Mark Davidson (DA) on Inside the Role of a Tennessee District Attorney (Copy)
Mark Davidson, District Attorney General for Tennessee’s 25th Judicial District, joins Signature Required for a wide ranging and deeply honest conversation about justice, responsibility, and what public safety actually looks like away from the spotlight.
Serving five rural counties in West Tennessee, Davidson leads an office responsible for thousands of cases each year, spanning everything from probation and recovery courts to violent crime, child protection, and victim advocacy. In this episode, he breaks down what a district attorney really does, how little of the job involves simply “locking people up,” and why most people who enter the justice system are trying to find a way back out.
About Mark Davidson
Mark walks through his own path into the role, from law school uncertainty to being the only prosecutor in a rural county, typing his own indictments and learning the job in real time. He shares how he was ultimately appointed and elected as District Attorney, and what it means to carry an eight year constitutional responsibility in a system that is often underfunded and misunderstood.
The conversation moves beyond job descriptions into the emotional weight of the work. Davidson speaks candidly about the cases that stay with him, including crimes involving children, systemic failures meant to protect the vulnerable, and why certain images and outcomes are impossible to forget. He also reflects on the psychological difference between prosecuting and defending cases, and why he has never lost sleep believing he convicted an innocent person.
We also explore courtroom dynamics that most people never consider, from the role of public defenders and jury psychology in small communities to the misconceptions surrounding funding, workload, and power within the justice system. Davidson explains why victim witness coordinators are among the most critical roles in public safety, and how relatively small budget increases could dramatically improve outcomes for victims and families.
Leadership & Community Impact
As a father of three daughters, Mark shares how decades in the criminal justice system have shaped his parenting, his awareness of risk, and the balance between protecting your children and letting them live their lives.
This episode offers a rare, clear eyed look at how the justice system functions on the ground, what it gets right, where it struggles, and why trust, accountability, and community cooperation still matter.
Resources
Tennessee District Attorneys General Conference
Tennessee Bureau of Investigation
National Crime Victim Law Institute
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[00:00:00] Welcome to Signature Required. It is intended for Tennesseans by Tennesseans,
Mark Davidson, district Attorney General for the 25th Judicial District of Tennessee. Welcome to Signature Required. Thank you for having me. When people hear that you're a district attorney, I think all kinds of different questions immediately come to mind. First, should I be afraid of this guy? What does this guy know about me?
What does he actually do? Does he watch Law and order? Like a whole lot of questions, I think come to people's minds. So I wanna hit that right off the top. Before we go into who you are and all your story, what does a district attorney do? Yeah, and that's a great question. And when I speak to different groups and typically younger groups, high school.
Maybe college kids. I'll ask them that question. Does anybody in here know what the [00:01:00] DA does? Oh, you flip it. I do. Yeah. Well, let's see what y'all know. And I usually will only get a hand or two and they're probably gonna say something like, you put bad guys in jail. Yeah. And that's, and I'm like, yeah, that's what most people, when they hear district attorney, that's what they typically think is you're locking up bad guys.
Which is part of our job. But it's a very small part of our job. It's a public safety job. Of course, you have to be a lawyer, so you gotta go to law school. That's a fundamental requirement. To be elected DA. In Tennessee, you have to be 30 years old. Have to be a licensed attorney in the state, in good standing.
And you have to live in the judicial district where you want to run for da. But we do also employ. I think I have 14 assistant district attorneys who work as prosecutors in criminal court, and we cover a lot of courts. So we're very busy every day. We're typically in court two or three days a week [00:02:00] and off, and I've got five counties and I'm sure we'll get into that in west Tennessee.
So we're busy attending courts. We do attend a lot of criminal court and we do make a lot of arguments to lock up bad guys. But at the same time, we are very aware of the fact that most people that come into the criminal justice system for the first time probably are not going to go to jail.
And if they do, they're probably not gonna be there very long. You're entitled to be a suitable candidate for probation if it's your first time in. So most folks that we do convict are probably gonna be on probation. They're probably gonna be at Walmart might be at church. And we are hoping that we can provide services and rehabilitation tools to them so that we don't see them again.
And they can complete their probation and be out of the system. Now having said that, we do have what I would call but we have real criminals in our district. Just because we're a rural five county district in West Tennessee doesn't mean it's all peace and quiet and, you [00:03:00] know, sunshine and birds.
We do have gangs, we do have homicides. We do have violent crime, guns, drugs sex crimes. A lot of meth. But we do things a lot of people don't know about. We do child support enforcement, which is a good thing. Making sure children and parents are supported. And then we do a lot of work with recovery courts and mental health courts and other things that I'll talk about a little later to try to help people.
So it's not just about locking up bad guys. So the 25th district, nobody will know off the top of their head where that is and some of our listeners are not from Tennessee, so help set the geography for us of what you cover. You've mentioned five districts, where are they and what are some of the maybe cities that people might recognize whether they're from or not from Tennessee. Sure. So, Tennessee, I believe we now have 33 judicial districts. We had 32. A year or two ago, but we made Williamson County a single judicial [00:04:00] district. Most judicial districts in Tennessee are like mine. They're rural, multi-county districts. So I have five counties Lauderdale, Tipton, Fayette, Hardiman, and McNary.
They're in West Tennessee and they're right outside of Memphis. Okay. So I kind of have five counties outside of Memphis. Next to me is the 26th Judicial District. That is Madison County or Jackson, Tennessee. He has two smaller counties. So he has a three county district. The 28th is in northwest Tennessee.
Danny Goodman has two pretty small counties, Dyer and Lake Counties. The population of his entire district is smaller than the population of my one most populated county. So Tipton County in my district has more people in it than DA Danny Goodman has in his entire district. And then there's Memphis or Shelby County, which is a single district.
