Tag: David Pool

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Politics Politics Feature

October Surprises

Thaddeus Matthews

A phrase that has attached itself to presidential election years, especially between well-matched candidates struggling to get in the last and best word to the electorate, is “October Surprise.” That’s the name given to an unexpected event that sometimes occurs and sometimes doesn’t, but is always feared by each of the rival candidates.

The October Surprise, so called because it occurs just before the final vote takes place in early November, is sometimes carefully hatched by one of the candidates and sprung against the other. Sometimes it occurs all by itself, without any obvious prompting or advance management.

The late announcement in 2016 by FBI director James Comey that his agency was reopening its investigation of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails was an October Surprise. So was Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The one circumstance benefited Donald Trump, the other Barack Obama, the then-president whose emergency efforts were enabled thereby to come to the fore.

In the case of this week’s county election, one could speak of both a late July Surprise or an early August Surprise — both affecting the crucial and hard-fought race for district attorney general. The first was the brutal hijacking murder a week before last of beloved local pastor Autura Eason-Williams. The second was a controversy over the call-in appearance by incumbent GOP DA Amy Weirich, via Facebook and YouTube, on the talk show of “shock jock” Thaddeus Matthews.

The murder, committed by a 15-year-old who had been the beneficiary of a restorative-justice program, fed directly and unexpectedly into the ongoing debate between Weirich and Democratic opponent Steve Mulroy over the pros and cons of transferring violent youthful offenders to adult criminal court. An issue that had been discussed in statistical, largely hypothetical terms — with Weirich taking the hard line and Mulroy a reformist view — suddenly became very real and very concrete. It is fair to say that determining the right legal response proved a difficult task not only for the two candidates but for members of the deceased’s family and for on-the-fence voters as well.

Was Weirich’s discussion of the state’s new truth-in-sentencing law with Matthews, who is the subject of ongoing prosecutions by her office, as seen both on Facebook and on YouTube, an open-and-shut case of conflict of interest, as charged by Mulroy? Or, was it, as Matthews maintains, a simple matter of venting an informed view on a matter of public interest?

One thing is certain: Both of these circumstances could have had a seismic effect, whether small or large, and in whatever direction, on the outcome of a race which, in the well-established jargon of pol-watching, had been too close to call.

• One of the most unusual — and in many ways most endearing — endorsements administered during the run-up to the August 4th election occurred at a fundraiser back in July on behalf of David Pool, a judicial magistrate seeking to become the judge of Criminal Court, Division 6, otherwise known as felony drug court.

Before an audience including at least a score of other candidates for various offices at the East Memphis home of Dr. Kishore Arcot, Pool was steadfastly making his case. “What do you want in a Criminal Court judge?” he asked his audience rhetorically, then began dutifully listening to some of the likely answers to such a question: experience, dedication, knowledge of the law, etc., etc. Until he was stopped cold by an outburst from one of the several rows of listeners seated nearby.

“Cute!” came a loud and enthusiastic voice. “Cute!” the voice repeated. “That’s what we want!” As the stunned audience beamed in surprise, the even more surprised Pool, a performing musician in his spare time, bounded over to where fellow lawyer and supporter Ellen Fite was sitting and gave her an appreciative hug. Then, he walked back to where he’d been talking and there, sober as a judge, resumed his remarks and his recitation of judicial attributes, to the group at large.

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Politics Politics Feature

Modernizing the Vote; Bogus Ballots; and a Judgeship Kerfuffle

Shelby County should be able to hold elections with paper-trail capabilities by August 2020. Or so opined County Election Administrator Linda Phillips last week. In a pre-election speech to a luncheon of the Kiwanis Club of Memphis at the University Club, Phillips said the county is in the process of acquiring equipment that would make possible a process combining electronic scanning with paper trail records.

Phillips said, however, that there would be disadvantages to any return to voting by paper ballot alone, a course advocated in some quarters. The chief problem, she said, would be the high rate of voter error. As an example, she said that “4 to 5 percent” of absentee ballots, which are executed on paper, contain some kind of error. “And how many elections can you recall in which the margin of victory was 5 percent or less?”

