in the Land of Opportunity than in the Volunteer State, but Lamar Alexander ran first for governor and then for senator. And one recalls the unhappy, arguably tragic fate of Democrat Frank Clement, who served several terms as the state’s governor before meeting his Waterloo in two successive failed runs for the Senate.

(Interestingly, Clement’s second and final failed try, in 1966, resulted in the election to the Senate of Republican Howard Baker — the forerunner of what, in the course of time, would become the wall-to-wall ubiquity of GOP state officials.)

In any case, both of Tennessee’s current Republican senators have floated unmistakable trial balloons regarding gubernatorial races in 2026, and both seem dead serious. It may be far-fetched to imagine a competitive race between the two, but, my, wouldn’t that be an attention-grabber!

More likely, forces in the Republican Establishment — most notably Donald Trump — would probably dictate the choice of one over the other. (Either could make a plausible claim of loyalty to the president and to the MAGA agenda.)

And, given the high probability of success for the ultimate GOP nominee, one can imagine a domino-like chain reaction of opportunities opening up for other upwardly mobile Tennessee Republicans.

If Hagerty makes a governor’s race, he could either run for both governor and re-election as senator simultaneously, or go ahead and shed his Senate seat (his term would expire in 2026, anyhow) while campaigning for governor. In that latter eventuality, a race for his departed seat would occur in 2026, with a high probability that 8th District Congressman David Kustoff would be a candidate.

Kustoff’s seat, in turn, might then well be targeted by, say, the preternaturally ambitious state Senator Brent Taylor, in which case his seat would open as well, with possible aspirants for it including former city councilmen Kemp Conrad and Frank Colvett, and maybe even state Rep. Mark White. (A White race would create yet another vacancy and another domino.)

If Blackburn runs and wins, she would keep her Senate seat until being sworn in, in which case either she or a lame-duck Bill Lee would appoint a temporary Senate successor, with a special election for a permanent senator to be held in 2028.

The same sort of sequence as mentioned above for a Hagerty win might then occur, involving the same or a similar cast of characters, though everything would happen at a later remove in time.

Got all that straight, gentle reader? Probably not, though it could be worse. There are other permutations and possible complications we’re sparing you from.

The bottom line is that some shock and awe seems certain for the state’s political calendar in 2026, along with a potentially dizzy round of dominoes.

And who knows? Maybe some as yet unknown Democrat comes out of nowhere to spoil the party at some point along the succession line. 

Categories
News The Fly-By

MEMernet: One More, Records Request, GIF Level

Posted to Facebook by Memphis Memes 901

Memphis on the internet.

One More

This image of Bass Pro Shops at the Pyramid was just too good not to share. Memphis Memes 901 titled it “the beautiful, snow-capped mountains of Tennessee.”

Records Request

Posted to Facebook by Steve Mulroy

Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy fulfilled a “burdensome” records request from state Sen. Brent Taylor recently. Taylor, of course, is seeking Mulroy’s ouster from the job during the legislative session this year. 

The request included 4,000 documents, 16,000 pages, six boxes, and more than 150 staff hours to complete, Mulroy said. “Things like this are a distraction from the real work that our office has to do. But we will fully cooperate with legislators.” 

GIF Level

Posted to Reddit by u/Melodic-Frosting-443

Reddit user Melodic-Frosting-443 took the Memphis-Shelby County Schools situation to GIF level with a photo of the board surrounding Marie Feagins, overlaid with Stealers Wheel lyrics, “Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right …” (You could see it above. But we’re not The Daily Prophet.)  

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

A GOP Grudge Match

Naser Fazlullah with South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, Trump’s secretary of Homeland Security nominee and last year’s Lincoln Day keynoter. (Photo: Naser Fazlullah | Facebook)

The race for chairman of the Shelby County Republican Party, due to be resolved at the local party convention on Saturday at the Venue at Bartlett Station, has turned into a real donnybrook, with potentially divisive consequences.

As noted previously in this space, the two candidates are former Memphis City Councilman Worth Morgan, the beneficiary of an intra-party “Revive” campaign supported by numerous prominent party members, and longtime activist Naser Fazlullah, whose nose-to-the-grindstone party activities have won him a sizable grassroots constituency. 

Underlying the surface aspects of the race are conflicts and rivalries involving other party figures and a myriad of issues.