And it's gonna have over a million people. So just right there in west Tennessee, you can see how varied the districts are. Memphis, Nashville, Chattanooga and Knoxville are all [00:05:00] single county standalone districts. What we used to call the big four. Yeah. Rutherford County has now joined and I think Clarksville, so now we really had the big six because of all the growth in Middle Tennessee.
Williamson County's probably not far behind. And Mark, just a couple other housekeeping things so we can understand the role better. You're elected to this role, right? Correct. So walk us through just what it takes to become a district attorney. You mentioned some of the parameters, 30 years old, gotta be a lawyer with good standing.
How long do you hold that role and when are those elections? So just from my personal experience I started as an a DA, an assistant district attorney in 1994. And I served in that role for a number of years. I then went to work for the State Attorney General's office in Nashville. I was up here as an assistant attorney general for a number of years.
And then in 2011, I [00:06:00] went back to the DA's office in West Tennessee and I served as the Deputy District Attorney under Mike Donovan, who was then the elected da. Our terms are for eight years, and so Mike had been the DA I think since 2006. And so I became his deputy in 2011. When I got outta law school, I was an assistant DA in Lauderdale County.
I was the only assistant da, I was the only person in our office in the county. I was the secretary, the victim witness coordinator. I typed my own indictments, literally on a typewriter. I answered the phone, I did all the correspondence. So I did it all. I was Did law school prepare you for all those extra jobs?
No. No. I was completely unprepared. I knew what a lawyer was, but because you watched Law and Order Right. That's why. And I went to law school. Oh, okay. I knew how to become a, that might be a better way of knowing what a lawyer is. Okay. I have become a lawyer, but that doesn't make you a lawyer.
Sure. And you know, people that go through law school are pretty fond of saying that law [00:07:00] school does not teach you how to be a lawyer. And that's pretty true. It does give you the tools you need to be successful. But yeah, I was not very well prepared to be, wearing four or five hats.
But anyway, I was doing that and I was loving it. I was the only prosecutor in that county in west Tennessee, so I was the guy, so to speak. My DA, Betsy Rice was the elected da, and she would come around from time to time, but she had five counties, so it was a lot to cover. But Mike Donovan got outta law school and became a defense lawyer, and we started trying cases against each other.
And we tried a prison murder case. I had a, we had a prison and still do have a prison in Lauderdale County. And we had all kind of crimes occur in that prison. Drugs, assaults, aggravated assaults, murders. So we tried a prison murder and I want it. As I should. because he was guilty. And but Mike did a good job on that.
When I moved on to the ags office, Mike eventually ran for district attorney and won. So when I came back to the district, he had become the [00:08:00] elected district attorney and I was now working under him which was great. So in 2017, he became appointed the United States Attorney for West Tennessee by President Trump which made him the Chief Federal prosecutor in West Tennessee.
So you have three US attorneys in Tennessee, one in west, one in middle, and one in east. So when he got that appointment, he resigned from being district attorney, the elected da. I was then appointed to replace him in 17 and I had to stand at the next election, which was in 18. Is it by the governor that appoints you or who appoints you?
That's a really interesting question and good story. I understood and knew, and Mike did too, that when it looked like he was going to get the presidential appointment to be US attorney and be moving on, he made it known to me that he wanted me to succeed him. At the time I was living in our family home in Shelby County, just outside of the Tipton County line.
So just outside of the judicial district. [00:09:00] Okay. It was my grandmother's home. It was our family home. So I moved. I knew I had to get into the district, I had to move back into, and I'd lived in the 25th before we bought our first house in Ripley in Lauderdale County. But so we moved back. I moved into Covington, got a townhouse, and I knew I would have my one year residency in the district to run for the job, which the Constitution requires.
Das are constitutional officers. We're enumerated in the Constitution. Our terms of eight years are in the Tennessee Constitution. And I knew that I had to be a resident of the district for a year to be eligible to run. So, so we did that. I was residing there. I was good to go. We, Mike and I went and met with the governor's attorney, Dwight Tarwater who had.
Was pretty recent, I think, acting as the governor's counsel. And so we met with him, super guy he's on the Tennessee Supreme Court now. And he had instituted a new policy which required that anybody the governor appointed to be DA had to have lived [00:10:00] in the district for a year before the appointment.
Well, I was not gonna make that timeframe. I had been there several months, so we kind of went back and forth on that. And Dwight was pretty fond of his new policy and was not inclined to make an exception this early in, in their new term. I mean, this was a new administration and that was their new policy.
And so we kind of talked about it and figured out, well, we're all pretty smart lawyers, surely we can figure this out. And so we did. I went back to the district and the five judges in my district appointed me to be DA Pro Tim. So I got to serve in a, and that's a lawful temporary capacity. If the DA abdicates his seat or can't perform the duties of his seat, the court, the judges are authorized to appoint a replacement.
So in lieu of the governor doing it, my judges did it. And then I would go, spent the next year going around and being introduced to people, audiences, and the people introducing me would say, and General Davidson here was appointed [00:11:00] by the governor to be the da. And I would not correct that. because I thought that's a whole story.
So I would just kind of nod politely and say, I, yes, I'm pleased to have been appointed. And I'll be running. So I had to run at the next election in 18, but you set the record straight here. Yes. For the governor for that story. Let me pivot us and ask you this. I love hearing your story through your different work.
Like you've worn multiple hats, you've been chasing the bad guys when you were a 6-year-old boy, did you just wake up one day and say, I'm gonna go chase bad guys someday. And that landed you in law school. What made you choose this path? That's a great question. And the answer's no. When I was six years old I wanted to be the quarterback of the Philadelphia Eagles.
You and our son would get along really well. He also wants to be the quarterback of the Eagles. Yeah. I don't know how I got to be an Eagles fan. My aunt gave me a Cowboys jersey or coat when I was like seven and I cried and [00:12:00] for some reason loved the Eagles. So that's what I was all about.
That's awesome. I, you know, I didn't really know what I wanted to do all through high school, and then I went to college. At Ole Miss and majored in banking and managerial finance and still didn't really know what I wanted to do. I graduated and the banking industry was not real robust at that time, so jobs were pretty hard to come by.