The administrator said one of the biggest challenges faced by her office is that “we don’t have enough full-time employees.” Shelby County has 18 full-time employees but needs at least 26, she said, pointing out that Davidson County (Nashville) has 29 employees to service a voting population two-thirds the size of that of Memphis. She plans to transition her office away from what she considers its present over-reliance on temporary workers. 

Jackson Baker

Congressman Steve Cohen ( r) with Council endorsee Erika Sugarmon

Another need is more pollworkers, she said. Shelby County employs 1,800 pollworkers at present, but their average age is 70-something, and “each year we lose more of them.”

Asked about the efficacy of Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), also called Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), Phillips said the county has the capability to use the method, in which voters specify their ballot choices in order of preference, so that resampling of the votes can designate a majority winner without need for a runoff.

“The biggest problem is that the city council has not given us guidelines,” she said. Shelby County voters have twice approved the process via referendum vote, and her office was prepared to use RCV in the current election, but a council majority, in tandem with the state election coordinator’s office, has by one means or another managed to forestall use of the method so far.

At some point in the future, technological advances such as facial recognition could be employed to enable voter check-ins, Phillips said. “That’s probably several decades away. That’s not because the technology isn’t there, but because it takes the legislature a long time to embrace change. Some day we’ll have it.”

• Ballot Battles (cont’d): It wouldn’t be a local election without at least one sample-ballot kerfuffle. And, sure enough, alarms have been raised, especially in local Democratic circles about a ballot being mailed to households and passed out at early-voting polls bearing the imprimatur of the “Greater Memphis Democratic Club,” a shell organization that apparently exists only to turn out sample ballots at election time.

Jackson Baker

Election Administrator Linda Phillips

The ballot in question, whose chief proprietor is entrepreneur Greg Grant, is one of several such ballots that appear at election time, and it is no secret that many, if not all, of the endorsees for office listed on them paid good money to get there.

City Council candidate John Marek, who first called public attention to the ballot last week, says, in fact, that he himself was solicited to purchase a place on the ballot and declined.

Despite being designated as being under “Democratic” auspices, the ballot features several candidates with known or suspected Republican identities — including council candidates Chase Carlisle, Ford Canale, and Worth Morgan, the latter, an incumbent, being Marek’s opponent.

Grant’s sample ballot also pictures several of the favored candidates with facsimiles of the city of Memphis official logo on their mugshots — a possible violation of city and state laws, Marek says.

Along with several pay-for-play ballots in circulation, there are also, as was noted in this space last week, various not-for-profit sample ballots in distribution locally, including a familiar one published online by Paula Casey, Jocelyn Wurzburg, and Dottie Jones (successor in that regard to her late mother, Happy Jones).

And 9th District U.S. Representative Steve Cohen, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of sample ballots put out in years past by congressional predecessor Harold Ford Sr., is a party to one —  “The Most Qualified Democrats for Change” voters’ guide — expressing his preferences and those of County Commissioner Van Turner and former local party chair David Cocke, all bona fide Democrats. Cohen has in the past backed litigation against misappropriation of the name “Democratic” by purveyors of the pay-for-play ballots.

• As noted this week in the “Politics Beat Blog” at memphisflyer.com, sparks flew during a weekend forum featuring candidates for the two contested races for municipal judge.

Unexpectedly, incumbent Division Three Judge Jayne Chandler charged her opponent, Magistrate David Pool, with “dishonesty” in alleging that she was “unfair” in her conduct of her court, and that that was a reason for his several endorsements by various organizations. Pool denied making any such insinuations.

Chandler also denied rumors that she had a hand in making sure that her Division One counterpart, Judge Teresa Jones, had an opponent — lawyer LaTrena Davis-Ingram. Judge Jones, for her part, launched an attack on Davis-Ingram, who had, she said, resided, worked, and voted in Collierville right up to the point of declaring her candidacy for the Memphis judgeship. Davis-Ingram did not directly respond to the charge.

