Mississippi Today
These states are using fetal personhood to put women behind bars
This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system, AL.com, The Frontier, The Post and Courier and The Guardian. Sign up for The Marshall Project’s newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook.
When Quitney Armstead learned she was pregnant while locked up in a rural Alabama jail, she made a promise — to God and herself — to stay clean.
She had struggled with addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder for nearly a decade, since serving in the Iraq War. But when she found out she was pregnant with her third child, in October 2018, she resolved: “I want to be a mama to my kids again.”
Armstead says she did stay clean before delivering a baby girl in January 2019. Records show that hospital staff performed initial drug tests, and Armstead was negative.
Armstead didn’t know that Decatur Morgan Hospital also sent her newborn’s meconium — the baby’s first bowel movement — to the Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic for more advanced testing. Those test results showed traces of methamphetamine — drugs Armstead says she took before she knew she was pregnant. Because meconium remains in the fetus throughout pregnancy, it can show residue of substances from many months before that are no longer in the mother’s system.
Child welfare workers barred Armstead from seeing her daughter, Aziyah, while they investigated, and Armstead’s mother stepped in to care for the newborn.
The hospital shared the meconium test results with local police, who then combed through months of medical records for Armstead and her baby to build a criminal case. Prosecutors alleged that the drugs she had taken much earlier in the pregnancy could have put the fetus at risk. Nearly a year after she’d delivered a healthy baby, Armstead was arrested and charged with chemical endangerment of a child.
She is one of hundreds of women prosecuted on similar charges in Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma and South Carolina. Law enforcement and prosecutors in those states have expanded their use of child abuse and neglect laws in recent years to police the conduct of pregnant women under the concept of “fetal personhood,” a tenet promoted by many anti-abortion groups that a fetus should be treated legally the same as a child.
These laws have been used to prosecute women who lose their pregnancies. But prosecutors are also targeting people who give birth and used drugs during their pregnancy. This tactic represents a significant shift toward criminalizing mothers: In most states, if a pregnant woman is suspected of using drugs, the case could be referred to a child welfare agency, but not police or prosecutors.
Medical privacy laws have offered little protection. In many cases, health care providers granted law enforcement access to patients’ information, sometimes without a warrant. These women were prosecuted for child endangerment or neglect even when they delivered healthy babies, an investigation by The Marshall Project, AL.com, The Frontier, The Post & Courier and Mississippi Today found.
In these cases, whether a woman goes to prison often depends on where she lives, what hospital she goes to and how much money she has, our review of records found. Most women charged plead guilty and are separated from their children for months, years — or forever. The evidence and procedures are rarely challenged in court.
Prosecutors who pursue these criminal cases say they’re protecting babies from potential harm and trying to get the mothers help in some cases.
But medical experts warn that prosecuting pregnant people who seek health care could cause them to avoid going to a doctor or hospital altogether, which is dangerous for the mother and the developing fetus. Proper prenatal care and drug treatment should be the goal, they argue — not punishment.
Dr. Tony Scialli, an obstetrician/gynecologist who specializes in reproductive and developmental toxicology, said the prosecutions are an abuse of drug screenings and tests designed to assess the medical needs of the mother and infant. He said that drug use doesn’t necessarily harm a fetus. “Exposure does not equal toxicity,” Scialli said.
But prosecutors in these states aren’t required to prove harm to the fetus or newborn — simply exposure at some point during the pregnancy.
Legal experts say that under this expanded use of child welfare laws, prosecutors could also pursue criminal charges for a pregnant person who drinks wine or uses recreational marijuana — even where it’s legal. Police could also comb through medical records to investigate whether a life-saving abortion was medically necessary or to allege that a miscarriage was actually the result of a self-managed abortion.
Because of concerns about people being criminally punished for seeking reproductive healthcare after last year’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is working to strengthen privacy rules under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA.
Scialli said the prosecutions ignore the effects of separating a newborn from a mother, which research has shown harms the child. Several studies have shown that even when newborns exhibit signs of drug withdrawal at birth, keeping them in hospital rooms with their mothers improves their health outcomes.
Just because a person struggles with addiction doesn’t necessarily mean she is an unfit mother, Scialli said. “Even women who are using illicit drugs, they’re usually highly motivated to take care of their children. Unless the mother is being neglectful, separating the baby and mother is not healthy for either of them.”
Armstead grew up Quitney Butler in Town Creek, about two hours northwest of Birmingham. She watched as her town lost its Dairy Queen, grocery store, and eventually even the high school she graduated from in 2006.
She was deployed to Iraq in 2009, the same year her school closed. By then, she was 21 with one young daughter, Eva, with her boyfriend, Derry Armstead.
