The Craighead County Quorum Court has approved funding to allow the county to move forward with destroying juvenile files. According to the Sun Newspaper, the Quorum Court moved over 11-thousand dollars to the circuit clerk’s office to allow for a part-time deputy to work full time, with the main job of sifting through many thousands of juvenile files and determining which ones should be destroyed. Not destroying juvenile files would be a violation of state law, and could open the county up for lawsuits. State law requires that juvenile court records be destroyed on the 21st birthday of that juvenile, unless those files meet four sets of criteria. Craighead County Circuit Clerk Candace Edwards says each file must be reviewed individually to see if those files meet the criteria. The person hired will spend at least the next year working on reviewing those files.
Johnathan Reaves is the News Director for KASU Public Radio. As part of an Air Force Family, he moved to Arkansas from Minot, North Dakota in 1986. He was first bitten by the radio bug after he graduated from Gosnell High School in 1992. While working on his undergraduate degree, he worked at KOSE, a small 1,000 watt AM commercial station in Osceola, Arkansas. Upon graduation from Arkansas State University in 1996 with a degree in Radio-Television Broadcast News, he decided that he wanted to stay in radio news. He moved to Stuttgart, Arkansas and worked for East Arkansas Broadcasters as news director and was there for 16 years.