The forum fireworks seemed to  constitute a confirmation of sorts that bad feelings persist between Jones and Chandler. The third municipal Judge, Tarik Sugarmon in Division 2, is unopposed.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Judicial-Race Fireworks

CREDIT: JB

JB

City Judge Candidates: (from left) Judge Teresa Jones, Municipal Court, Division 1; Candidate LaTrena Davis-Ingram, Division 1; Magistrate David Pool, candidate in Division 3; Judge Jayne Chandler, Division 3

As political forums go, those involving clerks and judges are usually the tamest. In the case of the judicial races, in particular, there are canons of conduct that prohibit overt promises or explicitly political sentiments. So the forum scheduled for Saturday at St. Mary’s Cathedral on Poplar was expected to be a relatively ho-hum affair. It wasn’t; in fact, it turned into a guerrilla combat of sorts.

The first segment involved three of the several candidates for City Court Clerk — current deputy clerk Delicia DeGraffreeed, clerk employee Carl A. irons II, and De Givens. Nothing much out of the ordinary occurred besides the candidates’ discussion of their credentials and a few aspects of the office. About a third of the way through the planned event, the clerk part of the forum ended, and the four candidates for the two contested city judge positions took their seats behind the table. Unexpectedly, that’s where the mayhem ensued.

It started off with Jayne Chandler, reigning judge in Municipal Court, Division 3, who sat on the far right, next to her opponent, Criminal Court Magistrate David Pool. The two other candidates, vying for the judgeship of Municipal Court, Division 1, were incumbent Teresa Jones and challenger LaTrena Davis-Ingram.

Though the two paired antagonists were in each case seated next to each other, moderator Sharalyn Payton chose to pose all her questions in an order that leapfrogged that neat division, a quirk that often led her to overlook Pool in the sequence until prompted and, more importantly, interposed the responses of one or both of the Division 1 candidates when the Division 2 race began to include charges and counter-charges between Chandler and Pool.

As if to balance this state of affairs, Davis-Ingram and Jones, it turned out, had their own grudges to exchange, and, in the last half of the hour-long judicial part of the forum, the sparks flew in all directions.

The friction started when Payton posed a question about possible “bias” or other matters that might mar the principle of “fair and impartial” in court proceedings. Chandler was the first respondent, and she began with an obvious effort to settle a score. In a previous statement, Pool had recounted the various endorsements his candidacy had received (inter alia, from members of the Bar Association, from the AFL-CIO, and from the Shelby County Sheriffs’ Association, and from the Memphis Police Association) and suggested they underscored the need for a change in Division 3.

Chandler began: “I’m going to point to the person running against me, who has implied that I have not been faIr and impartial.” She maintained that Pool had first wanted to run in Division 1 and had requested her support for such a race. She then said,“To imply that the clerks asked him to run because I don’t treat people fairly, the police support him because I don’t treat people fairly,” why would he ask such a person for support in another division? “I don’t mind Mr. Pool running against me. It’s a democracy. It’s open. But be honest. An impediment to justice is dishonesty.”

Chandler then directed several questions to Irons, who was now sitting in the audience and was, she said, the resident clerk in her courtroom. She asked him a series of leading questions designed to draw Yes answers from him regarding such matters as her punctuality, her compassion, and her fairness in the courtroom. Dutifully, Irons answered each question in the affirmative.

“I’m a person of integrity. I have not been compromised. I will not be compromised,” Chandler declared. She said she would not be included on any sample ballot prepared under private auspices (an apparent reference to one such ballot circulated by Memphis Congressman Steve Cohen, County Commissioner Van Turner, and former local Democratic chairman David Cocke), “I will not be demeaned or lied on.”