In Iraq, she drove trucks and made sure fellow soldiers got their mail. She was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, in a stretch of desert east of Baghdad that was often the target of attacks.
Armstead came back from war in 2010 “a completely different person,” said her mother, Teresa Tippett. She was argumentative and temperamental.
Her family members “all said I changed when I went over there,” Armstead recalled. “I was like, ‘Mama, we were getting bombed all day, every day.’”
Armstead came home looking for an escape. She found drugs and trouble.
After her boyfriend returned from his deployment to Afghanistan, they married in 2012 and had a second daughter, Shelby. But their relationship became tumultuous, records show.
Both were arrested after a 2014 fight where he claimed she damaged his property, and she claimed he struck her on the leg, court records show. The following year, police records allege her husband drove his pickup past railroad barricades and into the side of a moving train, with his wife in the passenger seat.
Because of the couple’s fighting and arrests, her mother had custody of both Eva and Shelby. Quitney Armstead picked up two drug possession charges, and a misdemeanor charge for throwing a brick at the car her husband was in. Their divorce was granted in 2018, court records show.
In October 2018, she ended up back in jail after she was arrested on a drug possession charge during a police raid of a relative’s house, according to court records.
That’s when she found out she was pregnant with Aziyah, and promised herself she would get clean.
Not long before Armstead’s legal troubles began, some prosecutors in Alabama started to use a chemical endangerment statute — originally designed to protect children from chemical exposures in home meth labs — to punish women whose drug use potentially exposed their fetuses in the womb.
Prosecutions vary widely from county to county. In some areas, district attorneys choose not to pursue these charges, while one county has charged hundreds of women. In 2016, lawmakers carved out an exemption for exposure to prescription drugs, which can also be harmful to a fetus.
Morgan County District Attorney Scott Anderson said he does not discuss details and facts about pending cases.
“However, I will tell you that my position of being willing to allow mothers charged with chemical endangerment into diversion programs has not changed. I am willing to do that and, if at all possible, I favor that approach in resolving these type cases,” he wrote in an email. “I think that Ms. Armstead needs treatment for drug dependency and am in favor of her getting it.”
Some Alabama women we interviewed avoided a felony conviction and prison time by participating in pre-trial intervention programs run by prosecutors, which offer some treatment options. In some counties, the cost is $700 just to apply. Participants must keep making payments to remain enrolled. If they can’t afford to keep up, they face an automatic guilty plea.
In his email, Anderson said poverty does not prevent a person from entering diversion programs in his county.
In several Alabama cases, including Armstead’s, the mother and her newborn initially tested negative for drugs — but the hospital sent the baby’s meconium to a lab for more extensive testing.
Armstead said she never granted permission specifically for the test and had no idea her newborn’s meconium was being sent to the Mayo Clinic. A spokesperson for Decatur Morgan Hospital, where Armstead gave birth, wrote in an email statement that the hospital drug tests “all mothers who are admitted to our hospital for labor and delivery. Our hospital follows Alabama law regarding any required reporting of test results to state authorities.”
A federal law requires each state to have a policy on how to report and examine cases of drug-exposed newborns — but the federal statute doesn’t require states to conduct criminal investigations. About half the states stipulate that healthcare providers report to child welfare agencies when a newborn or mother tests positive for drugs, but only a handful pursue criminal prosecutions of the mothers.
Some prosecutors in Alabama, South Carolina and Oklahoma have determined that under those states’ laws and court rulings establishing fetal personhood, child welfare statutes can apply to a fetus. Mississippi doesn’t have a fetal personhood law, but that hasn’t stopped prosecutors in at least two counties from filing criminal charges against women who tested positive for drugs while pregnant.
In northeast Mississippi’s Monroe County, Sheriff’s Investigator Spencer Woods said he spearheaded the effort to begin prosecuting women under the concept of fetal personhood in 2019. Before that, Woods said, when the sheriff’s office received a referral from Child Protection Services about a newborn testing positive for drugs, officers wouldn’t investigate.
“It wouldn’t be handled because it did not fall under the statute. It still does not fall under the statute,” he said. “Because the state of Mississippi does not look at a child as being a child until it draws its first breath. Well, when that child tests positive when it’s born, the abuse has already happened, and it didn’t happen to a ‘child.’ So it was a crack in the system the way I looked at it. And that’s where we’re kind of playing.”
There are several ways law enforcement can learn of alleged drug use. Sometimes, child welfare workers inform police. Occasionally, women themselves admit drug use to an investigator; other times doctors, nurses or hospital staff pass test results to law enforcement or grant officers access to medical records without a warrant.
The cases demonstrate how existing privacy laws don’t protect women’s medical records from scrutiny by law enforcement, said Ji Seon Song, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, who studies how law enforcement infringe on patients’ privacy.
