Shelby County DA 'confident' TN Speaker Cameron Sexton not actively seeking to impeach him

Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy said Tuesday he is "confident" that Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton is not actively working to impeach him.

The comments come days after the Tennessee Lookout, a nonprofit watchdog newspaper based in Nashville, reported that Sexton, a Republican from Crossville, was pondering Mulroy's ouster.

"I think it's useful to know that Speaker Sexton has not been affirmatively trying to push the idea of removal of any prosecutor, any DA, in the State of Tennessee," Mulroy said Tuesday. "This was a question that was asked by a particular reporter who brought up the subject. If you take a look at the actual quotes of Speaker Sexton, he's never actually suggested that he's seriously considering the idea."

Mulroy said he spoke with Sexton's chief of staff Tuesday morning, prior to his press availability, and said he is "confident that's not the case," in terms of Sexton actively working to impeach him.

Sexton's comments came alongside complaints and concerns he said he had about juvenile crime in Shelby County. Mulroy said he will be meeting with Sexton in the "near future" to discuss the topic.

"At the end of the day, the only way we're going to tackle this problem is if we work collaboratively, and that means all the local agencies in Shelby County working collaboratively, and it also means us collaborating with the state," he said. "And we need to not be pointing fingers at each other. So I really do look forward to sitting down with the speaker, or his chief of staff, and sharing with them all the things we're doing right now, but also the ways that the state can help us because, if they're concerned about it, then they need to provide us the resources that we need to tackle the problem."

Mulroy also said that juvenile crime has been an ongoing issue in Shelby County, and was rising for years before he took office.

"Juvenile crime has been a rising problem in Shelby County for a number of years before I took office," Mulroy said. "And by the way, parenthetically, during that time no one ever talked about impeaching the DA of Shelby County. In the last year that I've been in office, we've taken a number of steps to address the problem. We substantially increased the staff of our juvenile court prosecutorial unit. We have also set up a special unit within our office to deal specifically with vehicle thefts and vehicle burglaries which certainly are rising and are a significant problem."

Questions about discretion and blended sentencing

Sexton had told reporters that Mulroy was not a fan of the blended sentencing bill he introduced during the August special session, saying Mulroy believed it was "too hard." Though Mulroy said Tuesday he disagreed with one aspect of the bill, he said he was glad to see the speaker recognize the importance of blended sentencing.

Blended sentencing allows juvenile court to maintain custody of a juvenile convicted of certain crimes when they grow too old for the juvenile system, which happens after they turn 19. Mulroy said this is a tactic that could lower the recidivism rate for youths. In October 2022, he and Juvenile Court Judge Tarik Sugarmon said they would petition the state to support a pilot program in Shelby County.

The disagreement between Mulroy and Sexton came when he said the bill that was introduced took away discretion from local DAs and set guidelines that local DAs would have to follow based on the charges and the kid's age.

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Mulroy called that an "overly rigid, restrictive approach," saying that there should be the option for a local DA and juvenile court judge to decide how best to proceed with a case.

"If the concern by those who want to make it mandatory is that it won't be used often enough, or won't be used effectively, then I say give us a chance," Mulroy said. "Allow the DAs to retain their discretion. All the juvenile court judges to retain their discretion. Give us this tool, sit back and wait a year or two, and I predict that we will use it and we will use it effectively. There will be no need for a straitjacket of rigid automatic requirements."

Juvenile court transfers are lower

Mulroy also said Tuesday that transfers from Shelby County's juvenile court to the adult criminal court system are "lower in my first year in office than they were in the comparable period under the prior administration," but he noted that his office is "still "not shy" in requesting case transfers for serious charges, especially in murder cases.

"In my view, [the lower transfers] is a good thing because one of the things I talked about in the campaign is that we did too much in Shelby County," he said. "We did more adult transfers in Shelby County along, year after year after year, than every other county in Tennessee combined. 95% of them were Black, and as I said earlier, the statistics show that when we did that, the likelihood that they would re-offend when they came out was higher than if we hadn't done it."

Lucas Finton is a criminal justice reporter with The Commercial Appeal. He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter @LucasFinton.

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Steve Mulroy 'confident' he won't be ousted by high-ranking TN Republican