The Kids of Rutherford County - Ep. 2

Serial

Serial Productions & The New York Times

True Crime, News, Society & Culture

4.5 • 81.9K Ratings

🗓️ 16 November 2023

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A young lawyer named Wes Clark can’t get the Rutherford County juvenile court to let his clients out of detention — even when the law says they shouldn’t have been held in the first place. He’s frustrated and demoralized, until he makes a friend. From Serial Productions and The New York Times in partnership with ProPublica and Nashville Public Radio, “The Kids of Rutherford County” is reported and hosted by Meribah Knight, a Peabody-award winning reporter based in the South.

Transcript

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0:00.0	These first two episodes of the kids of Rutherford County are free, but to hear the whole
0:07.4	series you'll need to subscribe to the New York Times, where you'll get access to all serial
0:12.0	production shows and all the New York Times
0:14.2	podcasts and it's super easy. You can sign up through Apple Podcasts or Spotify and if you're
0:19.4	already a time subscriber just link your account and you're done.
0:25.0	In 2013, three years before the arrests at Habgut Elementary,
0:30.0	when a bunch of kids were arrested and brought to juvenile detention for not stopping a fight.
0:34.8	A guy named West Clark had just graduated law school.
0:38.4	West was 25 years old, smart, ambitious, but he was also just coming out of a pretty wild past.
0:45.0	On and off since he was a teenager, he'd been addicted to OxyContin.
0:49.0	A hopeless love of this shit is how he puts it. With that came West's rap sheet, a
0:56.0	DUI, some drug charges. So considering this, he knew the chances of getting a job at a Tony White-Chu law firm were pretty close to zero,
1:06.5	but he needed a job.
1:08.2	That's when some lawyers he meant recovery circles gave him a tip.
1:12.0	There's always work in juvenile court.
1:14.0	They were like, hey, this is a place you can go and at least start out and learn the ropes
1:20.0	because there was a need for lawyers to do that.
1:24.0	Court-appointed juvenile cases don't pay well.
1:26.9	And lawyers have told me that juvenile court lacks the prestige of adult criminal
1:31.1	court.
1:32.2	One lawyer harshly described it as the bottom rung of the legal practice.
1:37.0	But for Wes, you know, it was something to do, which was much better than nothing to do.
	...

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