Speaker 1: You're listening to Bloomberg Law with June Grosso from Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 1: The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges is
Speaker 1: the nation's oldest organization for judges. It's two thousand members
Speaker 1: come from every state and several foreign countries, and their
Speaker 1: goal is to ensure justice for families and children in
Speaker 1: courts throughout the country. The organization has a new president,
Speaker 1: Judge Dan Michael of the Memphis and Shelby County Juvenile
Speaker 1: Court in Tennessee, who has more than twenty years of
Speaker 1: experience in juvenile law, and he joins me now, thanks
Speaker 1: for being here, Judge Michael, Will you start out by
Speaker 1: telling us about the goal of the National Council of
Speaker 1: Juvenile and Family Court Judges. Well, the Council is essentially
Speaker 1: a training and support organization for judges. It's the oldest
Speaker 1: judicial council in the United States. I believe we're celebrating
Speaker 1: our eighty three or eighty fourth birthday this year, so
Speaker 1: it's been around a long time. My introduction to the
Speaker 1: Council came years ago. Is over seventeen years ago, when
Speaker 1: the judge of the Juvenile Court at the time sent
Speaker 1: me to one of their conferences in Florida, and I
Speaker 1: got hooked and I've been a member ever since. The
Speaker 1: reason the Council is important to me, and I believe
Speaker 1: the judges that belong vary from judge to judge. But
Speaker 1: we are an implementation site and we've been getting good
Speaker 1: support from the Council for a number of years as
Speaker 1: we executed use of what we call our Dependency and
Speaker 1: Neglect bench Book, the Enhanced Guidelines for Judges and Abuse
Speaker 1: in Neglect cases, and they send, of course they're not
Speaker 1: sending anybody here right now, but for years they would
Speaker 1: send a team down here about every other year and
Speaker 1: sit in court review the judges who hear the cases,
Speaker 1: make sure they're following the guidelines properly, and give us
Speaker 1: assistance if we were slipping. In addition to that, they
Speaker 1: would hold what they call or Lead Judges Conference a
Speaker 1: year and all thirty or forty lead judges from across
Speaker 1: the country which show up out in Reno, where our
Speaker 1: headquarters is, and spend a day and a half to
Speaker 1: two days learning from one another. Well, this is what
Speaker 1: we're doing at my court, or this is what we're
Speaker 1: doing at my court, And of course it opens up
Speaker 1: the ability to borrow ideas from judges all over the country.
Speaker 1: In addition, and this is what's critical to me, June,
Speaker 1: the relationships that I made seventeen years ago are still
Speaker 1: in place. I've got judges magistrate judges who are friends
Speaker 1: of mine all over the country, and when we have
Speaker 1: a national conference, I get to see them, I get
Speaker 1: to break bread with them. We make new friends at
Speaker 1: the conferences, and those friendships last for a long time.
Speaker 1: And you may not realize, if you're not a judge
Speaker 1: that when you put on a robe you essentially separate
Speaker 1: yourself from society in a way that's rather unusual. Judges
Speaker 1: have very very stringent ethical guidelines they have to follow.
Speaker 1: We lose our First Amendment rights to some extent on
Speaker 1: what we can and cannot say, and a roabe can
Speaker 1: be very very isolated. So being able to go to
Speaker 1: a conference, go to a lead judges conference, meet other judges,
Speaker 1: be in a room with other judges where you can
Speaker 1: discuss judicial issues openly is a very very strong inducement
Speaker 1: to being part of the organization. Because in in the
Speaker 1: regular world, I can't talk about cases I'm working on.
Speaker 1: I hesitate to talk about cases. I've even finished with.
Speaker 1: But in the company of other judges you can talk
Speaker 1: about a lot of things you can't talk about in
Speaker 1: public because of the ethical guidelines, and it gives us
Speaker 1: that friendship support that we don't get in other places.
Speaker 1: I want to turn to the courts right now, and
Speaker 1: COVID nineteen has slowed down or closed courts across the country.
