Jackson attorney Dennis Sweet is calling attention to a recent change in Hinds County Circuit Court that should alarm every county resident, regardless of race. Hinds County Chief Judge Swan Yerger issued a memorandum to circuit court judges last November, dividing the four justices into two different case categories. Category 1 includes homicides, assaults, robberies and property crimes. Category 2 contains sex crimes, automobile offenses like DUIs and chop shops, and white-collar crimes, including embezzlement and drug crimes.
Yerger then assigned the arguably more serious Category 1 cases to himself and Judge Bobby DeLaughter, and left the Category 2 cases to the black judges, Tomie Green and Winston Kidd.
Perhaps Yerger did not issue this mandate to bar the black judges from hearing homicide and assault cases—but that’s what it looks like. Sweet sounded the alarm after one of his clients found his “robbery” indictment before Judge Green annulled and put before Yerger, where the grand jury upgraded his indictment to the more serious “strong armed robbery.”
Yerger’s split duty roster is an affront to both black voters in one of the most populated black counties in the state, and voters of all races who believe that laws are there to be followed, even if it means good ole boys don’t get their way.
Circuit court judges are elected positions, but the voters in Kidd’s and Green’s subdistricts didn’t get to choose who presides over homicides and robberies. What’s worse is that Supreme Court Justice Jim Smith appointed six special judges to Hinds County to decrease the backload. Very generous of him. The problem is that those appointed judges—who were not determined by voters—are allowed to hear Category 1 cases, unlike Green and Kidd.
Yerger can’t say this is about experience. Green had served in a district attorney’s office, and has hard experience in handling serious cases, and DeLaughter’s own reputation is in question. The State Supreme Court suspended him from the bench this year over a bribery allegation connected to his old boss, former Hinds County DA Ed Peters. The Judicial Performance Commission is also investigating Peters’ role in DeLaughter’s decision last year to withhold the plea of a former Jackson police officer who pled guilty to culpable negligent vehicular manslaughter in the death of a Jackson resident. Peters was the officer’s lawyer, and DeLaughter essentially withheld his plea—much to then-DA Faye Peterson’s fury, as the Jackson Free Press reported then. The case is under investigation.
What Yerger did may well be a violation of the nation’s Voting Rights Act. If you voted for the judge, then he or she should be allowed to handle the cases you voted them in to take, not have their talents overruled by men with different allegiances.