She then turned to another matter: “People have been saying I put LaTrena Davis in the race against Ms Jones. … Y’all report me good. I didn’t ask her to run against Ms Jones. She did it on her own. She has the right to run, just like he has the right to run,” indicating Pool. “But all these people who are supposed to be judges and honest and [to have] integrity walk around being dishonest. That’s why there’s no trust.”

She might have gone on longer, but League of Women Voters president Peg Watkins, who was acting as timekeeper, called time on her. There was a bit of a shocked pause in the room, as after an unexpected explosion.

Payton next called on, not Pool, but Davis-Ingram, who began to work her way through a more conventional kind of response, talking about factors in the lives of impoverished Memphians that might inhibit their trust in the judicial system.

She was followed by Judge Jones, who decided to pick up on one of Chandler’s themes. “There’s been a lot of talk about honesty, and that’s been one of the cornerstones of my entire life,” Jones said. “Is it honest when you say in an affidavit that you live in some place that you don’t live? You decide. You’re the voters.” This was a none-too-oblique reference to Davis-Ingram’s having maintained a residence in Collierville right up to her declaration for office in Memphis. Jones continued: “Is it honest to say that you’re on the side of the people in the community when, for 17 years you’ve voted in Collierville and lived in Collierville? You decide!…I stand before you with no public censures from the Board of Professional Responsibility, no violations for over 30 years…Can my opponent say the same? That’s honesty!”

Jones then re-surfaced the rumors, alluded to by Chandler, about the reasons for Davis-Ingram’s being in the race but dropped the matter without pronouncing on it one way or another. She sequed to a discussion of formal impediments to her office, including a lack of resources. “I am an honest person. I’ve lived in the inner city for the last 17 years. I’ve voted in city elections.”

With not one but two verbal wars underway now, Payton seemed about to ignore Pool, but audience reaction reminded her that he deserved a turn. And thus, several minutes after being directly attacked, he had a chance to defend himself. He denied ever saying that Chandler was unfair nor that he had ever sought her support. He then called it “unjust and unfair” to single out a clerk and put him on the spot, as Chandler had done with Irons. That, he said, was “an extreme conflict of interest.” He said he had always respected Judge Chandler and, win or lose, would continue to.

The fireworks apparently over, or at least suspended, Payton then solicited questions at large from the audience. Several came — about the nature of fines and fees, the consistency of them from division to division, and a judge’s limited discretion concerning how to implement them; about possible attempts to block organized court-watch activists from specific courtrooms; and about affording police officers proper regard in the courtroom.

The earlier flare-ups had not lasted long, but with a week and a half yet to go before voting is over, their consequences could be several.

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Politics Politics Feature

Doing It Again: The People’s Convention; Casada Goes National

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

As petitions for city offices continue to be pulled at the offices of the Shelby County Election Commission, attention this week focuses on the forthcoming People’s Convention, scheduled for Saturday at the Paradise Entertainment Center. The affair is intended as a redo of sorts of the 1991 People’s Convention that endorsed Willie Herenton as a consensus black candidate for that year’s Memphis mayoral race.

While this convention, scheduled for an 11 a.m. kickoff, is also rooted to a large degree in concerns of black Memphians, it may be both wider and more constricted in its scope than the original — wider, in that it may also draw white Midtown supporters of mayoral candidate Tami Sawyer, narrower in that backers of Sawyer would seem to be more involved in the affair than those of the two other prominent candidates, current Mayor Jim Strickland and Herenton, who retired from the office of mayor in 2009 after serving 17-plus years and is making another bid for the office.

Jackson Baker

Host David Pool (l) welcomes former Judge Robert L. “Butch” Childers to his weekend event.

Whatever the case, the Rev. Earle Fisher, a prominent ally of Sawyer, has been a major figure in organizing the convention, though numerous community organizations, including the AFSCME union and Black Lives Matter, are taking part, and the stated agenda includes such overriding issues as education, economic justice, and public safety.

• An annual event to which political candidates and pol-watchers are invited was held on Sunday at the site of a burned-out former residence on a high bluff in North Memphis overlooking the Mississippi River.