When did you graduate? 91. Okay. And so pretty quickly I did have an interest in law school. I wasn't sure why, but it appealed to me because I'm a big reader. My mom always had a novel in my hand, or a book in my hand to read every summer, all summer. And I thought I had the aptitude to probably succeed in law school.
So rather than continue to try to pursue a banking career, which wasn't going anywhere I'd, I went straight to law school and I did pretty well in the lsat. And then my, you know, I'd. Went through law school and I clerked for a number of lawyers in downtown Memphis. But even through law school, I really wasn't [00:13:00] sure what my career path was gonna be.
But I had some sense that I didn't want to stay in downtown Memphis and work at the big law firms. I wanted to get back out to the country. I'm from RoseMark, which is in west Tennessee. It's rural really pretty part of West Tennessee. And I had in my clerkships been able to make some trips out into the country to other courthouses.
So I knew that there was a legal world out there outside of downtown Memphis. And so when I graduated, I fired off a resume to Betsy Rice, who I did not know at the time, but knew to be the district attorney near where I lived in RoseMark. And she called me in for an interview and I also interviewed with some other attorneys out in that area.
But she actually offered a salary. I think it was $26,000 a year to do all the jobs. To do the jobs, yeah. To wear four, four or five hats. Health insurance. Sure. The other lawyers were doing different things. They were paying less or you were on a, what they called a draft where they would loan you money, but you had to earn it back.
[00:14:00] And so I decided I wanted to go to work with Betsy Rice and see what it was like to work in the DA's office. I didn't know a whole lot about it. And as soon as I got in there, I really took to it and really enjoyed it. And I was working under a senior attorney prosecutor who had I think 14 years experience.
And I just snuck right in under his wing and started taking a lot of notes. because I didn't know much about criminal law, so I was writing things down, you know, what is a probable cause hearing what's an arraignment, what's a bond hearing? And I would just take notes about. What happened and what you do and how it works.
And did that for a little under a year. And then Betsy Rice sent me out to Lauderdale County on my own to prosecute by myself in that one county. I was gonna say, do you remember the first case that you had to chair or do by yourself? I did. It was a DUI case. Betsy sat second chair with me, but she didn't do anything.
She just sat there and she could be pretty intimidating. So that was a pretty, I was [00:15:00] straight outta law school, barely a year out. My first trial, I'm doing it by myself with her there. Didn't really know what I was doing, you know, I had a book from law school, it's called MA Ways, and it's basically a primer on how to do a jury trial step by step.
And I was literally going step by step through the book. Did you have like sticky notes sticking out of it? I did. Down did, yeah. Yes. How to do a direct examination. How to do a cross examination. What do you do after you finish your proof? What's a defense gonna do? How can I prepare for their witnesses that I actually don't know about?
I feel like if you're the guy that's being charged with a DUI and you look over and you see your defense attorney over there with like a how to do a trial for dummies, like there might be an aspect of it where you're relieved Yeah. But also worried, like, I don't know which one you feel more, but like it's interesting from their perspective of saying, did I just get really lucky here?
Or am I just about to be taking a task by somebody that is you know, has a lot to prove? Right. [00:16:00] Yeah, good question. And yeah, I would be encouraged to see my prosecutor trying to figure out what to do. But in, in that defendant's case, he should have been a little worried because I was being very methodical.
I had my boss sitting next to me, so I was not gonna miss anything. And I didn't care if I had my little book out there with my sticky notes. And I got the conviction. And of course, you know, when I interviewed for the job talked to one of the assistants and he said, it's a great job.
You got the American flag behind you. You're doing the right thing. You should have the right guy. The police have done an investigation and called him and they should have good evidence. And out here in the country, people believe they're law enforcement and you have good cases, so you should be enjoying your job if you take it.
And that turned out to be pretty true. You know, back in the late nineties when I started, if a police officer just raised his hand and took the oath and started testifying of juries, I mean, they believed. What they heard. [00:17:00] And you could win a case just on the testimony of a law enforcement officer with an eye pointing out who the defendant is just with eyewitness.
Yeah. Testimony and his word. You know, those days are long gone. Today juries want video and DNA of everything, even if it doesn't exist. So times have changed a lot but it's a great job and I had a great start. And without knowing it, I found my way to where I am. Like most great stories.
Mark, I've got questions for you. If I can get inside your, that was so on this. Wait a second. Right. I have questions. I, you know, it's really a great privilege and opportunity to have you here because I kind of wanna get in your head on something that I just have always wanted to be able to ask people that are doing work in the criminal space because I could imagine being a defense attorney is a unique type of torture because you know that [00:18:00] you are representing some people that did do it and you're working to put them back out there.
And that has to be a heavy burden. And you all like to think that you get lots and lots of innocent individuals and you get because back out there and you've done something good for the day. But I can also imagine that there is a unique type of torture for a DA that looks across. And you feel confident, but can't be certain, at least in some cases.
And I just wonder psychologically how you go through that process. because I could imagine as a prosecutor you could say, this is my job and I have to believe it and I'm going to believe it and I'm gonna trust the process, but help me into your head space because I don't know how I would handle that on either side.
As [00:19:00] defense or da. Yeah. And that's that's one of the challenges of the job. And I've done some defense work. I did defense work for almost two years. And that is a burden when you go talk to your client in the jail. And within 15 minutes of talking to your client, you're pretty certain that he's guilty and you've probably pivoted from can we get you out of this completely with a not guilty to what's the best outcome for you?
Because it looks like you're guilty of this crime. And you know, I talk to the defense lawyers a lot and they're fond of saying that even though even when they know their clients are guilty, everybody deserves zealous representation. And that's kind of where you hang your hat. If you're that defense lawyer our constitution still provides all of us the protection of zealous representation.
