You're listening to Bloomberg Law with June Grosso from Bloomberg Radio. The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges is the nation's oldest organization for judges. It's two thousand members come from every state and several foreign countries, and their goal is to ensure justice for families and children in
courts throughout the country. The organization has a new president, Judge Dan Michael of the Memphis and Shelby County Juvenile Court in Tennessee, who has more than twenty years of experience in juvenile law, and he joins me now, thanks for being here, Judge Michael, Will you start out by telling us about the goal of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. Well, the Council is essentially a training and support organization for judges. It's the oldest
judicial council in the United States. I believe we're celebrating our eighty three or eighty fourth birthday this year, so it's been around a long time. My introduction to the Council came years ago. Is over seventeen years ago, when the judge of the Juvenile Court at the time sent me to one of their conferences in Florida, and I got hooked and I've been a member ever since. The reason the Council is important to me, and I believe
the judges that belong vary from judge to judge. But we are an implementation site and we've been getting good support from the Council for a number of years as we executed use of what we call our Dependency and Neglect bench Book, the Enhanced Guidelines for Judges and Abuse in Neglect cases, and they send, of course they're not sending anybody here right now, but for years they would send a team down here about every other year and sit in court review the judges who hear the cases,
make sure they're following the guidelines properly, and give us assistance if we were slipping. In addition to that, they would hold what they call or Lead Judges Conference a year and all thirty or forty lead judges from across the country which show up out in Reno, where our headquarters is, and spend a day and a half to
two days learning from one another. Well, this is what we're doing at my court, or this is what we're doing at my court, And of course it opens up the ability to borrow ideas from judges all over the country. In addition, and this is what's critical to me, June, the relationships that I made seventeen years ago are still in place. I've got judges magistrate judges who are friends of mine all over the country, and when we have a national conference, I get to see them, I get
to break bread with them. We make new friends at the conferences, and those friendships last for a long time. And you may not realize, if you're not a judge that when you put on a robe you essentially separate yourself from society in a way that's rather unusual. Judges have very very stringent ethical guidelines they have to follow. We lose our First Amendment rights to some extent on what we can and cannot say, and a roabe can
be very very isolated. So being able to go to a conference, go to a lead judges conference, meet other judges, be in a room with other judges where you can discuss judicial issues openly is a very very strong inducement to being part of the organization. Because in in the regular world, I can't talk about cases I'm working on. I hesitate to talk about cases. I've even finished with.
But in the company of other judges you can talk about a lot of things you can't talk about in public because of the ethical guidelines, and it gives us that friendship support that we don't get in other places. I want to turn to the courts right now, and COVID nineteen has slowed down or closed courts across the country. With juvenile and family courts, you have issues that are emergency or time sensitive. How have the courts been handling
those cases during this crisis? Well, I can tell you that my experience in talking to members of the judiciary across the country the last four months is that it
varies literally from county to county. My friends in Washington, d c. And Austin, Texas and lots of the states were locked out of their courthouses because their courthouses belonged to the county and the county mayor or the county manager back in March made decisions to close courthouses, so judges were literally stuck without a court room in a lot of those counties. Now I can specifically talk about what we did. We never closed down. He jumped from,
oh gosh, how many doctors do we have? A week um about forty five docuts a week down to three and moved into zoom hearings within two weeks of late March. It was after March fift when we started doing zoom hearings, but we jumped on zoom pretty quickly, and we continued to hear all our emergency cases on zoom. So if a child gets taken into custody, we give them a hearing within twenty four hours of that decision. If a child is removed from parents, we give them an immediate
hearing within seventy two hours under state law. We'll continue this conversation coming up and find out what you did in your courthouse, Judge Michael, as well as what your goals are for the organization as president. I'm dream Brusso and this is job I've been talking to Judge Dan Michael, the new president of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court. So, Judge Michael, we were talking about the courts and handling COVID nineteen. Tell us more about what
you did in your court house. What we have done in our courthouse is we locked everything down. I issued a mask rule right off the bat. We started taking temperatures at the door. We isolated ingress and egress because in my building we have about four hundred people come through here a year, and that's just for juvenile court. So we've shut it down. Visitors have to come in one door, employees the other. We temperature check everyone and we started rotating our staff. I have about two d staff.
They come in and shifts of about four and a half hours and then leave and then the next shift comes in, so our halls aren't packed with people and knock wood jun We've not had a case of COVID among my staff. We sealed off the judiciary so nobody can't get back here but the judges and the management team. We are working all of our cases on Zoom and we have reopened all our docuts except one, and all
of my magictis come in every day. They go into their chambers and they stay there and they're in court almost all day, and if they're not in court, they're signing orders and issuing orders, and we stay away from one another. We wave at each other in the hall, but that's about it. We're trying really really hard to contain this thing, to keep litigants safe, judges safe, and court staff safe and lawyers safe and like I say, not goold. We've been successful so far and keeping everyone safe.