The residence was that of the late Charlie Pool, an eminent lawyer and longtime eminent member of the local Democratic Party establishment. More accurately, the house was to have been Pool’s residence. Moved plank by plank from Downtown, where it had once belonged to former Congressman Frederick Stanton, it was destroyed in 1981 by a fire, presumably set by an arsonist, before it could be inhabited in its new location.

But the concrete base of the house remains, and it serves today as a stage for the annual summer crawfish feed and jamboree put on for all and sundry by the former owner’s son David Pool, a guitarist and singer who has turned to the law as a career. The younger Pool is now serving as a Judicial Commissioner for Shelby County and is running this year for the Position 3 Memphis city judgeship now held by incumbent Jayne Chandler.

Chandler didn’t make it to the crawfish feed, though she was invited to the event by Pool, who described her to attendees as a “wonderful lady.” He added, “Of course, I’m wonderfuller.”

Several other members of the county’s judicial community were on hand, along with a smattering of candidates for the city election, for the opportunity on a fine summer day to schmooze, enjoy food and drink, and hear music performed by Pool and his informal band, the Risky Whiskey Boys.

• If Glen Casada, the presumably soon-to-be ex-speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives, has kept to the schedule he announced in the wake of the scandal that forced his announced intention to resign, he is back in the state as of Monday after completing a long-planned post-session trip to Europe.

Before Casada left the country, he had announced his intent to get together on June 3rd and thereafter with members of the House Republican caucus, a majority of whom had given him a no-confidence vote, so as to map out plans for his resignation and replacement. The reasons for Casada’s downfall were many — including public exposure of  an exchange of racist and misogynist emails between Casada and his youthful aide, Cade Cothren, suspicions that Casada and his aide had conducted electronic spying on members, and evidence that they may have forged the date of an email so as to make it appear that an anti-Casada protestor had defaulted on a court order.

So who is to succeed Casada as speaker? There are several candidates among House Republicans, including Speaker Pro Tem Bill Dunn (R-Knoxville), who is next in the line of succession.

But state Representative Dwayne Thompson (D-Memphis) has an unorthodox proposal. Noting that all the hopefuls mentioned so far are members of the Republican supermajority that voted to make Casada speaker, either in a preliminary GOP caucus last November or on the floor of the House in January, Thompson suggests that, to ensure a genuine break with that now-tarnished outcome, the new speaker should be someone who did not participate in such voting.

Thompson further points out that nothing in the state Constitution mandates that the House speaker be an actual member of that body, only that the members of the House have the power to choose a qualified Tennessean to preside over their business as speaker. Conceding that the Republicans are now the majority party and should ideally have first dibs on the speakership, Thompson has a candidate in mind.

That would be Gerald McCormick, who was the GOP’s House Majority Leader for several terms while a member representing a Chattanooga district, but who moved his residence to Nashville before the 2018 election and consequently did not run for reelection.

In the process, argues Thompson, McCormick became the ideal successor to represent Tennesseans as speaker of the House. As a native of Shelby County, where he attended Germantown High School, McCormick has familiarity with all three of Tennessee’s grand districts — West Tennessee, Middle Tennessee, and East Tennessee. And his reputation, while serving in the House, was that of a fair-minded arbiter who, while representing the Republican majority, maintained good relations with the Democratic minority.

Thompson said on Monday that he has not yet discussed his proposal with McCormick himself but intends to.

Meanwhile, Casada’s ignominy, which has dominated so much of the state’s political news in the month since the legislative session ended, has now been broadcast, literally, from a national platform. The speaker’s foibles became the subject this week of a segment of Last Week Tonight, the HBO satirical review of the news hosted by British-born comedian John Oliver. Focusing on such aspects of the scandal as the sexual peccadilloes of Cothren and that aide’s admitted use of cocaine in a state office, Oliver said of the scandal, “While it may not be the most important thing in the world, every detail is spectacular.”