Morgan’s most significant supporter is undoubtedly state Senator Brent Taylor, who claims credit for having recruited Morgan, an unsuccessful candidate for Shelby County mayor in 2022, to seek the chairmanship. Taylor won election to the state Senate that same year, claiming the seat vacated by former incumbent Brian Kelsey, who was forced out by legal problems. Since then, he has gone on to generate an amount of attention for himself unusual for a first-term legislator.

That’s partly due to the fact that Taylor, wealthy from the sale of his extensive funeral home network, has personally endowed numerous GOP candidacies and party events, both statewide and locally. And he continues to attract publicity for his aggressive efforts, in and out of the legislature, to impose stronger state control over law enforcement in Shelby County.

The most recent manifestation of what Taylor calls a “Make Memphis Matter” campaign is his ongoing attempt to force the removal of Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy, whom he accuses of lax crime control. The senator has initiated a legislative procedure that would ultimately require a two-thirds vote in both chambers of the legislature to oust Mulroy.

As it happens, Fazlullah opposes that effort, on the grounds that using legislation to remove a legally elected local official is unjustified overkill.

That’s one reason for Taylor’s animus toward Fazlullah and his recruitment of Morgan as a rival candidate. Another is his assertion that, at last fall’s Germantown Festival, Fazlullah strenuously urged GOP state Representative Mark White to oppose Taylor’s reelection in 2026. White acknowledges that Fazlullah made such an approach, which he politely turned aside.

Says Taylor: “Naser should never be party chairman after trying to recruit a candidate to run against a sitting state senator in a primary who happens to have been the largest contributor to the Republican Party while he was vice chairman. Two can play at this game!”

Meanwhile, Fazlullah has allies who hold grudges against Worth Morgan. One is Terry Roland of Millington, a notable GOP conservative who regards Morgan as a lukewarm Republican, a “Never-Trumper,” and a potential advocate of city-county consolidation.

Roland sees Morgan as a tool of party “elitists” and reproaches the chairmanship candidate for allegedly “boycotting” the local GOP’s 2022 Lincoln Day banquet, which was keynoted that year by Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows.

The showdown over the chairmanship reflects a complicated pattern of conflicting loyalties, with GOP moderates and conservatives to be found on both sides.

• You saw it here first, in our year-end forecast of future political events: U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn is seriously considering a race for governor in 2026 and has so informed an increasing number of her fellow Republicans statewide. 

Glenn Jacobs, the Knox County mayor who was previously regarded as perhaps the leading Republican gubernatorial hopeful, has energized Blackburn’s likely candidacy with a formal endorsement. 

The Republican nomination, though, will apparently still be contested by U.S. Representative John Rose of Cookeville, a multi-millionaire with the capacity to self-fund. 

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Punching Down

Brent Taylor (Photo: Senator Brent Taylor | Facebook)

It surely hasn’t gone unnoticed that state government is continuing to flex its muscles vis-à-vis local government in Memphis and Shelby County. 

Officials aligned with the administration in Nashville are threatening outright takeover of the Memphis-Shelby County Schools (MSCS) system at the same time that state Senator Brent Taylor and helpers continue to implement their would-be coup d’état against the county judiciary and the office of District Attorney Steve Mulroy.

In the case of MSCS, the sudden out-of-nowhere power struggle between an apparent school board majority and first-year superintendent Marie Feagins has prompted what amounts to an ultimatum from Governor Bill Lee and the presiding officers of the state legislative chambers: Keep Feagins or else!

And Taylor has enlisted the same officials in his campaign to oust Mulroy, involving them in his bill of particulars against the DA at a press conference last Thursday that followed by a day a quickly improvised “summit” called by the senator to consider the case for a new crime lab in Memphis, something Mulroy has put forth as a major need for facilitating effective local law enforcement.

The list of invitees to the crime lab conference, styled as a “roundtable discussion,” included Tennessee Bureau of Investigation director David Rausch and a virtually complete roster of public figures, state and local, who could be considered stakeholders in the matter of law enforcement.

There was one glaring omission, however: DA Mulroy, who was not only not invited; he was not even informed of the meeting, which was held at the City Hall of Germantown and concluded with Taylor suggesting an ultimate consensus that processing of local crime data in sensitive cases could be easily expedited via an existing crime lab in Jackson, obviating the need for a new Memphis lab.

