Mississippi Today
Deputy who procured sexual favors from a jailed woman gets one day in prison
A former Noxubee County deputy will spend one day in prison after a federal judge said Tuesday that the jailed woman he had sex with behind bars for years โwasn’t really a victim.โ
District Judge Daniel P. Jordan III also gave Vance Phillips a $2,500 fine and eight months’ home detention that will enable him to continue his job with the ambulance service, go to church and see a doctor if he needs to.
The judge described the inmate โ who accused Phillips and others of sexual abuse in a lawsuit โ as a willing participant who exchanged sexual favors for contraband.
In both Mississippi and federal prisons, it is a crime for an officer to bring in contraband. It is also a felony to have sex with any inmate, even if that sex is consensual. Under state law, a convicted officer faces up to five years in prison; under federal law, that maximum is 15 years.
District Attorney Scott Colom, whose office handles criminal cases in Noxubee County, chose to pass his 2020 investigation on to federal prosecutors because of worries about getting a fair jury in such a small county.
It would take two years for a grand jury to indict Phillips and former Sheriff Terry Grassaree.
Instead of being charged with a sex crime, he faced federal bribery charges. In this case, the bribes were exchanging sexual favors and photographs for bringing contraband, including tobacco and cellphones, into the Noxubee County Jail.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Kimberly Purdie said the jailed woman spent four years behind bars, from 2015 to 2019, for a homicide she didn’t commit and did what she had to do in order to survive. No officer was charged with bringing contraband into the jail, but she was.
In her victim impact statement read to the court, Elizabeth Layne Reed said she felt she had to give people what they wanted to avoid further punishment.
She said she was โheavily impactedโ by what Phillips and his then-boss, Grassaree, did to her.
โI feel guilty for his family members who didn’t know what was going on, but I don’t feel guilty about Vance Phillips who knowingly did what he did,โ she wrote. โWomen and men are supposed to be protected while they are incarcerated.โ
She said the abuse has created โtrust issuesโ in her relationship with her husband.
She also said she prays that people who sexually abuse those behind bars are held accountable and that she hopes other victims โwill use their voice and come forwardโ to help โstop the abuse that happens every dayโ behind bars.
Public Defender Princess Abby said Phillips was an officer who dreamed of becoming a state trooper. โNow that dream is out the window,โ she said.
She argued for four months’ house detention, saying Phillips was an otherwise respected member of his community who played the drums for his church band and had no previous criminal history.
She said what happened was โoutside his normal behaviorโ and that he is now married with three sons.
But Jordan noted that what happened was far from a one-time indiscretion. Instead, he said, Phillips had sex with the inmate for years.
He called what the then-deputy did โa considerable breach of public trust.โ
But in sentencing Phillips, the judge also blamed the jailed woman and said, โIt would be different if she was raped.โ
In her 2020 lawsuit, Reed said that multiple deputies and Grassaree touched her sexually as well as demanded nude photographs from her contraband cellphone. Noxubee County settled that lawsuit for an undisclosed amount.
The judge noted that Phillips is currently working a 60-hour-week job and that he didn’t want to disturb that.
He said a stack of character letters said โglowingโ things about Phillips, but he noted that many barely knew about the crime. One writer called the former deputy a โfall guy,โ but Jordan said that wasn’t true because Phillips wasn’t the last deputy to have sex with the jailed woman.
Grassaree faces sentencing on Wednesday. He has already pleaded guilty to lying to an FBI agent on July 13, 2020, about making Reed take and share nude photos and videos in exchange for favorable treatment, which included making her a trusted inmate, also known as a trusty.
Jordan said the federal sentencing guidelines put Phillips’ prison time at between 8 and 14 months. The judge said the guidelines on Grassaree’s sentence are even less.
As Phillips walked out of the courtroom wearing a jeweled silver cross necklace, he told reporters, โI just want to thank God I’m not going to jail.โ
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
A Mississippi town moves a Confederate monument that became a shrouded eyesore
GRENADA (AP) โ A Mississippi town has taken down a Confederate monument that stood on the courthouse square since 1910 โ a figure that was tightly wrapped in tarps the past four years, symbolizing the community’s enduring division over how to commemorate the past.
Grenada’s first Black mayor in two decades seems determined to follow through on the city’s plans to relocate the monument to other public land. A concrete slab has already been poured behind a fire station about 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) from the square.
But a new fight might be developing. A Republican lawmaker from another part of Mississippi wrote to Grenada officials saying she believes the city is violating a state law that restricts the relocation of war memorials or monuments.
The Grenada City Council voted to move the monument in 2020, weeks after police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis. The vote seemed timely: Mississippi legislators had just retired the last state flag in the U.S. that prominently featured the Confederate battle emblem.
The tarps went up soon after the vote, shrouding the Confederate soldier and the pedestal he stood on. But even as people complained about the eyesore, the move was delayed by tight budgets, state bureaucracy or political foot-dragging. Explanations vary, depending on who’s asked.
A new mayor and city council took office in May, prepared to take action. On Sept. 11, with little advance notice, police blocked traffic and a work crew disassembled and removed the 20-foot (6.1-meter) stone structure.
“I’m glad to see it move to a different location,” said Robin Whitfield, an artist with a studio just off Grenada’s historic square. “This represents that something has changed.”
