What Tennessee’s incarcerated children taught me about seeking the truth while reporting

A year-and-a-half ago, I met a father who told me his 13-year-old son had been charged with murder. His son hadn’t killed anyone, he claimed. Tennessee law permitted prosecutors to try him anyway. 

I’d heard similar stories before. By that point, I’d been investigating conditions inside Memphis’s juvenile detention center for six months, a process that involved locating and interviewing over a dozen formerly incarcerated children. 

When I spoke with these children, I kept my questions focused — What was your first day in the center like? Did you go to school? Did you leave your cell? — and listened, silent. I knew that people unaccustomed to speaking about their lives, especially children, tend to leave gaps in their responses, places where they assume the facts of their experience are so obvious that they can remain unstated. I couldn’t let such gaps persist, I thought to myself. 

For example, to the kids I interviewed, it was almost self-evident that when they were locked up, they would be held in solitary confinement. “It’s jail,” one told me. “It’s not supposed to be a nice experience.” Clearly, this response left much unsaid. “Did it seem like the guards felt bad about locking you in a cell?” I asked. “Did you know that what happened to you was illegal?”

Still, there were other things the children told me, things I did not want to probe. One told me that he’d been incarcerated in the detention center for a crime his brother committed — he was shielding his sibling by “catching” his charge. Another told me that he was arrested by Memphis police because he was in the vicinity of a crime, not because he’d actually done anything wrong. A third told me that he had watched his cousin commit a crime, hadn’t intervened, and was then charged with that crime himself. Constantly, they told me they were innocent. 

I rarely asked any follow-up questions about this point. I let the implication — that the juvenile justice system regularly prosecutes children for crimes they did not commit — remain just that. I didn’t think these kids were lying; some freely told me about other crimes they had committed, many of which they had never been charged with. I was just uncertain. When I reported on the illegal use of solitary confinement, I had the law on my side. Here, I had a child’s word. 

Eventually, I heard this kind of story enough times that I felt it was time to directly confront the question. Was it really possible for someone to be convicted of a crime they had not committed? Quickly, I learned that the answer was yes. 

Tennessee, like many other states, has a “felony murder” rule: If you participate in a felony, and someone dies because of it, you can be charged with their murder. It doesn’t matter if you didn’t kill anyone. It doesn’t matter if your participation in the crime was fleeting. A related Tennessee statute, referred to as “criminal responsibility,” extends this logic even further. If you assist anyone else with a crime, you can be charged as though you committed the crime yourself. In this context, “assistance” can be broadly construed; for example, you can be charged with someone else’s crime if you knew it was happening, but didn’t call the police. 

These laws claim to lock up the abettors of terrible crimes. In reality, they punish those who associate with the wrong people. Children are particularly likely to be charged under these statutes. They have very little control over who their family members are, or who hangs out on their block; they also lack foresight and impulse control. 

I applied to the 2025 Data Fellowship because I wanted to figure out how many children had legally been convicted of murders they were innocent of. I thought the process would be simple — submit a records request, create a list of children convicted of felony murder, and then read case files until I understood whether each child had or had not killed anyone. 

Of course, it was all more complicated than that. Within the case files, I read stories about these children, as told by prosecutors. On the page, they appeared as ruthless killers, or uncaring bystanders. Their actions were inexplicable. Some cases were so horrifying that I wanted to cry. Briefly, I wondered why I was reporting on this at all. 

Still, I caught myself. This was a story largely based on legal documents. Journalists tend to assume such documents are infallible — we often report an adjudicated case as if it were fact. But just as I knew to listen for the gaps in what people said, I also began to look for gaps on the page. 

As I reported my project, I referred constantly to “Iphigenia in Forest Hills,” Janet Malcom’s 2010 article about a tabloid murder trial in New York. Malcolm’s essay is less about the trial itself than the storytelling that goes on during a trial; the attorney’s storytelling, and the subsequent storytelling of the journalists who report what the attorneys say. 

“A trial offers unique opportunities for journalistic heartlessness,” Malcolm wrote. “When the malignant, often libelous words of battling attorneys are lifted out of the heated context of the trial and set in cold type, a new, more exquisite torture is suffered by the object of their abuse —who now stands exposed to the world’s abuse.”

I decided to re-read the documents, noting what prosecutors said definitively, what they implied, and what they avoided discussing. I realized that the narratives they had spun were filled with omissions. As I wrote in my project: “The circumstances that led a 14-year-old to commit an aggravated robbery, a 15-year-old to sell drugs or a 16-year-old to turn to prostitution were almost never mentioned in a child’s trial.” 

When I began to interview people convicted of felony murder as children, I felt again how unreliable these documents were. The main subject of my project is a man named Shawn Hatcher, who at 17-years-old was charged with, and subsequently convicted of, a murder committed by his older brother. Shawn, who had been physically abused by his brother for years, was threatened into accompanying his brother to the scene of the crime. 

At trial, prosecutors avoided contending with Shawn’s brother’s abuse. When Shawn’s lawyer attempted to introduce medical records which showed that a few months before the murder, his brother had attacked him so severely that Shawn was left lying unconscious in a pool of his own blood, the prosecutor objected. These records were never shown at trial. 

If another journalist draws a lesson from my experience, I hope it will be this: We are often encouraged to take the word of those in power, as if what they report is always factually accurate — it’s not. We are encouraged to report what we can fact check, as though this is sufficient enough to present readers with the truth — it’s not. Indeed, journalists can easily arrange a series of factually accurate statements in a way that is deeply misleading. The truth, which is what I strive for in my own journalism, requires context; you get that context by listening for the gaps.