Child abuse allegations shouldn’t be a “carte blanche to access someone’s private health information, but that’s how it’s being used,” Song said. “When the loyalty to the patient completely disappears, that’s an institutional problem the hospitals need to deal with.”
Because this surveillance system could also be used to police women who seek abortions, federal authorities have proposed a privacy rule addition for HIPAA. Among other changes, it would prohibit disclosure of private health information for criminal, civil or administrative investigations against people seeking lawful reproductive health care. The agency sought public comment on the proposed rule through June 16, and is expected to complete the changes in coming months.
Medical groups supporting the changes argue that using private health information to punish people criminally harms the physician-patient relationship and results in substandard care. But several state attorneys general — including the AGs for Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina — wrote a statement opposing the change.
As proposed, the HIPAA changes could require law enforcement to provide documentation, such as a search warrant or subpoena, when seeking records related to someone’s reproductive healthcare — and medical providers could still refuse, said Melanie Fontes Rainer, director of the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Health and Human Services.
“It’s very much real that your information is being used inappropriately sometimes; and then that information is then being used to seek out criminal, civil and administrative prosecution of people,” Fontes Rainer said. “We’re in this new era — of unfortunately targeting populations for the kinds of health care they seek.”
In some cases, women were arrested and prosecuted after being honest with their doctors about their struggles with substance abuse. At one South Carolina hospital, a new mother admitted to occasional drug use while pregnant, only to have hospital staff call police who arrested her after a nurse handed over her medical records.
A few women have even been prosecuted after seeking treatment.
In 2018, Kearline Bishop was pregnant and struggling with meth addiction. She said she checked herself into a rehab program in northeast Oklahoma because she knew she needed help.
When Bishop appeared to have contractions, the rehab transferred her to a local hospital. A doctor at Hillcrest Hospital Claremore determined that she wasn’t yet in labor, and that despite her past drug use, her fetus was healthy.
Then two men Bishop didn’t know walked in. They were police detectives in plain clothes, who demanded a hospital worker draw her blood for testing, according to court records. It turned out that an off-duty police officer working security at the hospital had called his police department supervisor because he’d heard that a pregnant woman admitted to drug use.
The detectives didn’t have a search warrant, so they handed Bishop a “Consent to Search” property form with blank spaces on it. The officers crossed out the line where they would normally list the property to be searched and instead simply wrote “Blood Draw.” Police testified later in court that they didn’t advise Bishop she could talk to a lawyer first.
Bishop had told the cops she “was in a dark place, and needed help,” according to an affidavit.
The blood tests showed traces of drugs in her system. Officers handcuffed Bishop and took her from the hospital to jail. She stayed there until right before she delivered her baby, when she was allowed to go to a treatment house for pregnant women for a few days. When Bishop’s daughter was born, she was healthy. But child welfare workers took her from Bishop the next day.
The District Attorney in Rogers County, northeast of Tulsa, charged Bishop with child neglect. After an initial hearing, a county judge dismissed the charge, ruling the state couldn’t apply its child welfare codes to a fetus.
But the district attorney appealed. Then a 2020 decision in a separate case by the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that the state’s child neglect law could be applied to fetuses — even ones that didn’t display harm from drug use. The court later ruled that the prosecutor could continue the case against Bishop.
District Attorney Matt Ballard celebrated on Twitter: “My office scored a big victory today fighting for unborn children. I’m proud of all the work that went into this. #ProtectingUnbornChildren”
Through a spokeswoman, Ballard declined an interview request.
Bishop ultimately opted for a blind plea — a form of guilty plea that leaves the sentence entirely up to a judge — in January 2022. She was sentenced to three years in prison, plus five years of probation. A court terminated her parental rights to her youngest daughter.
Bishop did so well in prison that a judge reviewed her case and agreed to her release this past March, after just one year. Her daughter is now a healthy 4-year-old, adopted by a family member. Bishop has no contact with her youngest but saves up the money she makes working to buy clothes to send to her daughter.
Part of Bishop’s motivation to secure an early release, she said, was to prove that the prosecutors and judge who sent her to prison were wrong about her. She said that they never gave her a chance to show she’d be a caring mother.
“They looked at me like I wasn’t even human,” she said.
The cloud of cigarette smoke in Kevin Teague’s Decatur law office is almost as thick as his north Alabama accent. Teague is Armstead’s court-appointed lawyer. He defends a number of women in Morgan County charged with chemical endangerment of a child.
Many of his clients — like most of the women charged in Alabama and other states — reach plea deals, rarely challenging the cases against them. Teague said he had intended to help Armstead plead guilty too, but something about her case gnawed at him.
