Three New Billboards: 96% Of Kids Prosecuted As Adults Are Black In Memphis
Over the past two years, Shelby County District Attorney General Amy Weirich has prosecuted 73 children as if they were adults. 96% of those children were Black.
One of the kids that Weirich’s office charged as an adult is Rosalyn Holmes. When she was 15 years old, she was in a car with two teenagers who pointed a gun during a robbery of a 28 year-old man.
Rosalyn was riding in the back seat of the car. She didn’t carry a weapon, didn’t threaten anyone, and didn’t take anything. But Amy Weirich still prosecuted Rosalyn as an adult and transferred her to an adult prison. She faced up to 30 years of incarceration.
Most prosecutors across Tennessee, and throughout the country, would have sent Rosalyn’s case not to adult court, but to the juvenile justice system. The juvenile system often still leads to incarceration, but children are held at juvenile facilities where the purpose is rehabilitation.
The idea behind treating children differently than adults is that their brains are not as developed and so it is disproportionate to punish kids as harshly as an adult who commits the same crime.
It’s also often counterproductive to prosecute a child in adult court, and send her to adult prison. Nearly all of the children sent to adult prison at 15 years-old will return back to their communities. It’s safer for everyone if the person who returns home has grown and changed and can become a productive member of the community. That’s the goal that the juvenile justice system is set up to achieve, and it’s why most prosecutors would never dream of sending a 15 year-old girl to adult prison for decades for sitting in the backseat of a car while other people robbed someone.
But not Amy Weirich. She prosecutes children as adults more often than every other prosecutor in Tennessee combined. For example, in 2018, Shelby County transferred 73 children to adult court, meanwhile the other 94 counties in the state transferred a total of 58 children to adult court.
How extreme is Amy Weirich’s approach to prosecuting children? A federal probe called Amy Weirich’s approach as “toxic…for African-American youth”.
But very few people in Memphis know about this federal investigation, or even that 96% of the children Weirich sends to adult court are Black kids.
Memphis Watch exists to bring our reporting on these important facts to everyday people who live and work in Memphis. That’s why, starting today, we have published three billboards across the city, all of which will remain there for the next 30 days.
Here’s the billboard at 2800 block of Poplar:
Here’s the billboard at 2500 block of Poplar:
Here’s the billboard on the 240 South Loop, just past the Perkins exit: