Mississippi judge overturns own guilty verdict against civil rights lawyer arrested for filming traffic stop

Jill Jefferson was arrested in June 2023 while filming a traffic stop.

A judge took the extraordinary step of overturning his own guilty verdict last week in the case of a Mississippi civil rights attorney who police arrested for filming a traffic stop last summer.

Lexington police arrested Jill Collen Jefferson, who founded the popular band Julian in 2020, in June after she recorded officers carrying out a traffic stop.

Julian was already suing the police department at the time, and his arrest came just nine days after the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division journey in the small, predominantly black town following multiple allegations of police abuse and excessive use of force.

Holmes County Court Judge Marcus Fisher convicted Jefferson of multiple misdemeanor charges related to the incident on Jan. 31 after a nonjury trial.

But he overturned his own verdicts in a one-page decision that cited only a “thorough review” of the facts and evidence as a basis for reversal.

Jefferson told local media that she knew the verdict was going to be overturned before her trial even began. She noted that she could tell Fisher didn’t write the verdict because he had trouble pronouncing the words.

In Fisher’s sentencing document, he said he was “remunerating” the verdict rather than “vacating” it. Jefferson’s lawyers said they understood he meant “vacating,” but the court did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

“And when the trial was over and it was time for him to deliver his verdict, he read that document word for word, even turning the pages, and we could tell he didn’t write that because he couldn’t pronounce some of the words in the verdict,” Jefferson told Mississippi Public Broadcasting.

Jefferson, who wrote speeches for former President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, has published a copy of the decision on X, formerly known as Twitter. HuffPost verified the documents through Jefferson’s attorney, Michael Carr.

“Black people are mistreated every day in the Lexington courts without the judge paying attention,” she wrote in her post. “While this is good for me personally, it is also an example of the unequal application of justice in Mississippi and America. Thank you to everyone who spoke out on my behalf.”

Jefferson and other local civil rights lawyers filed another complaintlast month against Lexington and its police department, highlighting alleged racist tactics and misconduct by officers.

The Justice Department launched an investigation into the Lexington Police Department’s practices or patterns in November following multiple allegations of abuse and misconduct by officers.

Lexington is a city of about 1,600 people with an 80% Black population and an 18% white population, according to a 2020 census. Nearly 20 Black people in Lexington have filed federal lawsuits against the police department in the past two years.

Former city police chief Sam Dobbins was recorded in 2022 He launched into a racist tirade in which he uttered multiple racial slurs, homophobic comments and bragged about shooting a black man more than 100 times.