“She’s just had a hell of a life. I mean, she fought for her country,” he said. “I truly believe she has some serious PTSD.”
Her country — and the state of Alabama — owed her something better, he said. It seems unfair that poor people who can’t afford pre-trial diversion programs get felony convictions and prison time, while people who could afford thousands of dollars in fees can get different outcomes, Teague said.
Armstead missed an October 2022 court hearing — she said she didn’t receive a notice or have transportation. The absence landed her back in jail in December, and, lacking the money for bail, she’s remained behind bars since.
Meanwhile, Teague heard about a chemical endangerment case similar to Armstead’s in which the defendant challenged the evidence and the charges were dismissed: Dianne De La Rosa.
Eight months after De La Rosa’s daughter was born in 2018 in Huntsville, she and her family woke to a knock at the door at 2 a.m. The police had a warrant for her arrest for chemical endangerment. A meconium test allegedly showed traces of marijuana from earlier in the pregnancy.
De La Rosa did something that many women in Morgan County couldn’t afford. She scraped together thousands of dollars to hire her own attorney — John Brinkley.
Brinkley is a father of nine, with another on the way. He had waited in many delivery rooms over the years, and he remembered a key detail: The hospital doesn’t preserve everything it collects when a baby is born.
So Brinkley and his law partner Justin Nance did something unusual: They asked to conduct their own independent drug tests of the meconium in De La Rosa’s case. Defendants in Alabama have the right to request independent testing of evidence. But since so many women plead guilty, it rarely happens.
“It’s unclear the criteria they have for when they do these tests,” Nance said. “They claim they’re doing them on everybody, but I don’t think that is true.”
Prosecutors admitted that the evidence wasn’t preserved, and the charges against De La Rosa were dismissed. That took nearly three years.
Many women charged with chemical endangerment in Alabama can’t afford their own lawyer to fight a criminal case for years, Brinkley said. “They pick on these less fortunate women, and then they just railroad them.”
After hearing about De La Rosa’s case, Teague filed a motion in late March to have the meconium evidence in Armstead’s case independently tested. Prosecutors never responded in a written filing, nor they did not turn over the sample within 14 days, as the court had ordered, Teague said. Armstead’s trial was set for August.
When Teague told Armstead about filing that motion — in hopes of getting her case dismissed — she broke down sobbing.
Teague reminded her it would be a long road, and she would need to work on her sobriety and fulfill the requirements for a veterans’ court program she was offered for a synthetic marijuana possession charge in a nearby county. But it was a glimmer of hope she could hold on to.
“I am not the mistakes I’ve made,” Armstead said. “My kids were my world.”
Her incarceration has isolated her from family. Her jail doesn’t allow in-person visits from anyone but her lawyer, and she barely has the funds to make phone calls.
Her daughter Aziyah is 4 years old now. She and her older sisters only see Armstead on occasional video calls from the county jail, when the family can afford to put money in her jail account.
Armstead recalled that during a recent video chat, Aziyah asked her: “Mommy, can you just sneak out of jail for one night?”
She explained to Aziyah that if she did, she would be there even longer.
“It tore me up,” Armstead said.
Last week, Teague visited her at the jail with news: Morgan County was now offering her a better plea deal. If she successfully completes veterans’ court in nearby Lauderdale County, both her drug possession charge and chemical endangerment charge will be dismissed, he told her. There would be no conviction for either felony, as long as she didn’t screw up.
Armstead knew this meant the state probably didn’t have the meconium evidence. But taking the plea deal meant getting out of jail sooner and hugging her girls. Maybe she would be home in time for back-to-school.
She couldn’t afford to say no.
Additional reporting contributed by Anna Wolfe, Mississippi Today; Amy Yurkanin, AL.com; Brianna Bailey, The Frontier; and Jocelyn Grzeszczak, The Post and Courier.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Gov. Tate Reeves urges lawmakers to use unspent state revenue for tax cuts
Mississippi’s legislative leaders believe two things will happen when lawmakers convene for their next session in January: They will attempt to cut state taxes in some form, and they will have almost the same amount of money to spend during the next fiscal year as they do for the current fiscal year.
Members of the Joint Legislative Budget Committee and Republican Gov. Tate Reeves agreed on Thursday morning to estimate that the state government will collect about $7.6 billion in tax revenue during the next fiscal year, a slight increase in revenue collections of $26.9 million from the current fiscal year.
Reeves, who is strongly urging lawmakers to pass legislation to abolish the state income tax, pointed out that $600 million in tax revenue from the current fiscal year remains unspent, and that it could be used for tax cuts.
“I would encourage you for the additional $600 million that we return that back to the taxpayers,” Reeves said.