If we're charged with a crime we have the right to represent ourselves, which is usually a bad idea. So hopefully you'll have an attorney. You're not doing it yourself and you're a defense lawyer. You're entitled to a zealous representation, a [00:20:00] competent representation. And so those defense lawyers use those fundamental requirements I think really to help get them through that kind of tough mental aspect of defending the guilty.
And you're just gonna do the best you can to get the best outcome for your client that you can, whether it's a lesser included offense, maybe a jury finds him not guilty because somebody doesn't like the state's case. You've got possibilities out there, things you can try to work with to mitigate the damage to your client and yeah, try to keep him outta prison.
Right. Okay. From my perspective as a prosecutor, and I've been doing this almost 30 years you know, the quality of your cases varies, but I have never in my career, and I've prosecuted thousands of cases never lost any sleep thinking that I went to court on any of those days and prosecuted and convicted an innocent person.
Okay. Okay. And I've never been challenged on any case, any conviction I've ever had on any [00:21:00] basis of actual innocence and had it be successful. Wow. So that's, I know that does happen. I read the papers. I watch the news. I know that occasionally you do see DNA evidence that can exonerate typically in cases that are older, where you had some eyewitness testimony that led to the conviction, but DNA that they had but didn't know how to use.
Now, today, sometimes we can. There are some exonerations, but in, in the big scheme of things, and in the big scheme of the number of cases that are handled in America every year, which is in the millions, and in my district alone, it's thousands of cases every year. In the big scheme of things though, that percentage of wrongful convictions is minuscule.
And that gives me a lot of comfort knowing that I've never worried that I've convicted an innocent person. Now, do some of my cases have, do I have better proof than others? [00:22:00] Yes. You know, some cases you have it on video, it's a slam dunk case. DUIs these days probably the car. The weaving of the car is gonna be on the dash cam video.
So right off the bat you're gonna see that. And then when the suspect gets out, the body cam and dash cam videos, you're gonna see him stumbling around. And then the blood alcohol is gonna be a 0.17. You can take those cases to trial and that defendant may do that. I'm gonna know he's guilty. Yeah, his lawyer's gonna know he's guilty.
So then it becomes an exercise in convincing a jury and the judge that we can meet our burden of proof and we're gonna go through these fundamental evidentiary steps and we're going to, we're gonna do this thing, we're gonna have this trial. because the client won't sit and he's entitled to it. But I'm gonna do it without much concern other than make, trying to get this thing across the finish line with the jury.
I've now gotta convince these 12 jurors to come along with me. That's my challenge. I don't have any doubt in my mind that he did it and I may or may not succeed. And if the [00:23:00] defense lawyer's got something to work with and he's skillful enough. You know, I might get something less. I might get a reckless driving outta that DUI.
So, you know, at the end of the day, that's just our jobs and that's kind of how you work through it. And it can be a challenge. But I would consider my challenge is to be more procedural and posture wise, but in my head I'm like, I've got the evidence, I've got the case. I'm moving forward.
I just gotta see if I can make it work in this trial. I was gonna say, what does, if anything, keep you up at night? Because you've seen some stuff Yeah. In thousands and thousands of cases and you cover a lot of territory. Is there anything that when you lay your head on the pillow at night makes you churn a little bit?
It's probably some of the stuff. I mean, I just, I'm eager to hear your answer. I just, I can't even imagine some of the things that you have had to witness and. Pictures and evidence and things that you've had to study. I mean, it's one thing to like see a highlight, but you've had to study it. Yeah, sure. I can imagine [00:24:00] that could be a tremendous burden to have to carry.
You know, I did some work on the Paula Dennis Reed cases in Middle Tennessee, and the evidence in those cases was horrific. What's the 32nd summary for those that don't know the case? Well, he was abducting and abusing and murdering young girls from fast food restaurants. I think a Baskin Robbins.
He abducted two girls from there. And he said those crime scene photos, I mean, they were basically decapitated, it's horrific. It's stuff you can't unsee. Yeah, right. But it's part of the job. And so when you're trying to tell the Tennessee Supreme Court that Paul Dennis reach is stay on death row, because these murders were in fact heinous, atrocious and cruel, and involve torture beyond that necessary to produce death.
You've seen the evidence, you know, it's true. The court's gonna have the evidence. The jury at trial saw this evidence and it is damaging and you should look at it and consider it. So you learn to [00:25:00] process these things. I do go to crime scenes. Not a lot. because I don't wanna make myself a witness in the case, but I have gone to a few with TBI.
And so yeah, you'll see dead bodies. We've done, I've done some roundups and been in some homes with drugs and guns and a lot of poverty and people who live a lot differently than others. But none of that really keeps me up at night, you know, did have a case in Mcna County DCS was involved, took a child out of a home placed him into another home, I think with a grandparent.
Became aware that the grandparent was doing bad things, but they didn't do anything. And then we got photos of the child with black eyes. And then the child died in the care of his grandmother after being taken out of his parents' home. because they were both on drugs and in jail. Wow. So that was a DCS failure to protect that child.
And we prosecuted them [00:26:00] and their job was to protect him. And they failed. And it's that thing that you can't see coming that you don't expect to happen out there. I do anticipate that bad people, criminals, gangsters, are gonna shoot each other over drugs and kill each other. But I did not expect to see photos of a young boy in DCS custody who's, when it's their job to protect him and they put him in a worse spot, ignore evidence, and then he dies.
So it's that kind of thing you can't see coming that bothers you. Yeah. And then some of the animal abuse cases man, people can victimize people and we just don't get all that much attention from the public on our cases of child rape, murder robbery, and these cases are going on in court all the time.
But if you harm a dog or a cat. You'll get all the attention you want online and in the local media if they pick up on it. [00:27:00] Wow. And probably internationally it's just an unusual thing in this line of work. But I had a case where two women were driving U-Haul from California to Virginia, claiming they were on a rescue mission, and they got pulled over in Fayette County, Tennessee, and my county on the interstate and had 128 dogs and one cat in the back of this U-Haul.
