The Tennessean reports that former longtime courthouse reporter William Kirk Loggins died Thursday morning from post-stroke dementia at a memory care facility. He was 76. A lifelong Middle Tennessee journalist, Loggins covered Nashville's courts for The Tennessean for 26 years starting in 1976 before he retired in 2002. "A good day at the courthouse," Loggins told a Lipscomb University interviewer in 2012, "was like going to the movies." Among hundreds of criminal trials, Loggins covered 15 death penalty cases and witnessed the first Tennessee execution in 40 years in April 2000.

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.

Multiple Tennessee child advocacy experts say they are alarmed by a sudden move to dissolve an independent children's advocacy commission and distribute its responsibilities to other state agencies, reports the Tennessean. Jack Johnson, R-Franklin, was set to present Senate Bill 282 on Wednesday to the Senate Health and Welfare Committee, but the legislation, backed by Gov. Bill Lee's administration, was ultimately delayed to next week. The bill essentially strips any mentions of the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth from state code. The commission released a report in January finding Tennessee foster kids experience the highest levels of instability in U.S. Nearly 34% of foster cases meet that definition in Tennessee, according to the report, more than double the overall U.S. national average of 14.9%.

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 Associated Press reports that 18- to 20-year-olds in Tennessee may soon be able to carry handguns in public without a permit, with or without Gov. Bill Lee’s approval. After the law was passed in 2021 that allowed gun owners aged 21 and up to carry handguns in public without a permit, the Firearms Policy Coalition sued, arguing that the age limit should be lower. In late 2022, then-Attorney General Herbert Slatery moved to negotiate a settlement, citing 2022’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling expanding gun rights. In January, Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti proposed a deal that would allow 18- to 20-year-olds to carry handguns publicly. A judge put the arrangement on hold for a 30-day period that ends tomorrow.