Marcus Floyd
Marcus Floyd, a public defender who has done stints as a mayoral adviser, prosecutor and probation officer, is running for a seat on the bench. He announced Monday that he will be a candidate for the General Sessions Division VII seat currently occupied by Judge William E. Higgins.
In an interview with the Scene, Floyd — who turns 38 on Monday — says he’s running to become a “decision-maker” in Nashville’s criminal justice system. He says although he was able to help some people and contribute to policies he’s proud of while working under District Attorney Glenn Funk, Mayor David Briley and Public Defender Martesha Johnson, he hasn’t been able to “push the system to where it should be.”
“At each stop my goal has been to help folks, in particular help folks who come from the communities that I come from,” Floyd says.
Floyd grew up in rural Mississippi, “in houses without running water.”
“My first memory is of a house that we lived in without a bathroom floor,” he says. “You’d walk into the room and there was a big hole there.”
His mother moved the family to Nashville, hoping for more opportunity, he says. He lived in Edgehill and went to Hillsboro High School, and Floyd says that even as a teenager, he was a “big Black dude.” He saw how that seemed to affect his interactions with police.
“So, being pulled over for expired tags, I was asked to step out of the car, then placed in handcuffs for officer safety,” he says.
At first, his experiences made him want to be a police officer “because I don’t want other folks in our neighborhood to be treated that way.”
He later changed his mind and became a probation officer. He decided to go to law school after a court hearing during which an attorney, an older white woman, couldn’t remember the name of her young Black defendant.
“I don’t know what was going on in her life at the time, I’m sure something,” he says. “But she couldn’t remember his name. … The person who was supposed to be an advocate, to provide a voice for this young Black man, couldn’t do him the honor and service of remembering his name.”
As a General Sessions judge, Floyd says one of his immediate areas of focus would be on setting bail based on a person’s ability to pay, as opposed to current practices — which in practice primarily keep poor people behind bars before trial.
He says the system needs leaders whose life experiences allow them to better relate to the people who come through the courtroom, be they criminal defendants or victims. Floyd notes that both groups of people often come from the kind of neighborhoods he grew up in.
“I think that it’s important that if we want to move Nashville forward and our criminal legal system forward toward more fairness — and I know ‘equity’ keeps getting tossed around, but I’m gonna toss it around some more — toward equity, like true fairness, then we have to start changing the decision-makers,” he says. “We can’t keep electing the same people over and over again. These General Sessions judges can’t continue to run unopposed. So, sign me up.”
Higgins — the incumbent judge and former Metro councilmember Floyd will look to defeat in next year’s Democratic primary — has been on the bench since 1980 and has been reelected without opposition five times.