Horrible conditions. A couple of animals were dead feces everywhere. It was overwhelming. So they were arrested, charged with animal cruelty. Sure. We had to put these animals up. I went out to the shelter to try to volunteer and help, and it was awful. And I mean, we got blown up with calls from across the country internationally.
They wanted these women under the jail Wow. For animal cruelty. And I've seen that play out in different animal cruelty cases over time. So that's kind of one of the unusual things you see is how people react so viscerally to, to some types of [00:28:00] cases versus others. So some of the animal cruelty stuff, it, it bothers me too.
And then of course, any crime against the elderly or children. I wonder if people are starting to get, sadly, desensitized to certain types of crimes across the nations, but other things that are less common. Might shock the system differently because they're not desensitized yet. Yeah. Well, you know, if you live around here, I say in West Tennessee where I am and you turn on the nightly news in Memphis, it's murder after murder.
And I do think you get desensitized to some extent when you see the same thing over and over. Yeah. So as a parent, I believe you have three daughters, is that correct. I do. Yes. Goodness. Those poor boys. Trying to date your daughters when you've seen everything. I can imagine you greeting them with some very intense words before prom.
Yeah, I'd love to do that. Yeah. Yeah. I bet that joke writes itself right there. That definitely does. Yeah. But I wonder how has it informed your parenting? Like you can't [00:29:00] unsee and unthink when your kid goes out the door to a party or an event. Sure. Some of these things. How do you. Compartmentalize that.
Yeah. You know, you just try to do your best like any parent would to just try to raise them to make good choices. And I do come home and tell some war stories from work. They hear some of that, which I think is good. I take them to court with me. I took my middle daughter to court quite a bit and she's working down in Oxford at the US Attorney's Office.
They got speeding tickets and I made because go to court and do the pancake breakfast or whatever the judge makes you do on probation. So I want them to know that, you know, you, there are consequences out there, there is accountability and to be worried about the other guy. You can be a great person and you can be a great driver and you can have great friends, but y'all can still run across the wrong guy.
And that's what you gotta be careful about. Whether it's the wrong driver or the wrong part of town. So be smart about your surroundings. I do worry about them going to Memphis, [00:30:00] you know, when they were teenagers, they were wanting to go down to Bill Street. That caused me and my wife some angst. But at the same time, you know, you gotta let because live some.
So I would just tell because, be aware of your surroundings. All the time. But that's about the best you can do. You can't lock because up at home. Mark, I wanna address another maybe stereotype that you see on the televisions and people might carry around about the defense attorney versus the da, the prosecuting side.
And the stereotype is that the das are totally overstretched, overworked, caseload beyond belief, underfunded and generally a less quality attorney. Than the defense side. The defense side is generally well-funded, slick suits, unlimited budget, like a whole different world. So can you help [00:31:00] provide some truth and fiction to that?
Because I even hear a little bit in your story from the early days that, you know, I can make a colorable case for the amount of roles that you played of having to be the, you know, the secretary and having to be you know, the court runner and the lawyer and all these. So can you help us understand the dynamic of the law and the legal system and that balance?
So, there, there is some truth to what you're saying about that kind of perspective that the the DA is gonna come into court carrying 85 case files. Yeah. And slam them down on the table. And it's gonna have a suitcase. It looks like it's been worn out over 10 years. Yeah. Yeah.
And he is got every case in the courtroom. Okay. So you've seen this caricature too, that, that is Well, that's a fact. Yeah. And I've been down in Shelby County, we handle cases in Memphis when they have conflicts. And I've been down there and they do literally come into court with stacks of files.
Sometimes we're rolling because in baskets. They've got a [00:32:00] lot of work on their plate, so do our people. Resources are always an issue for us. Like I said, I've got 14 attorneys stretched over five counties and they handle thousands of cases a year. I only have victim witness coordinators for three of my five counties.
So in three of my counties I have one person doing the role of secretary, administrative assistant and victim witness coordinator. Now we have separate victim witness coordinator positions. I should have five of those, but I don't. And that's just a state funding. Issue, and we're always working on that, trying to get more resources.
On the other side of the courtroom the public defenders are well funded. They do carry about a third of the caseload that we do. We have all the cases. They only have the cases they get appointed on. And they're defending cases along with the private defense lawyers who, as you point out quite often will show up with nice suits and ties and they're [00:33:00] driving nice cars and they get paid pretty well.
And they charge their clients pretty handsomely for their services. So if you're sitting out in the the gallery looking at this, you may think, well, this doesn't look like a fair fight. The public defender's over there talking to his five clients, these rich defense lawyers are talking to their one client each.
And this poor prosecutor's trying to deal with all these witnesses and victims. And but. You know, kind of the counterbalance to that is we are prosecuting people who almost certainly are guilty of the crime and they're defending people who almost certainly are guilty of the crime. And that tends to end or balance out.
We've got the evidence, we've got the investigation, we probably have the confession, we probably have the video, and you're getting Mr. Defense lawyers getting paid a lot of money to try to weasel his guilty client out of a bad situation. Right. And in, in West Tennessee I'll sometimes joke we've got some well-known criminal defense lawyers.
So if a client [00:34:00] comes in and they've hired Leslie Ballin I'll usually say, well, we know that he's guilty because he's hired Leslie Ballen, so he is gonna spend whatever it takes to get him outta this mess. Right. Oh, I love this, mark. That's great. And, you know, there's a few others. Steve Re is another one.
I'll Jo and I'll say this to Steve's face when I see him in court. Are you representing so and so? Well? I know he's guilty now. And he'll laugh and kinda laughing with me. So, and then I'll also say to people that ask about the public defender. And I'll tell young groups of young people this sometimes in court you'll hear defendants complain.
