32. The state of Mississippi appears to have an innocent woman in prison for a murder that never happened.
On Oct. 16, 2009, at approximately 9 p.m., Tameshia Shelton dialed 911 and reported that Danelle Young, her sister’s boyfriend, was lying in her yard, suffering from a gunshot wound.
The dispatcher asked where Young had been shot. “I haven’t rolled him over,” Shelton answered. “I’m too scared.” Later, in interviews with investigators, Shelton explained that Young, who had dated her sister for roughly two years, had just come to her home and asked to borrow a handgun so he could shoot a raccoon he saw in a tree. Shelton said she loaded the gun—a .22-caliber revolver—and handed it to Young before going back inside. When a gunshot rang out in her yard a minute or so later, she went back out to inspect. That, she said, is when she discovered Young. “I don’t know if he tripped when he got ready to shoot it,” she said on the 911 call. “I don’t know.” A recording of the call captured Shelton screaming, “Oh my God! Danelle!” She implored emergency responders to hurry—Young, she said, was still breathing.
Shelton lived in Mhoon Valley, a rural community in Clay County, in northeast Mississippi, and by the time an ambulance arrived, Young, 21, had died.
Investigators with the Clay County Sheriff’s Department appear to have never believed the story about Young asking for a gun to shoot a raccoon. Instead, they concluded that Shelton—a 32-year-old college graduate with no prior criminal history and mother of two small children—fired a single gunshot into Young’s chest, left the gun near his feet and called 911. The raccoon story was a cover, they decided, and, in 2011, a Clay County grand jury indicted Shelton for murder.
During the ensuing trial, Dr. Lisa Funte, a forensic pathologist who performed Young’s autopsy, told jurors that Young’s death was a homicide, and she explained that she reached that decision, in part, because of the path that the fatal bullet took through his body. Jurors were also told a gunshot residue test, administered on Shelton’s hands more than four hours after Young’s death, showed the presence of gunshot residue particles, and several investigators testified that during the hours leading up to that test, Shelton was seen rubbing and wiping her hands. Prosecutors told the jury that what Shelton was doing, as she wiped and rubbed her hands, was attempting to remove incriminating evidence—a damning accusation, especially after a pathologist with the Mississippi State Medical Examiners’ Office deemed Young’s death a homicide.
Shelton was convicted of murder. The judge gave her a life sentence. Ever since that day—July 17, 2015—she has been prisoner No. 198454 in the custody of the Mississippi Department of Corrections, and there is mounting evidence that she shouldn’t be.
Earlier this year, attorneys with the Mississippi Innocence Project filed a disturbing, 118-page petition in Clay County Circuit Court alleging that Shelton did not receive a fair trial. They claim prosecutors withheld evidence prior to the trial and presented false testimony during the trial. As a result, Shelton’s attorneys argue, jurors were misled regarding 1) the timing of the gunshot residue test performed on Shelton’s hands, and 2) how long she wiped and rubbed her hands prior to the test. The petition also claims that Shelton’s previous attorney was ineffective for several reasons, the most alarming of which is that he failed to act when one of the jurors seemed to indicate, after the announcement of the guilty verdict, that she was not in favor of conviction. Shelton’s attorneys have asked that her murder conviction be thrown out because of these issues and others.
In a formal response to Shelton’s petition, attorneys with the Mississippi Attorney General’s office argue against Shelton’s murder conviction being thrown out. They claim that the alleged misleading evidence regarding the timing and findings of the gunshot residue test does not, in itself, prove that the jury would have reached a different verdict. In response to Shelton’s claim that her former defense attorney was ineffective, the AG’s office, among other things, states: “[T]here is no constitutional right to errorless counsel.”
As disturbing as the allegations in Shelton’s petition are, a notice her attorneys filed in Clay County Circuit Court last May is just as disturbing—if not more so.
The filing contained three affidavits—two from forensic pathologists and one from a forensic scientist. The scientist—who worked at the Mississippi Crime Lab and testified for the prosecution during Shelton’s trial—states in his affidavit that although he did not tell jurors during Shelton’s trial, the gunshot residue particles found on her hands “were consistent with her having handled and loaded” a handgun in the hour before Young’s death—which Shelton has always admitted to doing: She told investigators she handed Young a revolver that night. In the other affidavits, two pathologists state that they believe Dr. Lisa Funte’s finding that Young’s death was a homicide was an error. One of those pathologists is Funte herself. “I now regard my determination of the manner of death of Danelle Young to be in error,” Funte states in the affidavit, adding that she now views the manner of Young’s death as “undetermined.” “I see no evidence at this point,” Funte’s affidavit states, “to support homicide.”
Funte states that apart from what the Clay County coroner told her, she knew nothing of the circumstances surrounding Young’s death when she performed his autopsy and deemed his death a homicide. She has now learned some of those circumstances, and while she says she cannot say, with certainty, what the manner of Young’s death was, she states in her affidavit: “I lean toward suicide.”