You are taking the helm of the organization In July. I know that you've been leading on a project to improve child abuse and neglect practices at juvenal and family courts. Tell me a little bit about that and what you hope to achieve their As a juvenile court judge, somebody
has been on the bench over twenty three years. In my early career of judging, I had numerous dockets of all types, from child support, two arguments between parents over whose parents the child, two delinquency cases when children commit acts that would be crimes if they were adults. But the most important docket I believe we have a juvenile court is the abuse inflect docket. And Tennessee we use the word dependency and neglect. The children who come in
before us on dependent neglect dockets. If we can't successfully break that behavior of where child is being severely abused or abused or neglected, the risk of that child growing into delinquent behavior and acting out from the trauma they suffer as young children is critical. We have had students come from the medical school, which is about two blocks from here do studies on their PhD work in their MD work that shows the connection between abuse and neglect
and delinquent See. So I know as a judge, and I can tell you anecdotally that when I saw children abused and neglected twenty years ago, and now is the judge who does only transfer here I see some of those children that were in front of me as abused and neglected children years ago, who are acting out from the trauma and the severe damage that was done to
them as young kids, and they get in trouble. So my goal is to employ the Child Abuse Enhanced Resource Guidelines that were developed by the National Council throughout all of those abuse and neglect bockets, and my judges have been trained. They all have the resource guidelines in their chambers when they go into a courtroom. Before the pandemic, they carried those resource guidelines in there with them. They
utilize what we call bench cards. Bench cards are a one page laminated sheet that essentially has bullet points on what you should look for, who should be in the courtroom, what kind of questions you should ask, that sort of thing to guide them to a better shot at getting the information they need. So they can make a good decision and break the cycle. And it's an ongoing thing. It's not something that you, Okay, we ordered a bunch of guidelines and now we're good to go. It's a
constant training. It's constantly changing your callioquey in the courtroom to make sure you're showing the compassion and respect for everyone in there. Because just because a parent is not parenting properly doesn't mean they're a bad person. They probably weren't trained to be a good parent by their parents, so they're suffering from trauma that they grew up in
and that flows through to their children. So what we try to do is very compassionately help that person find ways of properly parenting their children so that their children can grow up to be productive citizens without the amount of trauma that most of these kids see. I think that a judge's job, any judge's job, is really difficult. But it must be very difficult to face, you know, the the juveniles who are in crisis and families, to face that every day, day after day and deal with
these emotional problems. Yes, it's very difficult. We um for years. You know, judges are supposed to be um above the fray. We're supposed to be independent. We don't adhere to any political parties in Tennessee. Judges run independently. We're supposed to go in the courtroom, and we don't have juries in juvenile courts. So the judges, the judge and the jury in a juvenile court. And one of the things I learned early on from the judges that I worked under
was that compassion is critical, empathy is critical. That you don't judge the person, you judge the act. Okay, because as young adults, we've all made mistakes as children and young adults, and even as older those mistakes are part of life. Some are worse than others, some are minor, some are terrible, but the mistake does not define who
you are as a person. So we train our magistrate judges when they go into court that you're you're dealing with a human being who is suffering from trauma, and their response to that can be really bad on their children, and then the children suffer trauma. Now, the third piece of that puzzle that you ask about is that judges and clerks and lawyers who operate in that arena get
what I call vicarious trauma. If you sit in on a murder trial as a juror and the d A puts up crime scene photos, you're gonna be traumatized because there's a member of the public. You don't see real life of a murder seemed very often, and television doesn't really do it. Honor judges sit every day and hear the worst of human behavior, and it has a tremendous effect on us. That's why the National Council is so
important to be. If I have a tough day, I can pick up the phone and call my friend Tony, easy update and just say, Tony, how you doing. I've had a really rough day. Let me tell you about this case I had. So when I took office four and a half years ago, almost five years ago now, I started trauma training in the courthouse. I had the National Council come in. They did a trauma audit and they literally looked at absolutely everything in the building and
everybody in the building. They issued a report. We then shared a partnership with the University of Tennessee Health Sciencest Center, which is Tennessee Medical School. I reached out to their dean of the psychiatric department. He gave us people who knew how to deal with trauma and aces, and we trained literally everybody in the courthouse, lawyers, judges, probation staff,
even our psychologist upstairs took the training. Even our maintenance people took the training because they're in the hallways they run into children and families. I then appointed Dr Eleon and she is a PhD. And she is my trauma authority in this building, and her role is to keep the training going for new staff, the retraining of existing staff, and reaching out into the community to spread the word
that we know what the problem. If we could stop the trauma, if we could stop the aces, we could eventually whittle down the number of cases we see to a small number. And I truly believe that we've all known as judges for years who've done this, that the families that come in front of us are in serious trouble, but we didn't know how to label it. And it's the medical profession that came out and said, these are the problems that you're seeing in your courtroom, and they're
driven by high ASIS scores and severe trauma. So I've been attacking it at the base since I took office and looking at your resume. I was intrigued because, you know, when you go to law school, almost everybody who was in law school just came out of college or came out a few years ago. You went to law school when you were thirty seven? Why what happened? What led you? What led you at that aids to try to take on the law. Well, I guess I was an argumentative child.
My parents always used to say to me, you'd be a good lawyer, of good judge. I went into business with my dad right out of college. He owned service stations. Now I don't know how old you are, but that's a term that nobody ever uses anymore. We didn't sell
milk and bread. We saw gasoline, and we fixed cars, and we were franchise operators for and then Exxon, and the franchise agreements through the oil companies were chained from independent dealers owners like my father and I, to big finance guys who would buy, you know, two hundred and fifty stores across the Southeast and run. I'm with employees.
And I had grown up in a family business and realized that I either had to figure out a new business to go into because most corporations aren't going to hire a thirty seven or forty year old who's been running his own business. And I had already worked on my master's degree. I always loved education, and I took the els At on a lark and got into law school. One of the hardest things I've ever done, to be honest, with schools. I was married with kids, and Lord had mercy.
I walked into that first class and I'm sitting in there with nineteen year olds, twenty year olds who've been out partying all night, and I've been up all night reading law books. Thanks so much for joining us. Judge Michael, that's Judge Dan Michael, the President of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. And that's it for this edition of Bloomberg Law. I am June Grasso, and this is Bloomberg