I don't judge. I don't want the public defender. I want a real lawyer. They don't like this idea that they're getting an appointed public defender. They want one of those other lawyers in the nice suit and tie appoint me that guy. And the judge is probably gonna be like, no, you're getting the public defender.
They don't have a conflict and that's what they're here for. And I'm pretty fond of saying that if you get the public defender, you've got one of the [00:35:00] best defense lawyers in the district. We work with them all the time. Daily. We know because. I know the elected public defender, he used to work in our office.
They're on the other side of us in court every week. They know the judges just like we do. They know all the clerks and the court personnel. They probably know the jurors. And so you're dealing with a lawyer and that's all they do is criminal law. These other lawyers are probably out there chasing cars too, and ambulances and whatnot.
But your public defender, that's all he does is defend criminals. Can you tell me more about knowing the jurors get what, where does that come at, come from if you you know, we get to know if you're in a community long enough, let's say Lauderdale County, which is about 26,000 people, it's a rural community.
I worked in that community for years and my, the public defender across. The aisle for me also did, and over time we got to know from living in the communities, when we brought our jury pools in, we [00:36:00] would know members of the pool. Wow. And we would know, you start to learn who you do and don't want. You learn family names, and that includes criminal families.
So there are some families there. Some of this is generational crime. It actually is generational through families. It'll go from father to son to grandson. And the same is true of jurors and good business families, good working families. So you will, and the pools are not so large, you will develop some relationships and some communications with these folks and that's really invaluable.
But if you're a defendant and you've hired some lawyer from Memphis to come in, he may be a hot shot with a nice car and a nice suit. But he doesn't know any of these folks. Right. Yeah. Public defender does. What a new piece of strategy. To think through. Like I would've never thought about it that way, but especially in maybe even the more rural districts where there's a little bit less population per county where they're being tried.
So interesting. Next time we do something, [00:37:00] we should really keep that in mind for our Yeah, it's for our strategy. The psychology of it is just fascinating. Yeah. Because that's what I really appreciate about the law and trial settings too. Is that there definitely is a part where the law is what the law is, but gosh, is there not a meaningful part of perception and presentation and emotion to it.
Sure. It's incredible. Yeah. And so this is our Tennessee Criminal Justice Handbook. And we, you're talking about the law. This is the law that we would take to court with us. No sticky notes. Do you have it memorized now? This is a new one, yeah. Okay. Yeah, for those just listening, we've got a whole, very fine print book that has been opened in front of us here.
Very fine print. Thousands of statutes in here, and this changes every year. So the legislature will change, modify, [00:38:00] amend, delete. A lot of the laws that are in this book this year will be different next year. So, when somebody walks into the courtroom and asks me to tell them the law on such and such statute or charge I'm gonna say, let's go look at the book.
Because as much as I would like to think that I know the law and all the laws and all the sentencing factors and all the evidentiary rules, what I really know is that they change all the time, and I probably don't. And so you better go look because up to make sure you're right because this is a big book.
And this is our sentencing matrix. So this is something we would look at in court to determine where you fall on the scale of what potential sentence you ought to be getting from the judge. Wow. A lot of this depends on your prior criminal record. This juvenile blended sentencing, this is a flow chart for how to handle juveniles in juvenile court.
Are these publicly available documents or are these that they can be in our district attorney's conference maintains [00:39:00] quite a few of these type documents. Interesting. And that's a group. Our conference is our statewide group of das. Since 1961 the legislature passed a law creating the District Attorney General's conference.
And so we meet monthly in Nashville sometimes in different parts of the state. All 33 das to try to be, statewide in our public safety efforts and be consistent. And and so, you know, we'll talk about laws that are on the books. What do we need to change? What are good laws? What are some bad laws that we're having trouble with?
What are laws that are not working, like to protect our elderly? There our children, what can we change in this book to make it better? Things like that. So, the law is a law, but the law will change every year. And so, we'll start a new legislative session this January of 26. And we'll, we will be very active with the legislature here in Nashville trying to fight bad bills and kill bad bills and fight for good public safety laws.
And that's a pretty heavy lift for [00:40:00] us for those several months. I really wanna ask, you are elected into your position, as are the other 32 das across the state. Tennessee is relatively homogenous in its politics, but not totally. Right. How much do you find. That getting in the way of you guys working together as political differences or, I mean, we think of the law being the third branch of government that is meant to be, even though it's elected pretty apolitical and about doing the right thing at the right time.
How do you balance that tension working with your associates across the state? Yeah, we are pretty, pretty homogenous across Tennessee. You know, the state as a whole is pretty red. Pretty conservative. You do have the big blue.in Davidson, the big blue.in Memphis. Within my own district of my five counties I have four reds and one blue.
Hardiman County would be considered a blue do in my otherwise red district. But the das as a whole, work [00:41:00] very well together. So we have meetings every month in Nashville with Glen Funk and with Steve Mulroy. They're the das in Memphis and Nashville. We get along fine with them. We don't always agree.
You know, and a lot of that is that their constituency base is different than mine. My constituents, I think, have different values than some of theirs, and I know that they react to their constituents just like I do mine. So you will hear different opinions. Different thoughts.
How we should treat juveniles, how we should treat bail should we have cashless bail or should we not? Yeah. And these are healthy discussions and debates, and they happen also in the legislature. You know, the legislature is mostly Republican, but we still do have some Democrats out there. And we still do see some bipartisan work in the legislature.
So Tennessee, in my opinion, is much more functional than the federal government, at least from what I see on the news. Thank goodness for that. Yes. And we balance our [00:42:00] budget. We make good use of our money. We make good use of our resources. I think we do a pretty good job at public safety in Tennessee, but we do have more work to do.
And then you've got challenges in places like Memphis. Crime is an issue there, and I'm next door to that city. My constituents want to eat, drink, and play in Memphis, and they're worried about their kids going to Memphis, about, you know, people shooting on the interstate. Just a general sense of lawlessness.