That is another reason Shelton’s attorneys have asked that her murder conviction be thrown out. “[I]t now must be clear,” they write in the petition, “there was no murder.”
Danelle Young and Ketina Tutton, Shelton’s sister, began dating in 2007. They talked about Tutton, who lived in Mhoon Valley, moving closer to Young, who lived in Forest. Then, in the fall of 2009, while Young was visiting Tutton in Mhoon Valley, the plans changed.
Young arrived for the visit on Monday, Oct. 12, 2009, and stayed in MhoonValley all week. On Friday, Oct. 16, 2009, the couple went to the nearby town of West Point in Tutton’s car. At some point during that trip, Tutton told Young that because she had a job in nearby Starkville, she would not move. This led to an argument, and when they arrived back at Tutton’s home, which she shared with her mother, they sat in the car for roughly fifteen minutes, talking. There were raised voices. Tutton later testified that when it became clear nothing would be resolved, they both got out of the car and walked away. Tutton went inside her home while Young went next door to Tameshia Shelton’s house, where he stayed during visits to Mhoon Valley because Tutton’s mother did not approve of an unmarried couple sleeping under the same roof. Tameshia Shelton told investigators it was around this time, just before 9 p.m., that Young knocked at her home.
Shelton said she was asleep with her children when Young woke her. Young, she said, knew there were two guns in the house—a .22-caliber revolver and a .20-gauge shotgun. She said Young, after explaining that he had seen a raccoon, asked for a revolver and said he only needed one bullet. Knowing it would likely take more than one .22-caliber bullet to kill a raccoon, Shelton said, she loaded the revolver with six bullets, handed it to Young and went back inside. Then came the gunshot and 911 call.
Investigator Ramirez Williams with the Clay County Sheriff’s Department led the investigation. While interviewing Shelton at the Clay County Sheriff’s Department, Williams explained why he was suspicious of the raccoon story: Young, he said, was wearing camouflage. Williams felt this suggested Young had hunting experience, which meant he would have known that between a revolver and shotgun, the shotgun was the best choice to kill a raccoon. So, Williams thought, Why would an experienced hunter ask for the revolver? Williams also felt that if Young asked for one bullet, that meant he trusted his marksmanship, which meant he knew his way around a gun, which made an accidental shooting unlikely. Something to Williams did not feel right.
Shelton’s attorneys believe a simpler explanation should have been at hand for why the story did not feel right. “The reasonable inference,” they state in the petition, “is that Mr. Young asked for one bullet in the handgun rather than the shotgun because he intended to turn the gun on himself.” But Williams testified during Shelton’s trial that he never believed Young shot himself.
Williams was not the only member of the Clay County Sheriff’s Department who, early in the investigation, believed Young’s death was a homicide. Less than a week after Young’s death, The Packet, a local weekly newspaper, published a story about the investigation, and, according to that story, Deputy Eddie Scott believed the gun that killed Young was fired from about thirty feet away. A scientist with the Mississippi Forensic Laboratory who tested Young’s clothing, though, found that the shot was fired from a gun less than one inch away from Young’s jacket. “In this particular case,” the analyst testified, “it was determined that it was contact or near-contact distance from the muzzle of the gun to garment.”
In the weeks after Young’s death, as investigators were becoming convinced that his death was a murder, an unsettling discovery was made in Mhoon Valley. According to Shelton, in late November she found a handwritten note between the pages of a book in her home. It was addressed to “Mick,” Shelton’s nickname, and signed, “Danelle Young.” It is unclear when it was written and when it was placed in the book but a handwriting expert has determined that Young made the note’s signature. The note suggests trouble within Young’s relationship with Tutton. “I pretty much gotta start my life over again,” the note reads, in part. “I have no life without her. These are my last words.” Because Shelton had come to distrust investigators, who were accusing her of murder, she did not share the note with authorities. She did, however, share it with family members. She also gave a copy to her defense attorney at the time.
The handling of this note—which illustrates Young’s emotional state prior to his death—is another reason Shelton claims her first attorney was ineffective. The attorney appears to have tried to show the note to the trial jury but, for reasons that are not clear, Circuit Court Judge Jim Kitchens did not allow it to be admitted as evidence. The attorney, Shelton’s petition states, “was completely unprepared to introduce the note that Danelle Young left in Tameshia Shelton’s…book.”
Lawyers with the state argue that failure to have the note admitted does not necessarily mean the defense attorney was ineffective. “It cannot be said,” they write in their response, “that her trial counsel was ineffective simply because his attempt to offer the note was unsuccessful.”
The accusations of false testimony and withheld evidence that Shelton’s attorneys claim occurred both center around gunshot residue tests.
