Tag: Floyd Bonner

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Of Shows and No-Shows

Monday night’s venue (Photo: Halloran Centre | Facebook)

By now, the much-ballyhooed first of two mayoral forums to be conducted by the Daily Memphian has come and gone. The five billed participants at Monday night’s event at the Halloran Centre were Paul Young, Michelle McKissack, J.W. Gibson, Frank Colvett, and Karen Camper.

The fact is, only one of these participants can be ranked among the leaders at this early pre-petition stage of the mayoral race. That would be Downtown Memphis Commission CEO Young, who is indisputably the most successful fundraiser among all the candidates.

Young reported $432,434.97 on hand in his second-quarter financial disclosure, just outdoing Sheriff Floyd Bonner, who reported $400,139.12. Young is also known to have significant support among the city’s business and civic social elite, who make up a large percentage of the donor class.

At this juncture, the main disadvantage facing Young vis-à-vis rival Bonner is a fairly enormous name-recognition gap favoring the sheriff, who has out-polled every other contestant for whatever position in each of the last two Shelby County elections.

Clearly, the need to narrow this gap is one reason, along with his undoubted public-spiritedness, that impels Young to take part, along with other relatively unknown candidates, in every public forum that comes along.

Keeping their distance from such events so far are Bonner and Willie Herenton, the even better-known former longtime mayor. Almost as hesitant to appear at such affairs has been local NAACP president and former County Commissioner Van Turner, who, like the other two, was absent Monday night, as he had been at a recent mayoral forum at First Congregational Church.

Turner, also, can claim a respectable degree of prior name recognition, and he brought into the mayoral race a fairly well-honed constituency among the city’s center to center-left voters.

The relevance of all this to this week’s forum, and to other such opportunities for exposure that may come along before petitions can be drawn on May 22nd, should be obvious. Those who need to enhance their share of public attention are likely to be attendees; those who feel more secure in their familiarity to the electorate may not be.

To be sure, both Bonner and Turner pleaded the fact of previously scheduled fundraising events as reasons for their absence on Monday night. A reliable rule of thumb in politics is that the existence of “prior commitments” can always be adduced to explain nonparticipation in a particular event.

Still, to win, it is necessary to be an active competitor, and Bonner, Herenton, and Turner, who — not coincidentally — topped the results in the only poll that has been made public so far, can be expected to rev things up in fairly short order. Bonner and Turner have been stalled somewhat by their ongoing litigation against a five-year residency requirement posited by the Election Commission.

That matter may be effectively resolved in Chancellor JoeDae Jenkins’ court at a scheduled May 1st hearing.

Herenton, meanwhile, has habitually stonewalled multi-candidate appearances throughout his long public career — out of apparent pride as much as anything else.

None of the foregoing is meant to suggest that other candidates, including the five involved Monday night, can’t break out of the pack. Politics is notoriously unpredictable.

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Politics Politics Feature

In the Picture

Michelle McKissack (Photo: Michelle McKissack | Facebook)

As was teased in this space last week, second-quarter financial disclosures of the Memphis mayoral candidates were expected to come due. And they did, roughly a day after last week’s issue went to print.

The contents of the disclosures have since been bruited about here and there and have been subjected to analysis. In many — perhaps most — ways, the numbers conform to advance expectations. The leaders now, in the vital metric of cash on hand, are the same two who led the field in first-quarter disclosures in January: Downtown Memphis Commission CEO Paul Young, with $432,434.97 cash on hand, and Sheriff Floyd Bonner, with $404,139.12.

Local NAACP president Van Turner was still very much in the game, with $154,633.46, as was the largely self-funding developer J.W. Gibson, with $254,015.55.

The real surprise was former Memphis-Shelby County Schools board chair Michelle McKissack, who raised $101,712.95 — in less than two months of a declared candidacy, she notes — and has $79,164.95 on hand.

Clearly, McKissack has some catching up to do but justly takes pride in her results, given her relatively late start. She and the other candidates have some time, given that candidate petitions cannot even be drawn until May 22nd. Election day is October 5th, some five months away.

In a video tweet last week, McKissack alleged about some of the media coverage that “there are those in the city who don’t want to acknowledge that it’s actually possible for a woman to be mayor of Memphis.” She focused on an unnamed article “that really touted, just, you know, highlighting the men in this race.”

