FILE – Jill Collen Jefferson, president of JULIAN, civil rights and international human rights law firm, speaks in Lexington, Miss., during a civil rights tour, June 1, 2023. The civil rights attorney was arrested Saturday, June 10, while filming a traffic stop conducted by officers from a police department she is suing in federal court. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, file)
A week after finding a prominent civil rights attorney guilty on multiple criminal charges with what was described as a “canned verdict” that was “emblematic” of how Black residents are mistreated by local government, a Mississippi judge reversed his own ruling in a short order riddled with errors.
Jill Collen Jefferson is an attorney, the President of the Civil Rights group JULIAN, a Harvard Law School professor, and a former staffer for both Barack Obama and the late Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga. For years, Jefferson has fought for racial justice in Holmes County, Mississippi — one of the nation’s poorest counties.
In 2022, JULIAN sued the Lexington Police Department on behalf of a group of local residents over the department’s alleged misconduct that included racial profiling, harassment, threats, brutality, and corruption. The department and the town’s government are currently under investigation by the Department of Justice for much the same misconduct.
In June 2023 — just days after the DOJ hosted a session for residents to speak freely about their experiences with police — Jefferson filmed a traffic stop by the same police department, and was promptly arrested Saturday, charged with multiple crimes, and held for several days in a local jail.
Jefferson ultimately stood trial for four misdemeanor charges stemming from the June arrest: unlawful use of a mobile phone while driving; obstruction of a public roadway; failure to comply; and resisting arrest. Her attorneys presented evidence that included Jefferson’s testimony as well as her video recordings. Holmes County Justice Court Judge Marcus Fisher presided over the bench trial, acting both as judge and as fact-finder.
Although the charge of unlawful mobile phone use was dropped at the conclusion of the trial, Jefferson was found guilty of the other three charges and fines were assessed against her as a penalty. In an email to Law&Crime Wednesday, Jefferson’s attorney, Michael Carr, said that the conviction, which Fisher read aloud in open court after the trial, “appeared to be a pre-prepared script.” Carr also noted that Jefferson’s testimony and evidence presented at trial directly contradicted the narrative presented by the Lexington Police Department.
Carr went on to say that as Jefferson’s legal team prepared her appeal, anomalies arose immediately. To file an appeal, the judgment of conviction must be submitted to the Circuit Court. However, Carr said that the justice court clerk advised him that although an entire week had passed since Jefferson was pronounced guilty, Fisher had not turned in his orders of conviction to file with the court.
On the same day that Carr asked for the conviction order, he received a different order signed by Fisher: one that rescinded the oral pronouncement of conviction and found Jefferson not guilty on all charges.
The unanticipated reversal was shocking.
“In 18 years of defense practice, I have never seen this happen – a judge reversing himself within days after an oral pronouncement of guilt at court and assessing fees and fines at that moment,” said Carr.
Fisher’s brief order, which contains multiple errors but no explanatory information as to the reasons underlying the unusual decision, can be seen below.
Court document rescinding Jefferson’s guilty verdict. (Image via X).
The document, “Order Resending Previous Decision” — as opposed to “rescinding” — declared that “it is the Court responsibility to carefully examine all the evidence,” and that “after a thorough review” of the case, the Court “hereby resends all Guilty verdicts previously entered on January 31.” It continues on that the “court further resends the guilty verdicts for the charges of Blocking a Public Roadway to Film a Traffic Stop and Failure to Comply.”
The 10 line order was rife with punctuation errors throughout. Jefferson initially described her trial as “really heartbreaking,” and said Fisher ignored the evidence she presented. She said she expected the “canned verdict” even before her trial began, because she observed other proceedings and noticed that Fisher already had verdict sheets printed on his desk before her trial started. When it came time for Fisher to read the verdict aloud, Jefferson said she “could tell he didn’t write [the verdict sheet] because he couldn’t pronounce some of the words in the verdict.”
Jefferson also said that during her trial and while in the courtroom, she discovered that some charges were added after the fact by the arresting officers. Furthermore, her team was not presented with key evidence that included body camera footage of the arrest until the night before Jefferson’s trial began.
Moreover, Jefferson reported that Officer Scott Walters, the main officer involved in her arrest, bragged about the arrest and even taunted Jefferson with a Facebook friend request after she was found guilty.
Jefferson posted about Walters on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, Tuesday:
Today, I formally requested that Mississippi’s Attorney General @LynnFitchAG charge Lexington police officer Scott Walters with perjury and fabricating evidence for the lies he told under oath during my trial. Let’s stop police from lying on innocent people.
Jefferson called her experience “emblematic of what we’re organizing against,” and warned that had there not been public outcry, her verdict would never have been reversed.
“It’s a personal victory for me, but in terms of this community, they’re not going to do that for any of the innocent Black people that they’ve put canned verdicts against,” Jefferson told MPB News, “They’re not going to reexamine those cases and give them a second chance. They only did that because I’m an attorney and know my rights and we kicked up a stink about all of this.”
