Brent Taylor runs for redrawn Tennessee District 9 with preemption record

Pearson calls for schools and jobs as Taylor stresses prosecution and incarceration

A report produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with MLK50: Justice Through Journalism documents how Republican state Sen. Brent Taylor, 58, used nearly four years in the Tennessee Senate to limit local officials’ authority. With the backing of a Republican supermajority, Taylor pushed through half a dozen laws that superseded the power and priorities of local politicians, including officials elected by many of the same voters he now seeks to represent in Washington, D.C.

Less than two weeks after Tennessee lawmakers carved Memphis into three congressional districts this spring, Taylor made his electoral expectations clear in a Facebook photo with fellow Republican U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett. Taylor wrote: “My friend Tim Burchett showing me the dadgum ropes.” On May 7, the same day the new districts were approved, Taylor announced his bid to represent the redrawn Congressional District 9.

District 9 had covered mostly the Memphis area and for more than four decades had stood as the state’s sole majority-Black district. It now stretches across half the state and is majority white. ProPublica described the legislature’s move as “designed to eliminate Democratic representation.”

An April U.S. Supreme Court ruling made it harder to challenge gerrymandering that dilutes the Black vote. ProPublica reported that Taylor was favored to win because of redistricting by Tennessee Republicans after the ruling.

Taylor is a white Mississippi native who lives in an antebellum-style mansion in a tiny, heavily white community east of Memphis. He has loaned his congressional campaign $1.5 million and made millions after selling his funeral home businesses to a private equity firm.

His opponent, state Rep. Justin J. Pearson, is a 31-year-old Black Democrat who has called for addressing the root causes of crime by improving schools and economic opportunities instead of focusing primarily on incarceration. Pearson first gained national attention for his role in stopping the construction of an oil pipeline in a Black Memphis neighborhood. He is also one of two Democratic legislators expelled by the Republican supermajority after leading a protest calling for gun control following a 2023 school shooting.

Pearson has deep family roots in southwest Memphis and has positioned himself as the better fit for the historically Democratic Ninth Congressional District. He has received support from national Democrats and has raised more in campaign donations than Taylor.

ProPublica reported that state legislatures across the country, including those controlled by both parties, have used preemption laws to control local governments. It characterized the tactic as one “embraced by Republican-dominated statehouses in recent years as a way to restrict the ability of Democratic-led cities to enact policies state leaders disagree with,” including protections for civil rights, public health and workers.

Memphis has long struggled with high rates of violent crime, though those rates have begun to fall only in the last couple of years. Taylor focused his legislative efforts on the city. He led the effort to prohibit judges from considering a defendant’s ability to pay when making bail decisions, sought to remove Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy and pushed through legislation authorizing state review of every decision made by the prosecutor’s office. He also co-sponsored a law that voided the Memphis City Council’s ban on police stops for minor traffic infractions, a ban enacted after the 2023 beating death of Black motorist Tyré Nichols.

ProPublica described a divide between Mulroy’s focus on rehabilitation as part of his effort to lower violent crime and Taylor’s emphasis on aggressive prosecution and incarceration. Memphis makes up most of Shelby County. Some elected officials and criminal justice experts warned that the laws Taylor championed will embolden police to detain drivers without justification and cause the criminal justice system to lock up more people for longer periods in the already overcrowded county jail, where more than 65 people have died since 2018.

Former Shelby County General Sessions Court Judge Bill Anderson, who said Taylor’s policies could especially harm Black men, warned: “I think he’s very dangerous for Shelby County, and he’s going to be very dangerous for the Ninth District if he gets elected.” Anderson retired in May 2025 after clashing publicly with Taylor over bail reform. Anderson supported the reforms, while Taylor opposed them.

The traffic-stop measure followed the January 2023 beating death of Black motorist Tyré Nichols, the month Taylor took office. A street surveillance camera and police body-camera video showed undercover Memphis officers pulling over the 29-year-old unarmed man a few blocks from his mother’s home. For three minutes, officers repeatedly punched Nichols in the face, hit him with a baton and kicked him as he screamed for his mom. Nichols died from his injuries in the hospital three days later.

After pressure from Nichols’ family and community organizers, the Memphis City Council unanimously passed an ordinance in April 2023 barring police from stopping motorists for minor traffic violations, such as a broken tail light, as a pretext for investigating an unrelated, more serious crime. Research cited by ProPublica showed that such stops are disproportionately used to detain Black drivers, undermine the public’s trust in police and create unnecessary police encounters that can turn deadly.