Both the point of view and even some of the language in McKissack’s tweet were reminiscent of attitudes expressed by former female candidates for mayor — notably Carol Chumney, now a Circuit Court Judge, who ran for Memphis mayor twice, finishing a competitive second place to incumbent Willie Herenton in a three-way race in 2007.

Herenton, out of office now for 14 years, is a candidate again for his former office, where he served for 17 years. He and others — including City Councilman Frank Colvett, state House minority leader Karen Camper, former County Commissioner James Harvey, and former TV judge Joe Brown — will doubtless make some waves, one way or another.

Tami Sawyer (Photo: Tami Sawyer | Facebook)

• Another former mayoral candidate, Tami Sawyer, who had a singularly devoted following for her reform platform in 2019, is back on the scene after a work sojourn for Amazon in both D.C. and California. She tweeted, “Yes, I’m back in Memphis for good … I am not running for office in 2023. But y’all gonna still see me deep in this work.”

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Bottom Lines

At the invitation of Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, Circuit Court Judge Carol Chumney addressed a standing-room-only crowd last Thursday in Vasco A. Smith Jr. Shelby County Administration Building. Chumney read from The Arena: One Woman’s Story, her recently published memoir of a life in local politics, including two runs for Memphis Mayor.

First-quarter deadline for Memphis mayoral candidates’ financial disclosures was March 31st, with reports due at the state Registry of Election Finance by April 10th, Monday of this week. It will take a while for all of them to be collated and made public, but, when available, presumably this week, they will be a useful key to the competitive status of various candidates.

Likely leader in revenues raised and on hand will be Downtown Memphis Commission CEO Paul Young, who has been the beneficiary of several recent big-ticket fundraisers. Two of Young’s main competitors — NAACP president and former Commissioner Van Turner and Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner — will probably show lesser revenues than might ordinarily be expected.

The obvious reason for that is such public doubt as has recently been raised by uncertainties regarding possible residency requirements for Memphis mayor — though the Shelby County Election Commission has, amid litigation by Turner and Bonner, removed a note from its website citing an opinion from former SCEC chair Robert Meyers proclaiming a requirement for a five-year prior residency in the city. Meyers based his opinion on a city-charter provision dating back to 1895.

Turner, Bonner, and former Mayor Willie Herenton, who is not known to have launched a significant fundraising campaign, have all maintained residencies outside the city at some point in the past five years. Herenton is not a party to the ongoing litigation, regarding which separate suits by Bonner and Turner challenging the Meyers opinion and seeking clarification have been combined in the court of Chancellor JoeDae Jenkins.

During a status conference on the suits last week, Jenkins established May 1st as a date for ruling on the litigation. He had previously rejected a motion by attorneys for the SCEC to include the city of Memphis as a codefendant along with the Commission. Jenkins decided that the city had not officially endorsed the Meyers opinion, though city attorney Jennifer Sink had forwarded it to the SCEC. For her part, Sink has said she has no intention of formally claiming the Meyers opinion as the city’s own.

• In calling a special meeting of the County Commission for this Wednesday on the issue of reappointing the expelled state Representative Justin J. Pearson to the House District 86 seat, Commission chair Mickell Lowery made his own sentiments evident.

After noting that he was “required to make decisions as a leader,” Lowery said, inter alia, “I believe the expulsion of state Representative Justin Pearson was conducted in a hasty manner without consideration of other corrective action methods. I also believe that the ramifications for our great state are still yet to be seen. … Coincidentally, this has directly affected me as I too reside in state House District 86. I am amongst the over 68,000 citizens [actually, 78,000] who were stripped of having a representative at the state due to the unfortunate outcome of the state assembly’s vote.”

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Part One: Memphis Mayoral Candidate Update

Paul Young, with wife Jamila Smith-Young at LeMoyne-Owen meet-and-greet

Amid legal developments that could make it a potentially pivotal week in the Memphis mayoral race, it might be useful to hazard a brief synopsis of how the various campaigns are stacking up.

Floyd Bonner: The Shelby County Sheriff launched his candidacy last fall with good prospects of putting potential rivals in the dust.
Bonner had handily won two successive county races, leading all candidates in vote totals both times. The fact that crime loomed as the likely major issue to be faced by city voters undoubtedly boosted his profile.

Almost immediately, Bonner attracted the same kind of influential bipartisan support that he enjoyed in his races for sheriff. His campaign team actually envisioned amassing enough cash reserves early enough to dissuade potential rivals from running. And indeed, with first-quarter receipts of some $300,000 this year, and with good numbers anticipated in the soon-t-be second quarter disclosures, he has delivered. But Bonner’s then anticipated opponents didn’t scare.

