Looking for murder indictments again

By By Suzanne Monk / managing editor
July 28, 2003
As the last grand jury met in March, four apparent murders and a manslaughter had just occurred all in a four-week period beginning in late February.
Four victims in Meridian, brothers James Tingle and John Crump, George Russell, and Lefrance Chandler. Three arrests, one of them a teenager.
In Lauderdale, two teenagers had been charged in the shooting death of William Gill.
I was halfway expecting to see grand jury indictments in some of these cases, but it was too soon. It takes some time after an arrest for law enforcement officers to complete their investigations, talk to witnesses and get their reports to the district attorney's office. And, it takes a little time for the DA's staff to review the cases for presentation to a grand jury.
None of these arrests ended in indictments in March.
But, today, a new term of circuit court begins in Lauderdale County and a new grand jury will be impaneled. It seems safe to say that enough time has elapsed for some, or all, of these cases to be presented.
Expect murder indictments.
Quick takes
Third appeal: In a 6-3 vote, the Mississippi Supreme Court has agreed to hear John Barrett's appeal. Barrett and his sister, Mary Ann Adams, were convicted in February 2001 of the murder of Mary Ann Woolf. Both received life sentences and appealed their convictions.
The Mississippi Court of Appeals affirmed the convictions in December 2002. Both appealed for a re-hearing before the Mississippi Supreme Court, which denied their petitions in March 2003.
Brother and sister asked again for a re-hearing. This time, the high court refused to re-hear Mary Ann Adams' case but granted John Barrett's petition.
At this point, it is unclear what swayed the justices or caused the split vote.
Waynesboro update: If you're a regular reader of this column, you'll remember the story of four people in Waynesboro who said they had been hired by attorneys to drum up clients for lawsuits against drug companies.
By the way, there are rules of behavior for lawyers and any who solicited clients in that fashion would likely be disbarred.
Anyway, the four people claimed they did the work, but that the lawyers stiffed them on the fee. So, they filed a breach-of-contract lawsuit of their own in Wayne County Chancery Court.
The plaintiffs were represented by Kevin Muhammad of Fayette, and there were a lot of problems with the lawsuit including an extensive passage that impugned the character of someone who had nothing to do with the alleged business relationship.
Chancery Judge Frank McKenzie demanded that Muhammad remove the offensive language or he would throw it out of court. Instead of complying, Muhammad dropped the lawsuit … only to re-file it in Forrest County.
And, in a truly weird development, Muhammad has filed a new lawsuit on behalf of the same four plaintiffs in Jefferson County Circuit Court alleging, among other things, that McKenzie is part of a conspiracy against them.
J. Keith Shelton: One of the lawyers named in both the Wayne County lawsuit and the new Jefferson County lawsuit is J. Keith Shelton. He prevailed in Wayne County, winning sanctions against both Muhammad and his clients.
In an unrelated matter, the Mississippi Supreme Court, at the request of the Mississippi Bar Association, has now suspended Shelton from practicing law.
This disciplinary action goes back to a 1997 indictment against him for allegedly attempting to bribe a Hinds County judge but was precipitated by Shelton's tendering of a guilty plea in December.