Taylor had been in the state Senate for a few months when the ordinance passed. He said it made the public less safe by limiting the potential for police to investigate more serious crimes. The next year, Taylor and state Rep. John Gillespie, a Shelby County Republican, sponsored legislation prohibiting local governments from curbing law enforcement’s ability to conduct traffic stops, effectively undoing the Memphis ordinance.

Nichols’ mother, RowVaughn Wells, pleaded with lawmakers to drop the bill. Speaking on the Senate floor, Taylor said that as a funeral home director, he empathized with the Nichols’ family, but: “we can’t let that empathy, Mr. Speaker, cloud our judgment in protecting 7 million Tennesseans.”

Martavius Jones, who chaired the Memphis City Council when the ordinance passed, said Taylor’s intervention suggested “that Memphis voters don’t know what their best interests are.” He added: “What we were trying to do would not jeopardize the safety of anyone — not even in Memphis, but much less the rest of the population of Tennessee.”

Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee told reporters before signing the law that no one should limit police enforcement methods and that officers should be held accountable for their actions. He said: “I think what’s most important for us to remember is that we can give law enforcement tools, but we’ve got to hold law enforcement to a standard of using those tools appropriately, where there’s an appropriate interaction with the public.”

Eight months after Tennessee lawmakers passed Taylor’s preemption bill, the U.S. Department of Justice released an investigation of the Memphis Police Department. It found that aggressive traffic enforcement had harmed Memphians and recommended that the city limit pretextual stops. The Biden administration’s report said such activity enabled the “regular use of excessive force with impunity” and unlawfully discriminated against Black residents. When President Donald Trump took office in 2025, his Justice Department retracted those findings.

Over the last year, law enforcement increased its use of pretextual stops, particularly for immigration enforcement, as Trump’s Memphis Safe Task Force arrived in the city. The task force included more than two dozen state and federal law-enforcement agencies, including the National Guard. Taylor supported the effort and testified before the U.S. Senate days before it began that it would “succeed in doing the hard work to infiltrate gangs and arrest more routine criminals.”

Mulroy was elected in 2022 as Shelby County’s first Democratic district attorney in more than two decades, following a year with a record number of homicides. ProPublica reported that Republicans’ tough-on-crime approach had grown unpopular with voters, and Mulroy vowed to be an alternative. He promised to deprioritize the prosecution of low-level offenses such as marijuana possession and shoplifting, emphasize rehabilitation through drug treatment, mental-health counseling and job training, and establish a unit to examine the validity of convictions.

Community organizer William Arnold, who spent nearly seven years in state prison before his conviction was dismissed following examination by a Davidson County conviction review unit, campaigned for Mulroy. Arnold said he saw Mulroy’s candidacy as a way to “support someone who could help Memphians in a different way.” Arnold said seeing Mulroy’s power muted by Taylor was disheartening. He said the state legislature’s long treatment of the predominantly Black city was not surprising, a pattern that includes replacing the Memphis Shelby County Schools’ elected board with a state-appointed board.

Among the legislation Taylor sponsored, a 2023 effort stood out: dismantling a bipartisan effort to ensure Shelby County’s bail practices did not discriminate against poor people, who are disproportionately Black. State law directs magistrates to “impose the least onerous conditions” and set bail “as low as the court determines is necessary” to assure defendants return to court.

In practice, hundreds of people were detained in the Shelby County Jail because they could not afford bail, according to Just City, a Memphis criminal-justice reform organization. Just City and the American Civil Liberties Union threatened to sue the county in 2021 for violating existing state law. The organizations argued that detention while awaiting trial can cause defendants to lose jobs and child custody.

In August 2022, the organizations and county officials, including Mulroy’s predecessor, Republican District Attorney Amy Weirich, agreed on a new bail order that included an “ability to pay” calculator. By the following January, Taylor had co-sponsored a bill to eliminate it, characterizing the tool in a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting as a way of “essentially asking defendants how much money they happen to have in their pocket so that they can make bail.”

The bill’s supporters said judges should prioritize public safety when deciding whether to release defendants. Republican state Rep. William Lamberth said on the House floor: “There is blood running in the streets of Memphis today because they’re letting people out.”

State law requires judges to consider several factors when setting bail, including a defendant’s financial condition. Josh Spickler, executive director of Just City, said the calculator helped judges do that. Under Taylor’s law, however, “the defendant’s ability to pay shall not be considered.”

A 2025 University of Memphis study found that the median bail amount increased after Taylor’s law took effect. Anderson said the impact fell hardest on Black residents because they are more likely to be low-income and make up a disproportionate share of the jail’s population. “That tied our hands as judges,” Anderson said.