So yes, there are, you do see different politics play out in different ways, in different locations, but Tennessee as a whole, I think we're in pretty good place. Mark, I want to hit for a second on the budget item that you brought up before of saying that the Tennessee legislatures the one that controls the budget, and that's kind of, it sounds like a constant battle.
On one hand, I think citizens of Tennessee would look at it [00:43:00] and say, there's a lot of priorities of things to fund, but oh my gosh, if we don't even have like basic victim witness, what was the title? Victim. Victim witness coordinator. Victim witness coordinator, like some basic funding. Those seem like severe needs that an average citizen might say, yeah, that seems like a really high priority to fund. Can you help contextualize this in some type of dollar figure related to your district? Like if the legislature came to you and said, Hey, we really want to help level the playing field. We want to help. You fill the roles that you have is there a number where you said, you know, if my budget was moved by a million dollars a year, or is it $7 million a year, or is it $200,000 a year?
Do you have some way to contextualize the gap that you get to see it all? And what would move the needle, at least in your district? You know, I've never thought [00:44:00] about it that way in terms of just numbers. Yeah. And I'm gonna guess here. That's fine. But I would guess that 250,000 to $300,000 in additional personnel in the way of salaries and benefits, probably I would say if I had that we're covered up.
Wow. And that would be two additional victim witness coordinators. So that my secretaries can actually do their job and just do that job and not try to also be telling victims and witnesses when to go to court, where to be in court, what to say in court, what not to say in court. You know, victim witness coordinators are really pretty critical.
because they're the people that if you find yourself as a victim in the court system, they're the ones that are gonna hold your hand and tell you, okay, here's your next court date. Here's what's gonna happen. That yes, the defendant will be there. There's a no contact order, so you shouldn't hear from him.
Here's the order. What else do you need? That's an important person. If you don't have that person, otherwise you're calling our office and talking to our secretary [00:45:00] who's got a lot of other things to do, and she's gonna try to also play that role with you if she can. So yeah. And that, so in the big, and I don't know the big budget numbers in Tennessee.
But like anything else, when you're dealing with the legislature and funding. It's about priorities. Yeah. And so everybody does wanna talk about schools and education, healthcare. I get it. The economy. Good neighborhoods, everybody wants good neighborhoods. Good schools, good jobs. They don't wanna pay a lot of taxes and they wanna be safe Public safety's always in the top five of these generally high priority issues.
But what I kind of say beyond that is that you cannot have a good economy, good schools, good places to eat if you don't have public safety. I mean, public government's primary role ought to be public safety because everything flows from that. And you know, you can look around the world and see [00:46:00] places where there is no public safety.
There is not. Tourism. You know, they're not, these are not strong, thriving, flourishing places to be where you've got bad public safety. So people avoid those places. So we're always in the legislature trying to make the argument that public safety needs to be the priority and we're not the biggest slice of the funding pie in the legislature by far.
Is that accurate? Would you say that extrapolates across all 33 districts? Yes. Are they having similar feelings as you of just trying to make sure that they're staffed to be able to do the work that is on their desk? It's constant issue for us. We're asking every year for additional resources.
because we need because. I mean, if I don't need because, I'm not gonna ask. And if I have more than I need, I would gladly give it to another DA in the state to help him or her out. But you know, there's just a finite pool of state dollars. So every year it's the same kind of back and forth on who's, how do [00:47:00] you prioritize and how do you spend those dollars?
Incarcerating people is expensive. Prisons are expensive. Yeah. But I would say to the people of Tennessee, a prison is a worthwhile expense. We do not have a mass incarceration problem in Tennessee. If we have anything, it's a mass probation problem. If you're in prison in Tennessee, you've either committed a crime, a violent crime of a murder, a robbery, or a rape.
That requires you to serve a lengthy prison sentence due to the nature of the crime, or you have committed so many prior criminal acts, felonies that there's nothing left for us to do with you other than incapacitate you by incarceration. Wow. So when you look at this
matrix, the sentencing matrix and you look at, I mean, this talks about how, what kind of offender you are. Yeah. Mitigated standard. Standard will be your first time in multiple, you've been in two or three times. [00:48:00] You've got several felonies on your record. Persistent. You're gonna be four to five career offenders are six or more felonies on their records.
These are people that are actually ended up in prison. It's not first time drug dealers. It's not the guy with the joint that we caught. Those people are either in the local jail or they're on probation. So if you're at TDOC. You've worked really hard to get there either by committing a really heinous crime or by committing a whole lot of crimes.
So that's a worthwhile funding source. I know people don't like to spend money on corrections. It's not sexy, but it's necessary for public safety. That's really interesting. And that's, I learned so much in that answer. because you know, Tennessee as a state has about a $60 billion budget.
And you're right, every single area is gonna be always asking for additional funds, additional resources. Sure. But it really helps put in perspective that, you know, a 250 to $300,000 number for your [00:49:00] district, and that doesn't include all the other districts, but it just helps make it feel less impossible.
When you see the denominator as a $60 billion budget. And it's important because that Carli and I had another guest on the show that talked about the huge backlog of labs across Tennessee testing. For DNA, that I forget the number. It was either tens of thousands of kits, or it may have been hundreds of thousands of kits, but it was a big number.
It was horrible. Yeah. Of like. We have these people dead to rights based upon the DNA testing that is sitting inside of a lab that doesn't have enough funding and resources to be able to process it in order to give you what you need in order to be able to put the bad people behind jail. And again, the resources necessary to be able to process what was backlogged in that laboratory was not.
Impossibly huge, you know, right. Say this is [00:50:00] gonna be $3 billion, we're gonna spend 5% of our annual budget. So I just really appreciate the answer and I hope people learn a lot from hearing it. And, you know, the legislature is intentional about asking those questions. And be like, okay, I know everybody wants more money, but really what does it look like?
