'Ridiculous': Jackson City Court clerk rebukes indictment of office manager

An officer manager at the Jackson City Court Clerk's office has been indicted for allegedly misreporting information to the state, hindering officials' ability to suspend driver's licences.

Jackson City Court Clerk Daryl Hubbard called the indictment "ridiculous" and racially motivated.

The office manager, Shenile Ward, was indicted by a Madison County grand jury Wednesday for two counts of forgery and two counts of official misconduct.

The indictment follows a state comptroller investigation into Hubbard's office, which alleged case information was not being reported to a state database as required by law. 

Additionally, the investigators claim information was intentionally inserted into the wrong fields in a computer system, concealing failure to appear cases from the state and hindering officials from promptly suspending driver's licenses.

Investigators also alleged there were irregularities in the handling of a specific case involving an individual with two DUI cases, who was supposed to appear in Madison County Circuit Court.

Hubbard said in that specific case it was clerical error by his staff and not official misconduct or forgery. The city judge had ruled the individual indigent and staffers were trying to help the individual get his license back in order to get a job.

"Our staffers didn't even know he was supposed to be circuit court," he said, "and then for the staffers over there to file an audit complaint instead of just calling us is ridiculous."

The driver's licenses issue is part of a broader issue that city court staffers view as a systematic problem.

Court clerk's office staffers told investigators they believed people should not lose their license for failing to appear in court.

"The system should have compassion," Hubbard said. "People lose their license for racial and economic reasons. If you think everybody who gets a traffic citation should go to jail, then I'm wrong, but I don't think that.

"People get fined and then put in jail for these small driving offenses The jail is overcrowded and locking people up over basically nothing, and it just isn't right."

The revocation of driver's licenses for minor offenses has been the subject of an ongoing legal battle in Tennessee. In 2018, a federal judge issued an injunction that stopped Tennessee from revoking licenses for unpaid traffic fines amid a class-action lawsuit. But an appellate court reversed that injunction earlier this year.

Reach Adam Friedman by email at afriedman@jacksonsun.com, by phone at 731-431-8517 or follow him on Twitter @friedmanadam5.