House Speaker Jason White, who is the current chair of the JLBC, has also strongly encouraged his colleagues to support eliminating the income tax and trimming the grocery tax. He joked with Reeves that there are “lots of crosshairs” on that unspent revenue.
“Now, some have different bullets than others, but targets nonetheless,” White said.
The income tax accounts for about 30% of state general fund revenue.
Republican Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, the leader of the Senate, wants lawmakers to trim the 7% sales tax on groceries, the highest of such a tax in the nation. He told reporters after the meeting that he wants to trim the tax while also making sure the state’s public employee retirement system is adequately funded.
Hosemann said he has an ideal rate in mind for where he would like to see a new grocery tax reduced to, but he declined to share it with reporters ahead of the 2025 legislative session.
Corey Miller, the state economist, told the lawmakers that Mississippi’s economy this year will grow slightly more than anticipated, but predicts the state economy, like the U.S. economy, will slow slightly in 2025 and 2026.
Miller also said sales tax collections have slumped compared to last year, but income tax collections have increased in recent months. He attributed the increase in income tax revenues to anecdotal reports of an increase in the number of new businesses started.
The Thursday meeting is typically a pro forma part of the state’s budget writing process. The more important meeting will occur in early spring when the committee will adopt a final revenue estimate to determine how much money lawmakers can spend before they pass a budget and adjourn.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Willie Manning faces execution, despite a crumbling case
When death row speaks
It comes truly from the heart
It’s a lonely situation
The frustration’s just a start.
— Willie Manning
Unless a court intervenes, the state of Mississippi will execute Willie Manning, despite the fact much of the case against him has crumbled.
If the Mississippi Supreme Court doesn’t give Manning another hearing, justices are expected to grant Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s request to set an execution date.
He remains on death row, convicted of the 1992 murders of two Mississippi State University students, Jon Stephen Steckler and Pamela Tiffany Miller, but the scientific evidence that helped convict him has gone up in smoke.
At trial, an FBI examiner told jurors that bullets fired into a tree, allegedly by Manning, matched those used to kill the couple to the exclusion of all other guns. The FBI later said such a conclusion was not supported by scientific standards.
Another FBI examiner testified that hairs found in Miller’s car belonged to someone Black. Steckler and Miller were white, and Manning is Black. The FBI later called such hair analysis invalid.
Beyond such evidence, the jailhouse informant who implicated Manning has since recanted.
“In this case, there are no fingerprints, fibers, DNA, or other physical evidence linking Manning to the murders or the victims,” wrote Manning’s defense team, which includes attorneys David Voisin and Robert Mink Sr. as well as Krissy C. Nobile, director of the Mississippi Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel. “All that remains in his case is recanted testimony and debunked forensic science.”
Fitch said Manning needs to be executed.
“The Court should not allow Manning to abuse the system by citing inapplicable rules, raising baseless claims, and incorrectly relying on this Court’s precedent to further delay execution of his lawful punishment,” she told the justices. “This Court should reject Manning’s latest attempt to further delay execution of his lawful sentence imposed thirty years ago.”
Two double homicides
Two weeks before Christmas in 1992, Mississippi State students were celebrating the end of final exams when the bodies of 19-year-old Steckler and 22-year-old Miller were found on a blood-spattered road at 2:15 a.m., a little more than an hour after they were last seen leaving Steckler’s fraternity house.
Steckler had been shot and run over by Miller’s car. She had been shot twice, and one leg was out of her pants and underwear, but authorities found no evidence of sexual assault.
A month later, the bodies of 90-year-old Alberta Jordan and her 60-year-old daughter, Emmoline Jimmerson, were found slashed to death in their apartment in Starkville.
Both double homicides went unsolved.
The couple’s murders took place on the same night that Steckler’s fraternity brother, John Wise, had his Chrysler Eagle Talon burglarized. He said several items were stolen from his car: a CD player, a silver huggie, a leather bomber jacket and $10 in change, plus a restroom token. Steckler’s watch, gold necklace and Cathedral High School class ring were also missing. So was Miller’s ring.
Wise identified the token found at the murder scene as identical to the one taken from his car, and authorities theorized that Steckler and Miller had interrupted a burglary outside the fraternity house.
In April 1993, firefighters in Starkville found a silver huggie, which Wise identified as his. At this point, Manning became a primary suspect, Oktibbeha County Sheriff Dolph Bryan testified, but he didn’t explain why. Manning lived out of town, five miles from where the huggie was found.
A month later, the sheriff arrested Manning, previously convicted of burglary, robbery and grand larceny, and charged him with both double homicides.
A day later, the sheriff got a visit from Earl Jordan, who was back in jail after spending more than two years in prison. He had been on the sheriff’s list of suspects because he and another man had reportedly barged into a fraternity house, swiped cash, threatened to steal a car and said, “We are not afraid to kill anybody.”
