Knoxville Municipal Judge John Rosson, Jr. faced three opponents on August 29 in the Primary Election. On November 7, he will face one of the three in the General Election, Tyler Caviness, 31 years of age has in his campaign made veiled remarks about fixing city court. Finally, tonight in response to a question, Rosson’s opponent said here it is over one Google review that has been posted online. Many business owners know that one anonymous online review is hard to address. Nevermind that one online review could be one person upset over a speeding ticket, a traffic citation anything that didn’t go thier way in court that day. It could be someone that wanted a political opponent to use it against Judge Rosson. Who Knows!
This evening, Rosson’s opponent tried to tie Judge to Republican partisan politics for having accepted a $1,000 contribution from the Knox County Republican Party. In fact, Judge is at every political function, Democrat and Republican. As a non partisan elected Judge, he must serve ALL the citizens. Caviness in every stump speech, refers to his wife as a Prosecutor in Republican District Attorney General Charme Allen’s office. Caviness himself refers to his time in the Knox County Public Defender’s Office (November 2018 to June 2021) during that time he worked for Republican Public Defender, Mark Stephens and Republican Public Defender Eric Lutton. He boast of being part of Stephens, DiRado & Caviness since April 2022. The Stephens is former Republican Public Defender Mark Stephens. I have been told (rumor) that Caviness was a member of the Federalist Society in law school.
Caviness limited voting record for the past 13 years (31 years of age minus the voting age of 18) has a vote of one Republican primary Super Tuesday March 2020 (he could have voted for Donald J. Trump, Jr. or Bill Weld) and one Democrat primary, State Primary August 2020 (he could have voted for Marquita Bradshaw for US Senate and may again on August 1, 2024).
Caviness has the TN Democrat State Executive Committeeman District 5 as his campaign manager. I am told that Knox County Democrat Chairman Matt Shears had texted someone that was exploring a run for Municipal Judge that because Caviness had hired Jack Vaughan………...
I am always asked to submit a question by the League of Women Voters organizers, I rarely do it because the role of blogger/podcaster is to report what happens at the forum. Tonight, I submitted one that was rejected by the question screening committee. One of the committee screeners was Bill Lyons and is who I handed the question to.
As Caviness was launching his campaign (in Spring 2023) the daily paper several months after Judge Rosson obtained a citation for a traffic stop, reported it. Clearly a political motivations by a biased daily newspaper in many people’s opinion. Because I suspected the League would NOT accept my question, I snapped a photo of it. The question as you can read said, “We know of Judge Rosson’s traffic stop in 2023. For Tyler – what traffic stops have you encountered?”
