Live from Music Row Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed official guest host Aaron Gulbransen in-studio to further dive into the repercussions of Nashville DA Glenn Funk’s refusal to adhere to state law after Roe v. Wade was overturned.
Leahy: We are joined in-studio by the official guest host of The Tennessee Star Report and the lead political reporter at The Tennessee Star, Mr. Aaron Gulbransen.
Aaron, you had a very interesting story at The Tennessee Star about Nashville District Attorney Glenn Funk. Your headline says he vows to violate state law and defend abortion. Tell us about this story, Aaron.
Gulbransen: So he said several months ago that if Roe v. Wade was overturned that he would not honor the state trigger law, which is with the Human Life Protection Act.
Leahy: That law was passed in 2019, signed into law by Governor Bill Lee. Tell us what that law does.
Gulbransen: What it does is creates the performing – I want to be clear about this because there are so many misnomers going on about this law and then a lot of other states – it criminalizes the so-called doctor performing the abortion with a Class C felony.
And there are a number of cases that there are exceptions, like, you know, if you’ve had an ectopic – it’s such a weird word – pregnancy, it’s not like that, for example, even though there are misnomers about that going around, that that’s a problem. And of course, it also says if the life of the mother [is at stake], there’s an exception.
Leahy: But let’s go back to the trigger law element of this. So, number one, this law goes into effect, and when it was signed in 2019, it said that 30 days after either the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade or there’s a constitutional amendment banning abortions, then this law will go into effect.
The law itself is now scheduled to go in effect about, now, it’s what, 28 days from now? Thirty days or 27 days from now. Attorney General Slatery is trying to accelerate that in a lawsuit that he’s filed with the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals here in Federal District Court.
Ultimately, within 30 days, regardless of what happens with that, this trigger law will go into effect. And as I understand it, it outlaws abortions after a heartbeat can be detected, which is usually about six weeks. Is that right?
Gulbransen: Yes.
Leahy: So continue then with what now is a state law, and Glenn Funk is a state officer, if you will, as a district attorney for Metro Nashville Davidson County. He said he’s going to violate the law by not prosecuting those who break that law.
Gulbransen: Right. That’s 100 percent what he said. So the prosecutor is vowing very publicly to not do his job. He’s, in large part that’s essentially a token statement, considering the fact that there is a law that if a prosecutor refuses to do their job, then an additional prosecutor, or an independent prosecutor, can be appointed.
Leahy: Can be appointed, usually is appointed. In this particular case, Aaron, what would happen is … he’s already declared this.
Gulbransen: Yes.
Leahy: And he has no intention of endorsing the law, and it’s kind of a very bizarre description of it. He says, my job is to enforce the constitution of the state of Tennessee, but use my discretion, which means enforcing the constitution except when I don’t want to.
Gulbransen: Right.
Leahy: Which is not a very consistent position to take.
Gulbransen: And to be clear, too, the state law that allows for … when they don’t want to do their job, an independent one, an independent prosecutor being appointed, it’s in exact situations like this where Glenn Funk has vowed to not prosecute cases based on nothing to do with the facts of the individual cases.
Prosecutors do have the discretion in a situation where, you know, somebody accidentally brings a gun into the wrong place and it’s in their pocket and they forget or something like that, yes, you can have your case dismissed.
Although in this day and age, it probably gets prosecuted even more. But things like that, the prosecutor has discretion, and they exercise them. But this is him issuing a blanket statement.
Of course, this is far more egregious because this affects the murder of unborn children, in my opinion. But if he said that people running red lights in the city of Nashville, I’m not going to prosecute.
Leahy: Or as they do in San Francisco, if somebody steals from a retail store less than $1,000 worth of goods, we’re not going to prosecute them.
Gulbransen: Yes.
Leahy: And that ended in the recall of that district attorney. Now, Glenn Funk is never going to be recalled by the voters. But there is a provision that says right now, if you look at this the way you get a special prosecutor to handle this, the attorney general asks the Supreme Court to appoint a special prosecutor.
Now, there’s another twist, another layer to this, Aaron, and that’s the following: We have an attorney general, Herb Slatery, he’s already said that he is leaving that post on August 31st. He’ll be gone.
And right now, we don’t know whether the next attorney general, we don’t know their position. How will they appoint a special prosecutor in this instance in Davidson County? We don’t know that, because we don’t know who the candidates are yet, and we don’t know what kind of public hearings will be held on that.
Elaborate on that a little bit. You’ve been trying to get the [Tennessee] Supreme Court justices to tell us what their timeline is for announcing the finalists for the attorney general.
And by the way, Tennessee is the only state in the union where our attorney general is appointed to a term for eight years by the members of the Supreme Court.
In 44 states, the attorney general is directly elected by the people in five states, nominated by the governor, and confirmed by the state legislature. What is the Supreme Court telling you about when they will announce the finalists for this position?
Gulbransen: The communication I’ve had for the last, I don’t know, six weeks, has been the process would have been announced imminently, and “imminently” has lasted over six weeks.
But if it looks anything like it did last time, there was a public application process that lasted for, I don’t know, 10 days or so. People submitted job applications.
Listen to the interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