A cynic could be pardoned for assuming that the entire thrust of the meeting in Germantown was to undermine the absent DA’s call for such a lab.

There was no doubt about the senator’s minimizing motive in his press conference the next day at the Memphis Police Association headquarters. It was overtly to “reveal the causes to be considered for the removal of District Attorney Steve Mulroy.”

Taylor’s bill of particulars against Mulroy was a duke’s mixture of complaints, ranging from prerogatives asserted by the DA that could be, and in several cases were, countered by ad hoc state legislation to innovative procedures pursued by Mulroy, some of them reflecting purposes that Taylor acknowledged sharing himself.

A case of the latter was an agreement reached by the DA with Juvenile Court Judge Tarik Sugarmon to allow trial court judges access to Juvenile Court records. Taylor had sponsored a bill to do just that in last year’s session of the General Assembly.

A similar instance was Taylor’s inclusion in his list of Mulroy’s declared support of gun safety referenda placed by the Memphis City Council on the 2024 general election ballot and overwhelmingly passed.

“Many of us” could sympathize with the referenda points, Taylor said, but his point was that the referenda — calling for local ordinances on behalf of gun permits, an assault rifle ban, and judicial confiscation of firearms in at-risk instances — ran counter to state law.

Sponsors of the referenda had made it clear that they called for “trigger” laws that could be enforced only if and when state law might be amended to allow them.

And there’s a further anomaly here, given Taylor’s stated goal to “Make Memphis Mattter” and safeguard the city from crime.

One has to wonder why he isn’t pursuing an altogether different strategy, one calling for a legislative “carve-out” of Shelby County from current state law prohibiting the immediate implementation of the ordinances called for by the referenda.

Such a course would be consistent with the principle of home rule; it would also be supportive of a position taken by Mulroy’s Republican opponent in the 2022 DA’s race, then-incumbent Amy Weirich, who inveighed against the iniquitous consequences of the state’s increasingly permissive stripping away of gun safety regulations. 

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Early Heat

Terry Roland (Photo: shelbycountytn.gov)

As no one needs to be reminded, the year 2025 is starting off with near-arctic temperatures, but enough political action is ongoing or forthcoming in the near future to generate a bit of heat.

• The executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party will convene in Nashville on Saturday, January 25th, to pick a new chairperson, and no fewer than seven candidates have been nominated for the honor. They are:

— Rachel Campbell of Chattanooga, currently serving both as party chair of Hamilton County and vice chair of the state party. She is one of two co-favorites in the race.

— Gloria Johnson of Knoxville, a state representative and, most recently, the Democrats’ unsuccessful candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2024. The other co-favorite, she has good name recognition and a residual network within the party, but there is some question as to whether her legislative service would disqualify her from the fundraising duties required of a chair.

— Brian Cordova of Nashville, the state party’s current executive director, and a veteran of numerous Democratic electoral campaigns. In the event of a deadlock between Campbell and Johnson, he is seen as a possible fallback choice.

— Vincent Dixie of Nashville, another state representative and a former chair of the party’s legislative caucus. Like Johnson, he, too, might be conflicted on the issue of fundraising.

— Alec Kucharski, a veteran of Tennessee political campaigns and currently a resident of Chicago, where he serves as a liaison with the Democratic delegation of the Illinois legislature.

— Todd Frommeyer of Pulaski, an activist, lawyer, and Navy vet.

— Edward Roland of Chattanooga, said to be a salesperson. 

All these candidates will participate in a forum at 1 p.m. on Saturday, to be streamed on Facebook via the Tennessee Democratic County Chairs Association.

• It will be noticed, by the way, that this fairly sizeable field of Democratic candidates contains no aspirants from Memphis.

One longtime member of the Democratic state committee from Shelby County, David Cambron, takes note of this, saying in a text, “We are not Big Shelby any more.”

Cambron maintains that the Memphis area’s “last chance of relevancy” was lost in the 2006 U.S. Senate election, which saw Democrat Harold Ford Jr. lose to Republican Bob Corker.

And, in Cambron’s view, the problem has bipartisan dimensions. “It’s the same reason every statewide discussion of possible Republican gubernatorial candidates doesn’t mention Brent Taylor.” 

The reference is clearly to state Senator Taylor’s seemingly nonstop campaigning for more assertive state authority over law enforcement in Memphis and Shelby County. Often, such intentional omnipresence in media attention bespeaks an intention to seek higher office.