He told the sheriff that his cousin, Manning, had admitted burglarizing a car with another man, that they forced Steckler and Miller into her car, drove them to a remote location and killed them.
Jailhouse snitches seeking deals
Manning went on trial for the murders of Steckler and Miller.
Witnesses testified that Manning attempted to sell a ring and watch matching the general description of Steckler’s missing jewelry.
Wise testified about the items stolen from his car and identified the token found at the murder scene as identical to the restroom token stolen from his car. One witness said Manning sold him a CD player, which matched the serial number of Wise’s CD player.
Manning admitted he fenced the CD player, according to the sheriff’s notes, but he repeatedly denied being responsible for the couple’s murders.
At trial, two jailhouse informants told the jury, made up of 10 white and two Black jurors, about statements they said Manning had made. Jordan testified that Manning confessed to the murders, and Frank Parker said he overheard Manning talk about selling a gun.
Manning’s former girlfriend, Paula Hathorn, told jurors that Manning fired a gun into a tree in the yard, and FBI examiner John Lewoczko concluded that those bullets matched the ones that killed the couple “to the exclusion of every other firearm … in the world.”
Hathorn told jurors Manning didn’t come home for days after the shooting and gave her a leather jacket, which Wise identified as his.
In closing statements, District Attorney Forrest Allgood pointed at the babyfaced Manning. “He doesn’t look like a blood-thirsty monster,” he said. “Monsters never do.”
The jury convicted Manning.
A day later, the defense lawyer begged for his life, saying vengeance belonged to the Lord.
Allgood said Manning deserved execution for murdering these young students. “They were living bright with promises,” he said. “They were bright with dreams of tomorrows that went on forever. Now they are so much rotting flesh.”
If this “slaughter,” he said, “doesn’t justify the death penalty, then we need to apologize to every other individual on death row.”
The jury agreed, and the judge sent Manning to prison to be executed.
Witnesses recant
Over a five-year period, Hathorn had wracked up 88 bad check charges.
At the time of the murders, she faced 33 of those charges and owed $10,000. Worse than that, she faced up to 10 years in prison.
When she mentioned possible time behind bars, she said Sheriff Bryan told her, “You ain’t going to have to worry about that.”
The sheriff picked her up sometimes and bought her Church’s chicken. She said he also bought her furniture and paid some of her bills.
The sheriff wrote out questions for her to ask Manning and recorded all of her conversations with him in person and over the phone. The defense never knew about these recordings in which Manning said he had nothing to do with the murders.
Before testifying, she said the sheriff coached her, and after the conviction, he took her to the bank and gave her $17,500 in reward money. Authorities dropped all but one of her charges.
She told jurors that she saw him on Dec. 9, 1991, but she did not see him again until Dec. 14.
In a 2023 sworn statement, she said she saw him the day of the Dec. 11 killings. They were both at his mother’s house, which didn’t have running water. They had to boil water on the stove and wash in the sink.
“I never saw Willie Manning with any clothes that had blood on them,” she said, “and I never saw him trying to clean blood off him or off any of his clothes.”
As for Jordan, he initially pointed his finger at two suspects in the murders and passed a lie detector test.
Authorities ruled the men out and arrested Manning. A day later, Jordan told the sheriff that Manning had described carrying out the burglary and murders with Jessie Lawrence.
The problem? Lawrence was in an Alabama jail that day.
There was a logistical problem as well. How did four people cram into Miller’s two-seater sports car?
After Manning’s conviction, Jordan received reward money and pleaded guilty to a reduced charge. He admitted he lied in 2012, but he wouldn’t sign anything until 2023 when the sheriff and district attorney were both out of office.
“Manning never told me he killed anyone,” he said in a sworn statement.
He said he lied at the time because he knew he could have been charged as a habitual offender. When the sheriff shared details about the murders, “I changed some words to the way the sheriff said he thought it happened,” Jordan said. “The sheriff was satisfied.”
At trial, jailhouse informant Frank Parker testified that Manning talked to his cellmate about selling a gun, but that cellmate, Henry Richardson, denied that Manning ever spoke to him about a gun. “All we did was play cards,” he said.
In a sworn statement, Parker’s uncle, former law enforcement officer Chester Blanchard, called his nephew a thief and a liar. “I would not take his word for anything,” he said.
In other statements, two men described seeing Manning at the 2500 Club close to midnight on the same night the murders took place. One said Manning asked him for a ride home, which he declined to do.
In another statement, a woman described parking at the apartments besides Miller’s sports car at 1 a.m.
Manning’s lawyers said this narrow timeframe, combined with his lack of a car, made it impossible for him to have carried out the murders more than 3 miles away.