Speaker 1: With juvenile and family courts, you have issues that are
Speaker 1: emergency or time sensitive. How have the courts been handling
Speaker 1: those cases during this crisis? Well, I can tell you
Speaker 1: that my experience in talking to members of the judiciary
Speaker 1: across the country the last four months is that it
Speaker 1: varies literally from county to county. My friends in Washington,
Speaker 1: d c. And Austin, Texas and lots of the states
Speaker 1: were locked out of their courthouses because their courthouses belonged
Speaker 1: to the county and the county mayor or the county
Speaker 1: manager back in March made decisions to close courthouses, so
Speaker 1: judges were literally stuck without a court room in a
Speaker 1: lot of those counties. Now I can specifically talk about
Speaker 1: what we did. We never closed down. He jumped from,
Speaker 1: oh gosh, how many doctors do we have? A week
Speaker 1: um about forty five docuts a week down to three
Speaker 1: and moved into zoom hearings within two weeks of late March.
Speaker 1: It was after March fift when we started doing zoom hearings,
Speaker 1: but we jumped on zoom pretty quickly, and we continued
Speaker 1: to hear all our emergency cases on zoom. So if
Speaker 1: a child gets taken into custody, we give them a
Speaker 1: hearing within twenty four hours of that decision. If a
Speaker 1: child is removed from parents, we give them an immediate
Speaker 1: hearing within seventy two hours under state law. We'll continue
Speaker 1: this conversation coming up and find out what you did
Speaker 1: in your courthouse, Judge Michael, as well as what your
Speaker 1: goals are for the organization as president. I'm dream Brusso
Speaker 1: and this is job I've been talking to Judge Dan Michael,
Speaker 1: the new president of the National Council of Juvenile and
Speaker 1: Family Court. So, Judge Michael, we were talking about the
Speaker 1: courts and handling COVID nineteen. Tell us more about what
Speaker 1: you did in your court house. What we have done
Speaker 1: in our courthouse is we locked everything down. I issued
Speaker 1: a mask rule right off the bat. We started taking
Speaker 1: temperatures at the door. We isolated ingress and egress because
Speaker 1: in my building we have about four hundred people come
Speaker 1: through here a year, and that's just for juvenile court.
Speaker 1: So we've shut it down. Visitors have to come in
Speaker 1: one door, employees the other. We temperature check everyone and
Speaker 1: we started rotating our staff. I have about two d staff.
Speaker 1: They come in and shifts of about four and a
Speaker 1: half hours and then leave and then the next shift
Speaker 1: comes in, so our halls aren't packed with people and
Speaker 1: knock wood jun We've not had a case of COVID
Speaker 1: among my staff. We sealed off the judiciary so nobody
Speaker 1: can't get back here but the judges and the management team.
Speaker 1: We are working all of our cases on Zoom and
Speaker 1: we have reopened all our docuts except one, and all
Speaker 1: of my magictis come in every day. They go into
Speaker 1: their chambers and they stay there and they're in court
Speaker 1: almost all day, and if they're not in court, they're
Speaker 1: signing orders and issuing orders, and we stay away from
Speaker 1: one another. We wave at each other in the hall,
Speaker 1: but that's about it. We're trying really really hard to
Speaker 1: contain this thing, to keep litigants safe, judges safe, and
Speaker 1: court staff safe and lawyers safe and like I say,
Speaker 1: not goold. We've been successful so far and keeping everyone safe.
Speaker 1: You are taking the helm of the organization In July.
Speaker 1: I know that you've been leading on a project to
Speaker 1: improve child abuse and neglect practices at juvenal and family courts.