Paul Young: The Downtown Memphis Commission CEO matched Bonner dollar for dollar and even exceeded the sheriff somewhat. This was the result of months and even years of advance preparation and of a robust standing with the city’s business and civic elite. Young is thought to be the preferred candidate of the current city administration, though incumbent Mayor Jim Strickland is himself conspicuously neutral so far. He is also thought to be ahead in fundraising at this point, whether marginally or to larger degree.

Young’s major problem is that, however well he rates with insiders, he still lacks much name recognition with the public at large. In the long term, his campaign money will have to buy that.

In the short term, Young stands to benefit hugely if the Election Commission’s provisional ruling requiring a five-year prior residency in Memphis — one that would disqualify candidates Bonner, Van Turner, and Willie Herenton — is upheld. A ruling is expected shortly in Chancery Court. “Either way is fine with me,” Young said at an event Saturday. Sure.

Van Turner: The mayoral ambitions of the former Shelby County Commission chairman and current NAACP head have been known for years, and he is generally respected across the political spectrum, though his most significant following  is among Democratic Party regulars — a fact not to be discounted, given the demographic edge demonstrated by the party in recent local elections.

Turner has struggled to keep up with the fundraising totals of Bonner and Young, though he was in the ballpark on the first quarterly report, with some $150,000 raised. Since then, he has figured prominently, in national as well as local media, in public reckonings of the tragic death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of Memphis police. This kind of free media is also not to be discounted, though its shelf life is unknown.

Turner’s suit challenging the Election Commission ruling on residency is one of two  (the other is Bonner’s). The outcome is, of course, crucial.

Willie Herenton: The former longtime mayor is also vulnerable on the residency score on account of a brief sojourn in Collierville — an ironic fact, given that 30 years ago he personally created the sprawling (and enduring) Banneker Estates development in south Memphis.

There is in any case no questioning the historical cachet of the first elected Black mayor in Memphis history, one who served 17 years and claimed several achievements — notably his leadership of a defiant 1997 effort that successfully ended in a legal reprieve for Memphis vis–a-vis “toy town” legislation that would have blocked the city’s legitimate avenues for expansion.

Herenton remains a controversial figure, as much because of his strong and sometimes disputatious personality as for any lingering racial animus among the city’s Old Guard. But he can claim a substantially sized loyalist base in the inner city and has to be reckoned with in a crowded, winner-take-all field.

(Next: Part Two: J.W. Gibson heads a second tier with potential for rising.)

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Young, Bonner Lead Mayoral Candidates in Cash on Hand

Photo by cottonbro studio / Pixels.

The first financial disclosures from the 2023 candidates for Memphis Mayor are now available.

As of January 15, the two leaders in the vital “Cash on Hand” category are Downtown Memphis president/CEO Paul Young, with a reported $312,699.12, followed closely by Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner, with $310,482.88:

Businessman J.W. Gibson reports the $300,000 he has loaned to himself as a campaign starter. NAACP president and former County Commissioner Van Turner reports cash on hand in the amount of $121,747.29.

State House Democratic Leader Karen Camper reports $33,862. (She has the disadvantage of not being able to raise money during the ongoing legislative session).

School Board chair Michelle McKissick has so far not filed a disclosure statement.

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Politics Politics Feature

The Bonner Bubble

Floyd Bonner (Photo: Jackson Baker)

We were all reminded this past week of how freakishly and without warning the weather can change, but unless there are unexpected changes in the political weather, this week is due to see the advent of the second consecutive three-way contest in a Memphis mayoral race. And a hot one it could be.

Already out there getting campaigns in gear were local NAACP head and former County Commissioner Van Turner and Memphis Downtown Commission CEO/president Paul Young. Barring an unlikely last-minute change of mind, Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner is about to challenge these two previously declared worthies.

Bonner’s entry, scheduled for a Tuesday afternoon press announcement, could change the race from a conflict of credentialed challengers to one in which the city’s priorities are in for the same kind of seismic policy shifts Shelby County experienced just months ago.

This time, like last time, will see a contest between rival views of government — call it progressive versus traditional — but will see the direction of attack reversed and progressivism, triumphant in August but not yet firmly entrenched locally, faces the prospect of a new and powerful coalition, conventional in attitude but encompassing constituencies overlapping the usual boundaries.