Still, Whitfield, who is white, said she wishes Grenada leaders had invited the community to engage in dialogue about the symbol, to bridge the gap between those who think moving it is erasing history and those who see it as a daily reminder of white supremacy. She was among the few people watching as a crane lifted parts of the monument onto a flatbed truck.
“No one ever talked about it, other than yelling on Facebook,” Whitfield said.
Mayor Charles Latham said the monument has been “quite a divisive figure” in the town of 12,300, where about 57% of residents are Black and 40% are white.
“I understand people had family and stuff to fight and die in that war, and they should be proud of their family,” Latham said. “But you’ve got to understand that there were those who were oppressed by this, by the Confederate flag on there. There’s been a lot of hate and violence perpetrated against people of color, under the color of that flag.”
The city received permission from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to move the Confederate monument, as required. But Rep. Stacey Hobgood-Wilkes of Picayune said the fire station site is inappropriate.
“We are prepared to pursue such avenues that may be necessary to ensure that the statue is relocated to a more suitable and appropriate location,” she wrote, suggesting a Confederate cemetery closer to the courthouse square as an alternative. She said the Ladies Cemetery Association is willing to deed a parcel to the city to make it happen.
The Confederate monument in Grenada is one of hundreds in the South, most of which were dedicated during the early 20th century when groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy sought to shape the historical narrative by valorizing the Lost Cause mythology of the Civil War.
The monuments, many of them outside courthouses, came under fresh scrutiny after an avowed white supremacist who had posed with Confederate flags in photos posted online killed nine Black people inside the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
Grenada’s monument includes images of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and a Confederate battle flag. It was engraved with praise for “the noble men who marched neath the flag of the Stars and Bars” and “the noble women of the South,” who “gave their loved ones to our country to conquer or to die for truth and right.”
A half-century after it was dedicated, the monument’s symbolism figured in a voting rights march. When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders held a mass rally in downtown Grenada in June 1966, Robert Green of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference scrambled up the pedestal and planted a U.S. flag above the image of Davis.
The cemetery is a spot Latham himself had previously advocated as a new site for the monument, but he said it’s too late to change now, after the city already budgeted $60,000 for the move.
“So, who’s going to pay the city back for the $30,000 we’ve already expended to relocate this?” he said. “You should’ve showed up a year and a half ago, two years ago, before the city gets to this point.”
A few other Confederate monuments in Mississippi have been relocated. In July 2020, a Confederate soldier statue was moved from a prominent spot at the University of Mississippi to a Civil War cemetery in a secluded part of the Oxford campus. In May 2021, a Confederate monument featuring three soldiers was moved from outside the Lowndes County Courthouse in Columbus to another cemetery with Confederate soldiers.
Lori Chavis, a Grenada City Council member, said that since the monument was covered by tarps, “it’s caused nothing but more divide in our city.”
She said she supports relocating the monument but worries about a lawsuit. She acknowledged that people probably didn’t know until recently exactly where it would reappear.
“It’s tucked back in the woods, and it’s not visible from even pulling behind the fire station,” Chavis said. “And I think that’s what got some of the citizens upset.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Crooked Letter Sports Podcast
Podcast: New Orleans sports columnist and author Jeff Duncan joins the podcast to talk about his new Steve Gleason book and the new-look New Orleans Saints.
Jeff Duncan went from the Mississippi Book Festival in Jackson on Saturday to Jerry World in Dallas on Sunday where he watched and wrote about the Saints’ total dismantling of the Dallas Cowboys. We talk about both events and also about what happened in high school and college football last weekend and what’s coming up this weekend.
Stream all episodes here.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1899
Sept. 18, 1899
Scott Joplin, known as โthe King of Ragtime,โ copyrighted the โMaple Leaf Rag,โ which became the first song to sell more than 1 million copies of sheet music. The popularity launched a sensation surrounding ragtime, which has been called America’s โfirst classical music.โย
Born near Texarkana, Texas, Joplin grew up in a musical family. He worked on the railroad with other family members until he was able to earn money as a musician, traveling across the South. He wound up playing at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, where he met fellow musician Otis Saunders, who encouraged him to write down the songs he had been making up to entertain audiences. In all, Joplin wrote dozens of ragtime songs.
After some success, he moved to New York City, hoping he could make a living while stretching the boundaries of music. He wrote a ragtime ballet and two operas, but success in these new forms eluded him. He was buried in a pauper’s grave in New York City in 1917.
More than six decades later, his music was rediscovered, initially by Joshua Rifkin, who recorded Joplin’s songs on a record, and then Gunther Schuller of the New England Conservatory, who performed four of the ragtime songs in concert: โMy faculty, many of whom had never even heard of Joplin, were saying things like, โMy gosh, he writes melodies like Schubert!’โ
Joplin’s music won over even more admirers through the 1973 movie, โThe Sting,โ which won an Oscar for the music. His song, โThe Entertainer,โ reached No. 3 on Billboard and was ranked No. 10 among โSongs of the Centuryโ list by the Recording Industry Association of America. His opera โTreemonishaโ was produced to wide acclaim, and he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his special contribution to American music.ย
โThe ragtime craze, the faddish thing, will obviously die down, but Joplin will have his position secure in American music history,โ Rifkin said. โHe is a treasurable composer.โ
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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