The lone potential link between the burglary of Wise’s car and the murders was the token found at the murder scene.
Manning’s lawyers questioned whether the token came from Wise’s car since he testified his token was “dirty” while the sheriff described it as “a bright shiny gold colored coin.” A photograph of that token mirrors the sheriff’s description.
These tokens were produced for two service station restrooms in Mississippi as well as other restrooms across the U.S.
Hathorn said the sheriff gave her a much different reason for the murders. She said he drove her out to the gravel road where the killings took place and told her, “It was a drug deal gone bad.”
Manning’s lawyers have wondered if the killings might have been carried out by someone she knew. Miller was shot twice in the face at close range, which might suggest a personal killing. Her sports car was double-parked at an apartment complex not far from her trailer, and her missing ring was found between that trailer and her car.
One woman told police that on the night of the murders, she heard a man yelling after midnight from the direction of Miller’s trailer. Defense lawyers obtained statements from two people who said they heard what sounded like a white man yelling, followed by two gunshots.
Dashed hopes
In 2004, Manning learned he was getting a new trial.
It was the first good news he had heard in years. He had two different lawyers appointed to handle his post-conviction relief in Mississippi. They failed to file anything, and the statute of limitations for filing expired in federal court.
After the state Legislature created the Capital Post-Conviction Relief office in 2000, Voisin and Mink both took on the case and filed Manning’s first post-conviction relief request.
That filing led the Mississippi Supreme Court to conclude that prosecutors at Manning’s trial had been guilty of reversible error because they tried to enhance Jordan’s credibility as a witness by asking him if he had volunteered to take a lie detector test.
Justices had recently reversed a criminal case for the exact same reason. Now they reversed Manning’s conviction.
Lawyers for the attorney general’s office asked the high court to reconsider its ruling. They called the evidence against Manning “overwhelming” and suggested that the court adopt the U.S. Supreme Court’s limited retroactive standard.
In 2006, the justices followed the attorney general’s advice, reversed their original decision, took away Manning’s hope for a new trial and sent him back to death row.
Voisin called the ruling baffling. “Prosecutors improperly bolstered his [Jordan’s] credibility,” he said, “and we can’t get a hearing.”
Reprieve with four hours to spare
On the morning of May 7, 2013, Manning prepared to be executed. Tonight would be his final meal when he could dine on steak, shrimp or anything else he fancied. He found it strange that they would feed him so well just before they killed him.
Four hours before the 6 p.m. execution, word came that the Mississippi Supreme Court had issued a stay in an 8-1 vote.
Days earlier, the state had received letters from Justice Department officials, who said the ballistics tests were in “error” and that an FBI examiner had overstated conclusions about hair analysis by saying the hair came from an African American.
After halting the execution, justices reversed their denial of a defense request to reexamine a rape kit, fingernail scrapings, hairs and fingerprint evidence in the case. The rape kit again yielded no DNA.
Authorities identified 33 fingerprints inside Miller’s Toyota MR2. Sixteen belonged to Miller or Steckler, but none of them matched Manning.
In hopes of finding other matches, defense lawyers ran the fingerprints through a database known as the Automated Fingerprint Identification System. None was found.
DNA tests on the rape kit provided no additional clues, either.
After raising money to pay for a lab to test the hair from Miller’s car, the hair fragments proved too small and degraded to obtain a DNA profile.
A specialized lab told defense lawyers that it could do the testing, but Circuit Judge Lee J. Howard IV rejected that request because it had taken longer than three years and because “identifying the mitochondrial DNA of seven hair samples obtained from vacuum sweeping and debris from the car will not call into question [Manning’s] conviction as it is irrelevant to the issue of guilt.”
The Mississippi Supreme Court backed that rejection, saying even if another DNA profile was “discovered from the crime scene evidence, no proof has been shown that it would change the outcome of Manning’s case,” Justice Robert Chamberlin wrote.
After avoiding execution, Manning returned to his death row cell and resumed what he had been doing for decades. Waiting.
He penned a poem:
How many times have I shed tears?
How many people have to die
Before this nation starts to realize
That this system’s all a lie?
Another death penalty, more witnesses recant
In 1996, Manning went on trial for the murders of Jordan and Jimmerson.
Kevin Lucious said that he and his girlfriend, Likeesha Harris, and their baby lived in the same apartment complex as the victims.
Lucious told jurors that he saw Manning push himself into the victims’ apartment and later tell him if he had known “they” only had $12, he would not have done anything to them.
The jury convicted Manning, and he was sentenced to death.
In a 2011 evidentiary hearing, Lucious, who was serving three life sentences in Missouri, recanted his testimony against Manning, saying he was afraid he would be charged with the murders.
