TBA Vice President Ed Lanquist attended the American Bar Association's Bar Leadership Institute (BLI) in Chicago this week. The BLI is intended to guide bar leaders in their roles as stewards of their organizations. Programming focuses on bar governance, communication and leadership — all with an eye toward what's going on in our communities and our world today. 

An investigation by The Marshall Project and The Institute for Public Service Reporting at the University of Memphis found incidents of aggressive policing throughout the ranks of the 1,900-member Memphis Police Department, according to an article published in the Commercial Appeal. A review of more than 200 arrest reports from spring of last year shows that rank-and-file officers, as well as SCORPION members, used overzealous methods in their encounters. With regards to the SCORPION unit in particular, ABC24 in Memphis reports that the district attorney’s office is reviewing past cases involving the unit, which was dissolved after Tyre Nichols’ death. Several attorneys say they have had cases dismissed or plea offers made because of the unstable credibility of officers in that unit. "You cannot possibly put any of these officers on the stand to testify about arrests they made," Murray Wells of Wells & Associates said.

The Daily Memphian reports that officials are working to increase transparency about juvenile crimes as the nature of those crimes becomes more serious. However, state laws restrict what information is allowed to be shared with the public in an effort to shield juveniles from the same level of public scrutiny that adult criminals receive as efforts to rehabilitate those youths are in progress. Juvenile Court Judge Tarik Sugarmon says the court is “transparent to the extent we are allowed to (be) ethically and statutorily.” He also stresses that protecting juveniles as they go through rehabilitation is paramount to their recovery. Officials are moving to establish online “dashboards” that will provide more information, or as much permitted by law, to anyone seeking it.

Tennessee’s Public Defender Social Worker program pairs defendants who cannot afford a lawyer with social workers to help address underlying issues like poverty, addiction or homelessness, and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is praising the program as a model for other states. “The criminal justice system is just not designed to help people who have mental health issues,” says Rachel Rossi, the director of the Office for Access to Justice at the DOJ. “And what bringing a social worker into the conversation does is it really allows us to get to the actual core of the issue and to actually heal and help and provide resources and support so that a person is not just cycling in and out of jail over and over and over.” WPLN has the story.

Reuters reports that artificial intelligence can now outperform most law school graduates on the bar exam, according to a new study released yesterday. GPT-4, the upgraded AI model released this week by Microsoft-backed OpenAI, scored 297 on the bar exam in an experiment conducted by two law professors and two employees of legal technology company Casetext. That places GPT-4 in the 90th percentile of actual test takers and is high enough to be admitted to practice law in most states, the researchers found.

The Judicial Innovation Fellowship (JIF), an initiative of Georgetown University Law School’s Institute for Technology Law & Policy, is an 11-month fellowship for technology leaders to help transform justice across state, local, territorial and tribal courts. Applications for JIF fellows are open through April 7 at 3 p.m. EDT. One of the three JIF projects will be with the Hamilton County General Sessions Court and Hamilton County Mayor’s Office. The JIF fellow will audit and improve how courts and information technology departments share data to understand court patron experiences across government services, the criminal justice system, and court debt obligations in an effort to break cycles of debt, homelessness and criminal recidivism. 

The Judicial Conference of the United States is recommending that Congress create new district and court of appeals judgeships to meet workload demands in certain courts. The recommendation, approved Tuesday by the federal Judiciary’s national policy-making body, asks Congress to create two permanent judgeships in the courts of appeals and 66 permanent district court judgeships, convert seven temporary district court judgeships to permanent status, and extend two existing temporary district court judgeships for an additional five years. More information is available at www.uscourts.gov/judiciary-news.

The 21st edition of the Alimony Bench Book is now available. Published by the TBA’s Family Law Section, the book provides a ready resource for dealing with alimony cases in Tennessee. Current Family Law Section members can access their copy at no cost on the Family Law eCommunity page, but must be logged into their TBA account. Others may purchase an electronic copy for $25, a hard copy in loose-leaf format for $40, or a hard copy in a binder for $50 from the TBA Store.

Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti joined a coalition of 19 state attorneys general in filing an amicus brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear Gregory Tucker vs. Faith Bible Chapel International. The case will test if the “ministerial exception” to the First Amendment was properly applied in a lawsuit challenging the hiring decisions of a faith-based Colorado school. Read more in a press release.

U.S. President Joe Biden yesterday issued an executive order designed to reinforce gun sale background checks. The order calls for greater enforcement of existing background check laws, promoting awareness of red flag laws and gun safety, and developing more resources for gun violence survivors. Read a fact sheet on the order from the White House.