Speaker 1: Tell me a little bit about that and what you
Speaker 1: hope to achieve their As a juvenile court judge, somebody
Speaker 1: has been on the bench over twenty three years. In
Speaker 1: my early career of judging, I had numerous dockets of
Speaker 1: all types, from child support, two arguments between parents over
Speaker 1: whose parents the child, two delinquency cases when children commit
Speaker 1: acts that would be crimes if they were adults. But
Speaker 1: the most important docket I believe we have a juvenile
Speaker 1: court is the abuse inflect docket. And Tennessee we use
Speaker 1: the word dependency and neglect. The children who come in
Speaker 1: before us on dependent neglect dockets. If we can't successfully
Speaker 1: break that behavior of where child is being severely abused
Speaker 1: or abused or neglected, the risk of that child growing
Speaker 1: into delinquent behavior and acting out from the trauma they
Speaker 1: suffer as young children is critical. We have had students
Speaker 1: come from the medical school, which is about two blocks
Speaker 1: from here do studies on their PhD work in their
Speaker 1: MD work that shows the connection between abuse and neglect
Speaker 1: and delinquent See. So I know as a judge, and
Speaker 1: I can tell you anecdotally that when I saw children
Speaker 1: abused and neglected twenty years ago, and now is the
Speaker 1: judge who does only transfer here I see some of
Speaker 1: those children that were in front of me as abused
Speaker 1: and neglected children years ago, who are acting out from
Speaker 1: the trauma and the severe damage that was done to
Speaker 1: them as young kids, and they get in trouble. So
Speaker 1: my goal is to employ the Child Abuse Enhanced Resource
Speaker 1: Guidelines that were developed by the National Council throughout all
Speaker 1: of those abuse and neglect bockets, and my judges have
Speaker 1: been trained. They all have the resource guidelines in their
Speaker 1: chambers when they go into a courtroom. Before the pandemic,
Speaker 1: they carried those resource guidelines in there with them. They
Speaker 1: utilize what we call bench cards. Bench cards are a
Speaker 1: one page laminated sheet that essentially has bullet points on
Speaker 1: what you should look for, who should be in the courtroom,
Speaker 1: what kind of questions you should ask, that sort of
Speaker 1: thing to guide them to a better shot at getting
Speaker 1: the information they need. So they can make a good
Speaker 1: decision and break the cycle. And it's an ongoing thing.
Speaker 1: It's not something that you, Okay, we ordered a bunch
Speaker 1: of guidelines and now we're good to go. It's a
Speaker 1: constant training. It's constantly changing your callioquey in the courtroom
Speaker 1: to make sure you're showing the compassion and respect for
Speaker 1: everyone in there. Because just because a parent is not
Speaker 1: parenting properly doesn't mean they're a bad person. They probably
Speaker 1: weren't trained to be a good parent by their parents,
Speaker 1: so they're suffering from trauma that they grew up in
Speaker 1: and that flows through to their children. So what we
Speaker 1: try to do is very compassionately help that person find
Speaker 1: ways of properly parenting their children so that their children
Speaker 1: can grow up to be productive citizens without the amount
Speaker 1: of trauma that most of these kids see. I think
Speaker 1: that a judge's job, any judge's job, is really difficult.
Speaker 1: But it must be very difficult to face, you know,
Speaker 1: the the juveniles who are in crisis and families, to
Speaker 1: face that every day, day after day and deal with
Speaker 1: these emotional problems. Yes, it's very difficult. We um for years.
Speaker 1: You know, judges are supposed to be um above the fray.
Speaker 1: We're supposed to be independent. We don't adhere to any
Speaker 1: political parties in Tennessee. Judges run independently. We're supposed to
Speaker 1: go in the courtroom, and we don't have juries in
Speaker 1: juvenile courts. So the judges, the judge and the jury
Speaker 1: in a juvenile court. And one of the things I
Speaker 1: learned early on from the judges that I worked under
Speaker 1: was that compassion is critical, empathy is critical. That you
Speaker 1: don't judge the person, you judge the act. Okay, because
Speaker 1: as young adults, we've all made mistakes as children and
Speaker 1: young adults, and even as older those mistakes are part
Speaker 1: of life. Some are worse than others, some are minor,
Speaker 1: some are terrible, but the mistake does not define who
Speaker 1: you are as a person. So we train our magistrate
Speaker 1: judges when they go into court that you're you're dealing
Speaker 1: with a human being who is suffering from trauma, and
Speaker 1: their response to that can be really bad on their children,
Speaker 1: and then the children suffer trauma. Now, the third piece
Speaker 1: of that puzzle that you ask about is that judges