“To those of us in the system, it’s obvious what he’s doing,” said Anderson, who resigned in 2025 with six years left of his eight-year term. “He called them reform acts, but they’re not reform.”

Since his first year in the state Senate, Taylor had worked to displace the decision-making authority of locally elected district attorneys, especially Mulroy, one of Tennessee’s two Democratic county prosecutors. Taylor called Mulroy a “far-left zealot” who “has the potential to make the scourge of violent crime even worse.”

In 2023, Taylor sponsored a law transferring the review of certain death-penalty cases from elected county prosecutors to the state attorney general, who is appointed by the state Supreme Court. Although the law applied statewide, it disproportionately affected Shelby County, where half of the state’s 40 death-row prisoners had been prosecuted. Mulroy said the change “effectively disenfranchises the voters” who chose their district attorney.

Following Trump’s 2025 deployment of his crime task force to Memphis, arrests soared and Taylor worked to place Mulroy’s decisions under “unprecedented scrutiny,” saying he wanted to ensure that the prosecution of task-force cases was as aggressive as the task force itself.

One co-sponsored law authorized the state attorney general to review every case coming through Mulroy’s office, including task-force arrests, “to ensure the proper administration of justice necessary to protect the safety of the community.” The law required reporting case dispositions and bail recommendations to legislative leaders.

Republican state Rep. Andrew Farmer introduced the bill in the House and said it was designed to ensure that “all crimes that deserve to be prosecuted are prosecuted.” He said Mulroy “is just going to have to work harder and ensure that people are continuing to stay safe” and added, “We want Memphis to continue on the path that it’s going — up.”

The state district attorneys general conference, led by Republican former District Attorney Stephen Crump, opposed an earlier version because it applied to prosecutors statewide and could lead them to second-guess their decisions. Crump dropped his objections after the bill was narrowed to apply only to Mulroy.

The law also allows the attorney general to ask the state Supreme Court to install a temporary district attorney if Mulroy declines to prosecute specific categories of crime. The temporary prosecutor would then decide whether to prosecute. Mulroy described the effect as creating “an unelected shadow DA operating in parallel to the duly elected DA.”

Separately from his lawsuit, Mulroy criticized the legislation’s treatment of prosecutorial discretion and independence. He said: “Prosecutorial discretion and prosecutorial independence is a key fundamental part of our criminal justice system. It’s clear under both the text of the Tennessee constitution and Tennessee Supreme Court case law, and this bill does great violence to those principles.”

Taylor co-sponsored a second law, passed in May, requiring Mulroy’s office to report to the state and the U.S. Department of Justice within 10 business days every time it entered a plea deal, dismissed charges or lowered charges in a felony offense resulting from a task-force arrest. Gillespie, who co-sponsored the bill in the House, said: “Memphis residents deserve confidence that the significant investments being made to combat violent crime are matched with accountability at every level of the justice system.”

Taylor argued the reporting requirements were necessary to give the federal government an opportunity to prosecute cases Mulroy had dismissed. In a post on X and a statement before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, he called Mulroy “the weak link” in the task force’s efforts. Taylor alleged that Mulroy refused to prosecute crimes, and ProPublica characterized the allegation as one he made “without evidence.” Mulroy rebutted that his office prosecuted more than 40,000 defendants each year.

Mulroy sued to block both laws, claiming they were unconstitutional because they unfairly singled out Shelby County and created an administrative burden. The lawsuit remains pending in state court. He also objected to his staff spending time on the reporting requirements, which he called “pointless busywork.”

Taylor declined to be interviewed for the ProPublica-MLK50 report and did not respond to detailed questions. He has said the laws he championed prioritize public safety. John Pfaff, a Fordham School of Law professor who has studied how state preemption laws affect prosecutors, said tough-on-crime laws like those Taylor helped pass have historically been “a form of social control against disliked minority groups” under the guise of public safety.

Pfaff said non-urban voters “do feel, however incorrectly, sort of victimized by expanding civil rights” chosen by urban voters. Because those voters cannot vote in city elections, he said, “If the suburbs and rural areas control the governor’s mansion and the state legislature, they then can use their power there through preemption laws that finally tell Memphis what they want Memphis to do.”

Pearson calls for addressing the root causes of crime through schools and economic opportunities, while ProPublica describes Taylor’s approach as emphasizing prosecution and incarceration. Mulroy’s challenge to the two prosecutor-oversight laws remains pending in state court.

Katherine Burgess of MLK50 contributed reporting. Mollie Simon of ProPublica contributed research.