The apartment where Lucious testified that he lived with his girlfriend was actually vacant at the time the killings took place. The Starkville police knew this, but concealed the information from both prosecutors and defense lawyers.
The girlfriend, Harris, testified that as soon as she read in the local newspaper about Lucious’ testimony, she knew it wasn’t the truth. “Kevin was trying to get himself off by any means necessary,” she said. “He lied.”
In a 7-2 vote in 2015, the Mississippi Supreme Court granted Manning a new trial because the state withheld critical information.
“Any attorney worth his salt would salivate at impeaching the State’s key witness using evidence obtained by the Starkville Police Department,” Justice Michael K. Randolph wrote.
Manning’s attorneys never got a chance. Prosecutors dismissed his charges before a new trial ever began.
That dismissal marked the sixth exoneration in the same judicial district, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. All the cases came under longtime district attorney, Allgood, featured in Netflix’s documentary series on cases of wrongful convictions, “The Innocence Files.”
“These numerous wrongful convictions stemming from the same judicial district and prosecutor fit a template: flawed and false forensics and-or official misconduct,” Manning’s defense team wrote. “Manning’s current case follows that template.”
All but one of those exonerated were Black.
Sheriff Bryan denied in testimony that race played any role in the investigation, but he acknowledged creating a list of 13 possible suspects in the murder. All of them were Black.
Black Americans are seven times more likely than white Americans to be wrongly convicted of serious crimes in the U.S., according to a report by the National Registry of Exonerations.
Of the 29 Mississippians exonerated since 1989, 83% were Black. In fact, Black Americans convicted of murder are about 80% more likely to be innocent than other Americans convicted of murder.
As for false testimony, evidence shows it can often lead to wrongful convictions. Studies show that nearly two-thirds of wrongful murder convictions since 1989 have resulted from false testimony, and nearly half of wrongful capital convictions have resulted from the false testimony of informants.
“The witness intimidation and false testimony in the Jordan-Jimmerson case was an intended feature, not a ‘flaw,’” lawyers Ayanna Hill and Thomas M. Fortner wrote in a friend of the court brief for the ACLU, the NAACP and the Mississippi Office of State Public Defender. “When law enforcement is willing to frame a man twice for murder, it is almost beyond question that more aspects of Mr. Manning’s trial would fall far short of what he was constitutionally entitled to.”
What is justice?
Manning, now 56, sits on death row. Unless a court intervenes, he will be strapped down and injected with a drug to stop his heart.
The same Mississippi Supreme Court that tossed out his conviction in one case is denying him a new hearing in the other. In a 5-4 decision, the chief justice called the evidence against Manning “overwhelming,” saying even Jordan’s recanted testimony “would not have changed the verdict.”
Manning “has had more than a full measure of justice,” he wrote. “Tiffany Miller and Jon Steckler have not. Their families have not. The citizens of Mississippi have not.”
In his dissenting opinion, Presiding Justice Jim Kitchens wrote, “Today the Court perverts its function as an appeal court and makes factual determinations that belong squarely within the purview of the circuit court judge.”
Without Jordan, the case against Manning is circumstantial, and this is why a circuit judge needs to hold a hearing on the truthfulness and timeliness of the recanted testimony, he wrote.
Mississippi’s attorney general said it’s time for Manning to face justice and called on the high court to set an execution date.
His “fruitless trip to the circuit court for DNA testing brought the litigation of this case to an end,” Fitch wrote. “Manning’s pending motion is a blatant attempt to delay his lawful execution.”
Former District Attorney Allgood agreed. “There are a lot of deserving individuals for the death penalty,” he said. “[Manning is] certainly one of them.”
Former Sheriff Bryan could not be reached for comment.
Manning’s defense team said if the state of Mississippi goes forward with his lethal injection, it will execute an innocent man.
“What measure of justice is served if the wrong man is put to death?” the lawyers asked. “Will Mississippi allow a man to be executed when it has been proven that corruption, coercion, and false forensics lie at the core of his conviction and death sentence?”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1960
Nov. 14, 1960
Federal marshals escorted 6-year-old Ruby Bridges into William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. Day after day, whites jeered at the Mississippi native and three other Black children, Leona Tate, Gail Etienne and Tessie Prevost, who became the first to attend all-white elementary schools in the South.
Many white families left the school in protest, but Barbara Henry stayed and taught Bridges. Norman Rockwell depicted Bridges’ entry in his painting “The Problem We All Live With,” and she received the Presidential Citizens Medal in 2001. There is now a statue of her outside the elementary school, which bears her name.
“I was an innocent child that knew absolutely nothing about what was happening that day,” she recalled, “but I learned a very valuable lesson — we should never look at a person and judge them by the color of their skin. That’s the lesson I learned in first grade.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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