Speaker 1: and clerks and lawyers who operate in that arena get
Speaker 1: what I call vicarious trauma. If you sit in on
Speaker 1: a murder trial as a juror and the d A
Speaker 1: puts up crime scene photos, you're gonna be traumatized because
Speaker 1: there's a member of the public. You don't see real
Speaker 1: life of a murder seemed very often, and television doesn't
Speaker 1: really do it. Honor judges sit every day and hear
Speaker 1: the worst of human behavior, and it has a tremendous
Speaker 1: effect on us. That's why the National Council is so
Speaker 1: important to be. If I have a tough day, I
Speaker 1: can pick up the phone and call my friend Tony,
Speaker 1: easy update and just say, Tony, how you doing. I've
Speaker 1: had a really rough day. Let me tell you about
Speaker 1: this case I had. So when I took office four
Speaker 1: and a half years ago, almost five years ago now,
Speaker 1: I started trauma training in the courthouse. I had the
Speaker 1: National Council come in. They did a trauma audit and
Speaker 1: they literally looked at absolutely everything in the building and
Speaker 1: everybody in the building. They issued a report. We then
Speaker 1: shared a partnership with the University of Tennessee Health Sciencest Center,
Speaker 1: which is Tennessee Medical School. I reached out to their
Speaker 1: dean of the psychiatric department. He gave us people who
Speaker 1: knew how to deal with trauma and aces, and we
Speaker 1: trained literally everybody in the courthouse, lawyers, judges, probation staff,
Speaker 1: even our psychologist upstairs took the training. Even our maintenance
Speaker 1: people took the training because they're in the hallways they
Speaker 1: run into children and families. I then appointed Dr Eleon
Speaker 1: and she is a PhD. And she is my trauma
Speaker 1: authority in this building, and her role is to keep
Speaker 1: the training going for new staff, the retraining of existing staff,
Speaker 1: and reaching out into the community to spread the word
Speaker 1: that we know what the problem. If we could stop
Speaker 1: the trauma, if we could stop the aces, we could
Speaker 1: eventually whittle down the number of cases we see to
Speaker 1: a small number. And I truly believe that we've all
Speaker 1: known as judges for years who've done this, that the
Speaker 1: families that come in front of us are in serious trouble,
Speaker 1: but we didn't know how to label it. And it's
Speaker 1: the medical profession that came out and said, these are
Speaker 1: the problems that you're seeing in your courtroom, and they're
Speaker 1: driven by high ASIS scores and severe trauma. So I've
Speaker 1: been attacking it at the base since I took office
Speaker 1: and looking at your resume. I was intrigued because, you know,
Speaker 1: when you go to law school, almost everybody who was
Speaker 1: in law school just came out of college or came
Speaker 1: out a few years ago. You went to law school
Speaker 1: when you were thirty seven? Why what happened? What led you?
Speaker 1: What led you at that aids to try to take
Speaker 1: on the law. Well, I guess I was an argumentative child.
Speaker 1: My parents always used to say to me, you'd be
Speaker 1: a good lawyer, of good judge. I went into business
Speaker 1: with my dad right out of college. He owned service stations.
Speaker 1: Now I don't know how old you are, but that's
Speaker 1: a term that nobody ever uses anymore. We didn't sell
Speaker 1: milk and bread. We saw gasoline, and we fixed cars,
Speaker 1: and we were franchise operators for and then Exxon, and
Speaker 1: the franchise agreements through the oil companies were chained from
Speaker 1: independent dealers owners like my father and I, to big
Speaker 1: finance guys who would buy, you know, two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty stores across the Southeast and run. I'm with employees.
Speaker 1: And I had grown up in a family business and
Speaker 1: realized that I either had to figure out a new
Speaker 1: business to go into because most corporations aren't going to
Speaker 1: hire a thirty seven or forty year old who's been
Speaker 1: running his own business. And I had already worked on
Speaker 1: my master's degree. I always loved education, and I took
Speaker 1: the els At on a lark and got into law school.
Speaker 1: One of the hardest things I've ever done, to be honest,
Speaker 1: with schools. I was married with kids, and Lord had mercy.
Speaker 1: I walked into that first class and I'm sitting in
Speaker 1: there with nineteen year olds, twenty year olds who've been
Speaker 1: out partying all night, and I've been up all night
Speaker 1: reading law books. Thanks so much for joining us. Judge Michael,
Speaker 1: that's Judge Dan Michael, the President of the National Council
Speaker 1: of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. And that's it for
Speaker 1: this edition of Bloomberg Law. I am June Grasso, and
Speaker 1: this is Bloomberg