Yet, as Cambron points out, Taylor’s name is rarely to be found in public speculation about the 2026 governor’s race.

(In fairness, it should be pointed out that when the Flyer queried Taylor about a possible ambition to run for governor, the senator replied, “The short answer is no. The long answer is hell, no.”)

• As it happens Saturday, January 25th, is also the date for a GOP chairmanship decision, this one for the leadership of the Shelby County Republican Party, the issue to be decided at the Venue at Bartlett Station.

The two declared candidates are former Memphis City Councilman Worth Morgan and longtime GOP activist Naser Fazlullah. As noted previously in this space, Morgan has been the beneficiary of a hyped-up PR campaign involving numerous public endorsements from influential local GOP figures.

All of that has gotten the goat of one prominent Republican, however. Former County Commission Chairman Terry Roland of Millington, who praises Fazlullah’s “selfless” service to the local party, denounces the pro-Morgan faction’s “Revive” campaign as nothing more than an “elitist” plot to suppress grassroots Republicans.

And Roland, who has headed up local campaign efforts for Donald Trump from 2016 on, levies what may be the worst charge in his vocabulary against Morgan, whom he calls a — wait for it — “Never-Trumper.”

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

State vs. Local

JB Smiley at Germantown Democrats’ picnic (Photo: Jackson Baker)

Most people are familiar with an adage, often attributed to the late Speaker of the U.S. House Tip O’Neill, that “all politics is local.”

Until it isn’t. 

Tennesseans are becoming uncomfortably aware that state government is muscling into as many local government prerogatives as possible — in areas ranging from education to healthcare to social policy to, increasingly, law enforcement.

A number of current circumstances reflect what seems to be a war of attrition waged at the state level against the right of Memphis and Shelby County to pursue independent law-and-order initiatives.

Memphis City Council chairman JB Smiley spoke to the matter Sunday at the annual picnic of the Germantown Democratic Club at Cameron Brown Park.

Said Smiley: “You know, recently, I’ve been, against my will, going back and forth with someone in the statehouse who doesn’t care for Shelby County called Cameron Sexton. Yeah, he doesn’t believe that Shelby County has the right to exercise its voice.“

Sexton, of course, is the Republican speaker of the state House of Representatives who recently threatened to withhold from Memphis its share of some vital state revenues in retaliation for the city’s inclusion on the November 5th ballot of a referendum package soliciting citizens’ views on possible future firearms curbs.

The package lists three initiatives — a reinstatement of gun-carry permits, a ban on the sale of assault rifles, and the right of judges to impose “red-flag” laws against the possession of weapons by demonstrably risky individuals.

All the initiatives are in the form of “trigger laws,” which would be activated only if and when state policy might allow the local options. As Smiley noted, “That’s what the state did when they disagreed with the federal government when it came to abortion rights. As soon as the law changed in the country, [their] law became full and effective. That’s what we’re going to do in the city of Memphis.” 

Simultaneous with this ongoing showdown between city and state has been a determined effort by Republican state Senator Brent Taylor and others to pass state laws restricting the prerogatives of local Criminal Court judges and Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy.

One piece of Taylor-sponsored legislation, passed last year, would transfer authority over capital punishment appeals from the DA to the state attorney general. Litigation against the law pursued by Mulroy and an affected defendant resulted in the measure’s being declared unconstitutional in trial court.

But the state Appeals Court reversed that judgment last week, seemingly revalidating the law and causing Taylor to crow in a social media post over what he deemed a personal victory over Mulroy, whom he accused of wanting to “let criminals off of death row” and whose ouster he has vowed to pursue in the legislature.

The fact is, however, that there will be one more review of the measure, by the state Supreme Court, before its ultimate status is made clear. 

Some of the immediate media coverage of the matter tended to play up Taylor’s declaration of victory over Mulroy, ignoring the ongoing aspects of the litigation and overlooking obvious nuances. 

One TV outlet erroneously reported the Appeals Court as having found Mulroy guilty of “inappropriate” conduct when the court had merely speculated on the legalistic point of whether the DA had appropriate standing as a plaintiff (a point that was conceded, incidentally, by the state Attorney General).

Mulroy’s reaction to the Appeals Court finding focused on the issue as having to do with governance: “The Tennessee Constitution says local voters get to elect a local resident DA to represent them in court. This law transfers power over the most serious cases, death penalty cases, from locally elected DAs across the state to one unelected state official half a state away. This should concern anyone, regardless of party, who cares about local control and state overreach.”

Categories
News News Blog News Feature

Investigation Urged on State Sen. Brent Taylor’s Online Posts

State Senator Brent Taylor (R) Memphis district 31 Shelby County, during the 113th general Assembly | Photograph by John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout

A West Tennessee prosecutor has requested a state investigation into a Memphis senator for allegedly breaking state law by posting documents online containing a defendant’s personal information, possibly after obtaining it from the Gibson County Sheriff’s Office.

District Attorney General Fred Agee confirmed to the Tennessee Lookout he filed a complaint with the Comptroller’s Office and Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, asking them to investigate whether Sen. Brent Taylor (R-Memphis) put information on X showing a man’s birth date and Social Security number, which would be a Class B misdemeanor accompanied by nearly six months in jail.

Agee, a Republican whose prosecutorial district covers Crockett, Haywood, and Gibson counties, requested the appointment of a pro tem prosecutor to look into the matter. He said the items were posted online for at least 10 hours.

“With all the identity theft that goes on daily, I felt I had a duty to report it and to also ask for a special prosecutor since [Taylor’s] social media post was directed toward me,” Agee told the Lookout.

Taylor responded to questions by text message Tuesday, saying he posted the public record “for the benefit” of constituents and West Tennesseans to show an example of “outrageous plea deals” Agee reaches. He reiterated his claim that Agee and Mulroy are “soft on crime.”

“When I discovered one of the dozens of documents, that have been passed around more than a joint at a Willie Nelson concert, may have possibly contained a Social Security number, I quickly replaced them with newly redacted documents out of an abundance of caution,” Taylor said.

As part of the investigation request, Agee said he asked the state’s investigative agencies to see whether the Gibson County Sheriff’s Office gave the information to Taylor. Separately, Gibson County Sheriff Paul Thomas has been indicted in connection with directing inmate labor to an outside company he owned as part of a $1.4 million scheme.

The situation stems, in part, from an op-ed Agee wrote Aug. 6 for The Daily Memphian supporting Shelby County District Attorney General Steve Mulroy, a Democrat accused of being soft on crime and threatened with an ouster by Taylor and House Speaker Cameron Sexton (R-Crossville). Taylor has said he will file legislation to have Mulroy removed from office during next year’s legislative session.

Taylor posted documents within the last two weeks to paint Agee as a liberal prosecutor by detailing a plea agreement Agee’s office made with Brewston Lamonte Cole, who has been convicted of multiple DUIs, drug possession, firearms possession, violation of the sex offender registry, and violation of probation. Cole was sentenced to 10 years in prison, but that was suspended for probation or supervision by Community Corrections. He had served nearly four months in jail already after having his bond revoked and will receive a harsher sentence if he doesn’t comply with probation requirements.

As part of that post, Taylor put up three Google Drive links containing the plea agreement document that listed Cole’s birthday and Social Security number. The Lookout has obtained screenshots of Taylor posts and those links, which have since been removed, and the documents reposted without the personal information.

The state Comptroller’s Office declined to confirm it has been requested to investigate the matter.

Tennessee Lookout is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: info@tennesseelookout.com. Follow Tennessee Lookout on Facebook and X.

Categories
News News Blog News Feature

Tennessee Lieutenant Governor Backs Mulroy Ouster

Steven J. Mulroy is the District Attorney for Shelby County, Tennessee July 25, 2023. (© Karen Pulfer Focht/Tennessee Lookout)

Tennessee’s lieutenant governor is backing a Memphis state senator’s move to force the ouster of Shelby County’s prosecutor for “dereliction of duty” in connection with felons caught carrying weapons.

Lt. Gov. Randy McNally (R-Oak Ridge) issued a statement Monday saying he “wholeheartedly” supports efforts by Republican state Sen. Brent Taylor (R-Memphis) to dismiss Shelby County District Attorney General Steve Mulroy from office for “failing to properly prosecute convicted felons in possession of a firearm.” 

Taylor sent McNally a letter Monday notifying him he plans to file a Senate resolution after the November election to remove Mulroy from office. The district attorney general said recently he plans to adopt a policy allowing non-violent felons to avoid being prosecuted for possession of weapons.