Because there's probably an intermediate between fully covered for you at 300,000 and saying, well. If I didn't get the 300, there's still some things that I could do with one 50. Oh yeah, sure. Yeah. And he's not gonna turn it down. Did you see him get, he's like, oh yeah, I definitely could. Absolutely. Yeah.
I've got a grant funded victim witness person. I mean, I'm willing to scrape. Yeah. So I've got a federal grant funded person who's paid through the county. And that, that's a lot of work to deal with a grant funded position versus a regular state funded position. because it's a lot of paperwork, right?
Yeah. It's can be a headache, but it's worth it. because she does good work helping our victims. And I have her there because we're short on victim witness people. No one asks to be a victim. Correct. Nobody wakes up in a [00:51:00] given day and says, I wanna get hit by a drunk driver, or, I wanna lose my daughter to abduction.
Nobody wakes up thinking today's the day I'm a victim, and I become a statistic or I end up on the news. And so it is really moving to hear that the shortage is around the. Very people that support the victims. There's a lot going on around the actual court and all the sexy part that everyone talks about and you learn about in law school, but the people that need to be served, the Tennesseans that did not ask to be put in that position are the ones that could really use the resources.
And I think that is a really, you've said that loud and clear, and I will take that from this. Yeah. Well, and thank you. I'm glad to hear that. And that's part of the work we do is to try to shift some of the focus. It always seems to be on the defendant. Yeah. And the defendant's rights. Well, the defendant's got the right to this and that, and the other, well, victims have rights too.
Yeah. And victims need to have their rights enforced and they need to be supported as best we can. And so we're always gonna keep fighting that [00:52:00] fight. Mark, we end each podcast with three short phrases where I read to you a prompt with a blank at the end. And if you'll just fill that in with a word or a short phrase that you think completes the thought.
But if you'll just repeat the prompt back to me when you go through it. Okay. Okay. All right. Here you go. Number one, the biggest misconception people have about my job is blank. Biggest misconception about my job that people have is that I'm just locking people up. Yeah. Number two, the biggest joy in my work is blank.
The biggest joy in my work is making a victim happy, as happy as they can be.
And number three, when a community works together. Around the justice system, [00:53:00] it builds blank confidence. When a community builds around a justice system, it builds confidence in the system. Yeah. And I'm, I, having been in the system I think that's a common kind of source of debate out there and how fair is the system?
It's, it works. It's not perfect. No system is perfect, but ours is, I would argue with anybody, it's the best in the world and it works. And we always are looking to try to iron out the imperfections, but it works pretty well. Mark, it's been a real treat to have you on the program today. I got to ask so many questions that you just don't get to ask, but a lot of people wonder.
And. Heaven forbid, you have to ask those questions when you're going through the process and having to experience it. But I just really appreciate how open and transparent that you really do have the heart of an educator. And [00:54:00] I appreciate that because the justice system can be massively intimidating.
And especially if you're going through it. Yeah. I mean, not only is it intimidating, but it's horrifying and devastating and all the things that it is if you're having to go through that process either as a victim or as one accused. And so I just appreciate the way that you've approached the education in the materials here.
If we can link to it in some of the show notes, we will because they really are informative that this is not just something that you're winging. There's a lot of intentionality that goes behind it and. There's also a lot of opportunity for you to be doing a lot of other things. That probably pay more and don't have you having to wheel in all these different things, but you care and it's obvious.
And so I just appreciate what you're doing for your counties and also the state of Tennessee. But thanks for what you did for our listeners too, and just helping make the justice system a little more accessible for us to learn. Well, thank you. It's my pleasure. Appreciate y'all [00:55:00] having me on and always glad to talk about what we do and educate as much as I can and would love to come back.
Thank you. Thank you, mark. Yeah, thank y'all.
Mark Davidson, district Attorney General for the 25th Judicial District of Tennessee. I loved this episode. Getting to hear Mark, a real life district attorney, a guy that comes with. The television version of a lot of stereotypes of das that some of because are, you know, ruthless and cold and others are kind of bumbling idiots that are overworked and stressed out.
To actually get to have him here in the studio and ask him about those perceptions and speak truth into some things, and also set the record straight on some things, it was so educational. It's really [00:56:00] what I want this to be all about was. Remarkably captured in this episode. I agree with you. I was really encouraged to hear about how much collaboration is happening across the state and how all 33 das get together monthly.
He said in the Capitol I really appreciate that because there's some really bright minds, but I imagine crime is crime, and there's gonna be some pockets where there's different types of crime. But criminals are criminals in a lot of ways, in crime is crime. And I'm grateful that they're working together to find synergy and to see how they can make our code, our laws better based on what is happening in our state.
I definitely appreciated Mark's awareness, much like a CEO of a business. That he understands his districts, his constituents, his resources, the bottlenecks. He understands the system. Its [00:57:00] advantages and limitations. And that's really what you want, whether you are a victim or whether you're accused of something.
Like you want to make sure that the system is operating as designed because the system should offer rights to the victims and offer rights to the defendant. And that's what our whole country is built upon. And I really got from Mark that he cares about that. And he spoke honestly about the burden that defenders carry.
He's been a defender and he talked about making sure that he tries not to carry a burden as a prosecutor. And I just really enjoyed getting to get inside of his head some and learn about. How he goes to work each day and the challenges and [00:58:00] opportunities and drawbacks and all this stuff. I really appreciate how much he cares about his team.
You could hear that in so many of his answers. He knows. You could see he was picturing their faces every time he said, my secretary or my advocate, or however that was like he knew his numbers and he knew his team and knew where he wanted to support them, and I really thought it was powerful when he said if he could have more resources, it would be to add support to his team members.
It wasn't for other flashy new equipment, this, that, or the other. It was to provide support so that more people could be helped and less could be on each of his team members plate. And so I found that really. Encouraging man. Is he scrappy? I mean, I saw some entrepreneurial spirit in him and how he ran his office and how he's writing grants and he's filling out paperwork and doing all the things.
I, I really appreciated the scrappiness. Me too. Yeah.