It is Bonner’s persona, coupled with his breadth of appeal and success in electoral politics, that makes this possible. Clearly, he has political gifts.The sheriff polled more votes than all contenders in all other countywide races, both in 2018 and in his 2022 re-election race. The last time around, while running as a Democrat, he ended up on the endorsement list of the Shelby County Republicans as well. To the population at large, he seems to inspire confidence. Yet he is not menacing. On the stump and in person, he comes across as something of a Teddy Bear.

Many a candidate tries to run on the bromide that “my friends have urged me to run.” In most cases, this is a semi-fiction at best, a cloak for the candidate’s personal ambition. But, uniquely, Bonner seems to have been the subject of a genuine draft. His aforementioned appeal across party lines is replicated in the racial sphere as well, and going into the mayor’s race, addressing an electorate that is considerably less conservative politically than that of the county population as a whole and is made freshly apprehensive by an outbreak of violent crime, that is no mean advantage.

Bonner will remind the African-American community early and often that he is a native of Orange Mound, the son of one of the first waves of Blacks to be allowed to join the Memphis Police Department. Some have noted the sheriff’s current residence in unincorporated Shelby County. He has explained that he moved there from Whitehaven at a time when he was doing undercover work in that area’s drug trade, to reduce his family’s potential vulnerability. Bonner is reportedly seeking a new residence in the city.

There are no Ds and no Rs on the city’s political ballot, a fact that makes Bonner’s attempt at being a unity candidate considerably easier than was that of, say, former District Attorney Amy Weirich, who tried to run as “our DA” in a demographically divided community but was weighed down, among other factors, by her Republican label.

Can Bonner compete in such policy areas as that of economic development? He vows to pay special attention to that matter and says he will appoint a ranking city official to attend to it.

All that having been said, neither of Bonner’s declared mayoral rivals is exactly a slouch. Turner is a skilled political veteran with ties to various factions. He will have the particular support of those members of the political left who rallied in August to the support of current DA Steve Mulroy (who has endowed Turner) and who formed a hard core also for Juvenile Court Judge Tarik Sugarmon and County Mayor Lee Harris.

Young, who scheduled a fundraiser the same day as Bonner’s announcement, can count on powerful support from members of the city’s commercial and industrial elite.

Money counts in political races and Bonner will have an early chance to demonstrate his own strength. He begins the race with a leftover political kitty amounting to a hundred thousand dollars, and his backers proclaim an optimism that this sum will grow to several hundred thousand by January 15th when the candidates’ first financial disclosures will be made known.

In the meantime, Bonner’s entry will, at the very least, be a strong dissuader to other potential candidates who have considered running.

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Mayor Floyd Bonner?

Floyd Bonner electioneering this year (Photo: Jackson Baker)

There is, it would seem, a different Name of the Week in generalized speculation about the 2023 Memphis mayor’s race. Confessedly, there have certainly been different figures to talk about in successive weeks of this column.

Previously mentioned as likely mayoral candidates next year have been: NAACP head Van Turner, who is finishing up his second and final term of the County Commission this week; Paul Young, the president/CEO of the Downtown Memphis Commission; Karen Camper, caucus leader of the state House of Representatives Democrats; and Joe Brown, the onetime Criminal Court judge and former TV celebrity judge.

Brown’s intentions, though he has certainly promoted a possible race, may be more fanciful than real. The others are, one way or another, making tangible plans to run. Turner has basically already announced, Young is reportedly lining up some serious financing for a campaign, and Camper is expected to make an announcement any week now.

Other names that are getting some mention are those of the Rev. Keith Norman of First Baptist Church-Broad, a chief lobbyist for Baptist Memorial Hospital and a former Democratic Party chair; Beverly Robertson, president/CEO of the Greater Memphis Chamber; Patrice Robinson, City Council member and former Council chair; and Worth Morgan, City Council member and defeated Republican candidate for county mayor this year.

This week’s most mentioned mayoral prospect? Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner, who in two successive county elections has led all other candidates for office and has a decent-sized campaign account left over to start a mayoral campaign with.

Bonner’s popularity with the voters as a Democratic candidate has been such that Shelby County Republicans did not even bother to nominate an opponent for him this year and themselves endorsed him.