McNally said Mulroy’s “explicit refusal to prosecute criminals with guns is inexcusable and unconstitutional. While district attorneys have prosecutorial discretion, that discretion is not a license to override or subvert the law of the land. DA Mulroy’s record of refusal to prosecute laws he does not personally care for is longstanding and clear. I believe it is time for him to go.”

State Senator Brent Taylor (R-Memphis) during the 113th general Assembly Credit: John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout

Even though district attorneys general are elected by a county’s voters, the Legislature can oust them with a two-thirds vote, according to a state law cited by Taylor in his letter.

Taylor and House Speaker Cameron Sexton made social media posts last week calling Mulroy soft on crime for his new policy to provide “diversion” from conviction for non-violent felons caught carrying weapons.

Mulroy, a Democrat serving his first term after defeating Republican Amy Weirich, told the Tennessee Lookout last week the DA’s Office continues to prosecute illegal gun possession cases, including possession of a gun connected to drug crimes and possession of a Glock switch, which makes those types of handguns fully automatic. His office did not respond to questions Monday.

The district attorney, though, noted his office is “open to offering a diversion track, on a case-by-case basis for those defendants who have no history of violence or significant criminal history and seem reformable.” 

Those types of offenders would be prosecuted but could avoid conviction by meeting “stringent requirements” for rehabilitation, he said. The policy is designed to free up prosecutors to focus on offenders who “use a weapon,” he said.

Taylor acknowledged Monday that district attorneys general have “prosecutorial discretion” but contended that state law prohibits felons from possessing weapons and argued if Mulroy thinks non-violent felons should be excluded, then he should lobby the Legislature to change the law. He denied that his effort to remove Mulroy is a political move and maintained that the district attorney has “abused his prosecutorial discretion.”

It looks like every local official is now on notice not to cross powerful state politicians – or else. Memphians are sick and tired of seeing their local elected officials run over by state politics just for doing the job they promised to do.

Sens. Raumesh Akbari and London Lamar, Memphis Democrats, in a statement

“He’s attempting to enforce and prosecute the law based on how he wishes it were written, not how it’s actually written,” Taylor said. “District attorneys are obligated to enforce the law the legislature enacts.”

Senate Minority Leader Raumesh Akbari (D-Memphis) and Minority Chairman London Lamar (D-Memphis) issued a statement in response calling Taylor’s effort an “unconstitutional attack” on Shelby County’s district attorney and saying it “sets a dangerous precedent.”

“It looks like every local official is now on notice not to cross powerful state politicians – or else,” they said. “Memphians are sick and tired of seeing their local elected officials run over by state politics just for doing the job they promised to do.”

They contend crime didn’t start with Mulroy’s election and said, “it’s beneath the Legislature to threaten local officials over a policy debate.”

Sen. Taylor and state Rep. John Gillespie (R-Memphis) passed legislation this year overturning a Memphis City Council ordinance stopping police from making “pretextual” stops such as driving with broken tail light. The measure was designed to prevent violent incidents between police and motorists such as the death of Tyre Nichols who was pulled over for reckless driving and beaten by five police officers, according to video of the stop.

Tennessee Lookout is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: info@tennesseelookout.com. Follow Tennessee Lookout on Facebook and X.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Sen. Taylor Reveals Plan for Ousting DA Mulroy

Brent Taylor exiting the SCEC (Credit: Jackson Baker)

State Senator Brent Taylor confided to the Memphis Flyer on Sunday the basic outlines of the procedure he intends to set in motion to remove Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy  from office. 

The plan, as the senator indicated,  will depend on legislative action in a coming session of the General Assembly, either a regular session or a specially called one. 

Taylor, a persistent  critic of Mulroy for what the senator considers laxity in local law enforcement, says his plan is based on Article VI, Section 6, of the state constitution and would call for a removal  resolution to be passed by both chambers of the legislature, to be followed by gubernatorial action to appoint a successor as Shelby  DA.

State House Speaker Cameron Sexton has also acknowledged discussing the idea of ousting Mulroy with state Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti. Taylor promised to elaborate on details of his thinking and Sexton’s at a press conference at 2 p.m. Monday at the headquarters of the Memphis Police Association on Jefferson Avenue.

Both Taylor and Sexton fired off condemnations last week of Mulroy’s announcement of a diversionary program for non-violent previous offenders charged with illegal possession of firearms.