The City of Memphis is paying former Shelby County Criminal Court Judge Bobby Carter $200 per hour for his court monitoring duties, with a weekly 10-hour working cap, according to a copy of the contract between the city and Carter.
Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland said in his July 14 weekly update email that the city had hired a legal expert to sit in on court proceedings at the Shelby County Criminal Justice Center, though he did not say who he had hired.
“Several months ago, I wrote to the judges and judicial commissioners asking for transparency in the system and a way for the public to share their thoughts with these decision makers,” Strickland wrote in that email. “To date, I have not received a response. As a result, we have hired someone with 40 years of experience to monitor the system at 201 Poplar and make periodic reports to us so that we can bring more light to these decisions.”
Days after that email, on July 20, The Daily Memphian confirmed Carter was the person hired by the city. The Commercial Appeal filed a public records request with the City of Memphis for a copy of the contract. That request was fulfilled on Monday.
The contract was not signed by Strickland until Aug. 23, over three months after Carter signed it, and can be extended an additional year.
The contract is broken up into three levels. In level one, Carter, per the contract, will conduct “an in-depth examination and analysis, through data/record compilation and personal observations of activities and outcomes of criminal cases in Shelby County Courts, including but not limited to criminal courts.”
Level two will see Carter “perform a systematic evaluation of such activities and outcomes, to include” caseloads, trial calendars, data and efficiency trends, case outcomes and any other subject requested by the City of Memphis.
In level three, Carter will give written reports when he is asked to do so.
Much of the data Carter will be tracking is publicly available on a case-by-case basis in the Shelby County Criminal Justice Portal, though some of the case data has been overwritten as cases have made their way through the courts. Older cases in the portal also can be difficult to read.
The CA, for prior reporting on the Shelby County criminal justice system, has received help from Just City in scraping large amounts of this data — including bail amounts and case dispositions — from the portal.
Carter’s compensation was listed as $0 in the city’s contract portal, but the contract provided to The CA by the city showed Carter would be paid “the sum total $200.00 per hour, for a maximum of ten hours per week per year during the initial term of the agreement, plus all approved reimbursable expenses/cost.”
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Should Carter work 10 hours each week for the full term of the contract, which would be about 49 more weeks and is set to run through July 31, 2024, he could be paid $98,000 before tax.
The City of Memphis, in response to a question asking why the amount on Carter’s contract in the portal was $0, said this was due to him being paid hourly.
It is not yet clear how the city plans to use the data and potential reports that Carter puts together, as much of what happens in 201 Poplar falls under county jurisdiction, and Shelby County Criminal Court judges are employed by the State of Tennessee.
In response to questions about the information’s use, Allison Fouche, Chief Communications Officer for the City of Memphis, said the program is still “in beginning stages and this information is forthcoming.”
Lucas Finton is a criminal justice reporter with The Commercial Appeal. He can be reached at Lucas.Finton@commercialappeal.com and followed on Twitter @LucasFinton.
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