His interest in running for the nonpartisan office of mayor is a very real thing, and he has definitely had preliminary discussions about mounting a campaign next year. Bonner’s status on the eve of the Memphis city election has been likened by more than one observer to that of AC Wharton in the first decade of this century, when Wharton was considered an inevitable candidate for, successively, Shelby County mayor and Memphis mayor, both of which offices he would win.

Jason Martin (Photo: Jackson Baker)

• Jason Martin, the Nashville critical-care physician who emerged as the winner of the Democrats’ three-way gubernatorial primary, was the speaker at last week’s Germantown Democratic Club meeting.

Addressing an audience of 70-odd attendees at the Coletta’s restaurant in East Shelby County, Martin deplored GOP Governor Bill Lee’s policies on several counts, including Lee’s restrictive posture toward abortion rights, his refusal to countenance Medicaid expansion and the annual federal outlays of $1 billion that would come with it, his striking away of gun regulations, and his moves toward privatizing public education.

Said Martin: “The other side is so radical on these issues that most people are like, ‘That’s not me.’ And that’s why we’re getting traction.”

• As first reported last week on memphisflyer.com, outgoing District Attorney General Amy Weirich will be taking a position as assistant DA with the office of Mark Davidson, district attorney for the adjoining 25th Judicial District, which serves the counties of Tipton, Fayette, Lauderdale, McNairy, and Hardeman.

A press release from Davidson’s office on Monday confirmed that Weirich will be sworn in as special counsel to his office on September 1st, a day after the swearing-in of Steve Mulroy, who defeated Weirich in the August 4th county election, to replace her as Shelby DA.

• The ever-worsening situation of Shelby County Clerk Wanda Halbert, under fire for mishandling license-plate distribution and her office affairs in general, almost got even bleaker Monday when the Shelby County Commission, in its final meeting as currently composed, failed by one vote to appoint a special counsel to begin ouster proceedings.

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Discord and Unity

Memphis Suffrage Monument unveiled (Photo: Courtesy Downtown Memphis Commission)

With only days remaining before the financial disclosures of county candidates for the first quarter of 2022 will be made public, Shelby County Commissioner Brandon Morrison says she is satisfied with her fundraising efforts to date and is focusing on meet-the-public events.

Jordan Carpenter, her Republican primary opponent and a political unknown before this race, is meanwhile having as many fundraising events as he can manage. Addressing an audience at a Germantown residence on Sunday, he recalled asking “all the big names” to head up his financial efforts as he planned his race, “and they’re like no, no, we’re not gonna.” So he settled on Jason McCuistion, a banking attorney and his friend “since the eighth grade,” to be his treasurer.

L to r: GOP party chair Cary Vaughn, Jordan Carpenter, and County Commissioner Mick Wright (Photo: Jackson Baker)

The newcomer has the support of the current four Republicans on the commission, three of whom — Amber Mills, Mick Wright, and Mark Billingsley, who is term-limited and leaving office — were present on Sunday. David Bradford, the fourth GOP member, was absent. The newly reapportioned District 4, which Carpenter and Morrison are competing in, is a montage of East Memphis and Germantown precincts.

Contending that Morrison has “failed” to represent the district, Carpenter cited two issues he thought important to suburban Republicans. One was the lingering issue of support for MATA, something Morrison has expressed openness toward by reorienting present funding. “You don’t take county taxpayer money and send it to a Memphis city entity when they’re not using the money that they already have correctly,” he said.

And the challenger took issue with Morrison’s serving last year as vice chair of an ad hoc commission committee to examine a joint city-county proposal on future Metro consolidation. That, Carpenter said, was “an issue that people care about a lot … a forced marriage, where half the residents of the county don’t want to be in it.”

He continued: “And there are people that say that issue is dead. And I say, you shouldn’t believe those people while the political action committees are being formed. And the money is being given in the background. And the swords are being sharpened behind closed doors …”

Apprised of Carpenter’s statement, Morrison, back in Memphis late Monday after a trip to Nashville, where she presented the legislature with a commission’s wish list, said her opponent was “being divisive, and I’m not going to play that game. I’m looking forward.”

• Political acrimony was wholly absent from two other weekend events. One was the opening at Poplar and Highland on Saturday of Sheriff Floyd Bonner’s campaign headquarters. Inasmuch as Bonner is unopposed on the Democratic primary ballot and the Shelby County Republicans are offering no candidate for sheriff, the event was ready-made for a massive turnout, and an enormous number of candidates from both sides of the political aisle, as well as independents, showed up for a share of the dais.

Sheriff Floyd Bonner at HQ opening (Photo: Jackson Baker)

The other big event of the weekend, also crowded, was nonpartisan by design. It was the official unveiling on Sunday of the new Memphis Suffrage Monument on the riverfront in a space behind the University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law. The tribute to the women who worked to extend the ballot to womankind was the brainchild of Memphis activist Paula Casey, who labored 20 years to bring it into being. On hand for the unveiling was a virtual who’s who of local officials and civic figures.

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An Uneven Week for Sheriff Bonner

Sheriff Floyd Bonner (Photo: Jackson Baker)

Sheriff Floyd Bonner had ample reason to feel satisfied last week. Previously he had been informed that the Republicans would not include his office in their 2022 primary elections. And on Wednesday of last week, he was treated as something of a conquering hero by a large crowd of rank-and-file Democrats and candidates for other offices at a party forum.

Indeed, Bonner spoke early, as a de facto head of the party ticket, at the forum, which was sponsored at the Great Hall of Germantown by District 4 (Germantown, Cordova) of the Shelby County Democratic Party. And he was well applauded.

Yet all is not sunny weather for the sheriff. He is currently vexed by the matter of the county jail, as he made plain in his remarks at the forum. In effect, Bonner made a somewhat desperate-sounding plea, asking that those present help him in rounding up candidates to work at the jail, promising a $5,000 bonus for anyone applying and accepted, to go with a salary in the $40,000 range.

“And they can be 18 years old,” he said.

The sheriff did not mention another fact about the jail — that he has been the subject of a suit filed by the ACLU on behalf of the inmate population, which, according to the suit, is seriously underserved in the matter of protection from the ravages of Covid-19. Bonner is also bound by a consent decree to remedy the matter, overseen by federal Judge Sheryl Lipman, who finds both staff and inmates, a small minority of whom are vaccinated, to be in “deep peril.” (Three deputy jailers have died from Covid, and numerous inmates have become seriously ill.) Lipman has issued a follow-up order denying a motion by the sheriff to suspend the decree.

Supporters of the ACLU action succeeded in getting a resolution critical of the sheriff’s inaction on the agenda of the SCDP’s executive committee Thursday night, but it was rejected 21 to 3, with members of the majority proclaiming a reluctance to impose judgment on the sheriff’s prerogatives. And clearly the realpolitik of 2020 electoral politics played a role in the outcome.

The court order remains, however, as does the resolve of local activists demanding compliance.

As this week began, Sheriff Bonner, who won all the votes last week, lost one. The first reading of a resolution to raise his annual pay from $164,765 to $199,500 failed in the Shelby County Commission by a vote of two ayes, two noes, and seven abstentions. The magic number would have been nine, a two-thirds majority.

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Judge Lipman Refuses to Lift Jail Covid Decree

Shelby County Jail (Photo: Shelby County Sheriff's Department)

U.S. District Judge Sheryl Lipman entered an order on Tuesday denying a motion from the Shelby County Sheriff’s office to terminate a consent decree of last June mandating improved access to Covid-19 prevention for prisoners in the Shelby County Jail.

 The consent order was the result of litigation on inmates’ behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee.

Judge Sheryl Halle Lipman

In seeking termination of the decree, the motion from Sheriff Floyd  Bonner had claimed, essentially,  that, pursuant to the consent decree, the Department had offered all inmates access to a vaccine and provided adequate educational materials and incentives to take the vaccine.

Lipman rejected this argument, finding that, contrary to the assertions of head jailer Kirk Fields, it was not clear that all detainees had indeed been offered a vaccine. 

She found further that it was even less clear that all inmates had received the educational materials that the Sheriff’s Department contended had gone out to each detainee, or that the educational materials had indeed been adequate.

In denying the Department’s motion to terminate the decree, Lipman cited testimony from two experts, one provided by the plaintiffs and another by the court itself, asserting that the vaccination rate for jail inmates remained at a “shockingly low rate” of between 11 and 24 percent.

The judge said that such a rate, “in the midst of the virulent Delta variant, signals a population in deep peril,” and concluded, “The consent decree did not enshrine mere box-checking. It enshrined meaningful protection for plaintiffs, a medically vulnerable group.”

Hence, she said, “Defendants have failed to satisfy their burden that the Consent Decree has been terminated. Thus, their Motion to Terminate the Consent Decree is denied.”