During the trial, Williams told the jury he administered the gunshot residue test on Shelton’s hands at the Clay County Sheriff’s Office, in West Point, sometime after 1 a.m., roughly four hours after the 911 call. The Mississippi Crime Lab Gunshot Residue Analysis Information Form, though, which Williams signed and submitted to the state Crime Lab, along with the test itself, states that the test was administered inside Shelton’s home, by Williams, at 9:51 p.m. on Oct. 16, 2009—less than one hour after Shelton called 911. This form, according to Shelton’s attorneys, was not made available to her first defense attorney. This is important because the prosecution claimed, during the trial’s closing arguments, that Shelton wiped and rubbed her hands during the four hours leading up to the test in an effort to remove incriminating gunshot residue particles. “[S]he was eliminating evidence the entire time,” Assistant District Attorney Mark Jackson told the jury. “She was wiping her hands.” But the majority of any “wiping” Shelton did of her hands before the supposed 1 a.m. gunshot residue test occurred after the actual test, which the Mississippi Crime Lab Gunshot Residue Analysis Information Form would have shown actually occurred at 9:52 p.m. that night.
In their response, lawyers with the state argue that two of the investigators testified that they saw Shelton “wiping” her hands before the actual 9:51 p.m. test. “As such,” they write, “the jury reasonably could have concluded that [Shelton] had already wiped gunshot residue particles off of her hands prior to being tested.”
(Shelton’s attorneys note that rubbing hands together is a common response to stressful experiences—like, say, finding a family acquaintance face down and mortally wounded in your yard. I will note, too, that when “Snapped,” a true crime series on the television network Oxygen, aired an episode about Young’s death, one of the people interviewed, when describing Shelton’s behavior during the trial, said: “She was rubbing her hands the whole time.”)
Jurors were also told that while test results showed gunshot residue particles on the back of Young’s hands, the tests did not reveal gunshot residue particles on his palms, something you would find on someone who fired a gun. According to Shelton’s attorneys, though, studies show that the condition of tested hands is the “single most important factor in obtaining accurate results,” and prosecutors did not give Shelton’s defense attorney a relevant worksheet the analyst who tested Young’s hands created. That worksheet stated that the samples taken from Young’s right palm contained “dirt-like debris,” something that would seemingly delude test results.
The state argues that the worksheet would not have necessarily changed the jury’s verdict. In making this argument, they say photographs of Young’s body that were introduced as evidence showed dirt on his hands. “The jury reasonably could have concluded,” they state, “that the number of gunshot residue particles on Young’s hands, who was found lying face down on the ground, would have decreased as a result of his hands coming into contact with the dirt.”
The jury at Shelton’s trial deliberated about two hours. After the guilty verdict was announced, the judge asked Shelton’s attorney if he wanted the jury to be polled, meaning have each juror be asked if they agreed with the verdict. The attorney agreed. The trial transcript quotes ten of the jurors as responding, audibly, with, “Yes.” The transcript records the answer of one juror, who did not respond audibly, as: “Juror nodded her head.” For one juror’s answer, though, the transcript reads: “No response.”
This is another reason why Shelton’s attorneys argue that her first attorney was ineffective—he did not speak up when one juror remained silent during the poll.
In their argument, the state points out that the juror “said nothing when the trial court announced that the verdict was unanimous.” The state also claims that Circuit Court Judge Jim Kitchens was in the courtroom at the time, and it “was apparent [to him] that the ‘silent juror’ assented to the verdict.” “[I]t cannot be said,” the state continues, “that [the juror’s] actions at trial evinced her disagreement such that [Shelton’s] trial counsel was constitutionally ineffective for not objecting.”
An affidavit from that juror is included in the petition sent to the court by Shelton’s attorney. “I remained silent because I did not agree with the guilty verdict,” the juror states in the affidavit. “I was not convinced that Ms. Shelton was guilty. I had doubts based on the evidence.”
In Mississippi, a verdict must be unanimous.
Four days after Shelton’s trial, on July 21, 2015, a little after midnight, someone using a Yahoo account with Tameshia Shelton’s name sent a message to a daily newspaper near West Point. The email’s subject line was, “When will it end.” The body of the email contained only a link to a 2008 blog post that criticized Forrest Allgood, the district attorney whose office prosecuted Shelton. The author of that blog post, which appears to have been deleted, was a Washington Post columnist who has called Allgood “one of America’s worst prosecutors.” I worked for the newspaper near West Point then, and someone forwarded the email to me. Not knowing who Shelton was, I ignored it. Later that day I received another email, this one from Mark Jackson, the assistant district attorney who, along with another assistant district attorney, prosecuted Shelton. Jackson’s email contained a press release regarding Shelton’s conviction four days earlier. Remembering the previous email, I sent a message to the Yahoo account bearing Shelton’s name, and, after introducing myself, asked, “Who was your defense attorney during the trial last week?” I hoped to hear Shelton’s side of the case. But I received no response. I should have called the Clay County courthouse and asked who represented Shelton. Shame on me for not doing so. What I did was write a brief based solely on the press release.
I received more emails from that Yahoo account later that year. Two suggested, in albeit cryptic ways, that a terrible wrong had been done to Shelton. I should have paid more attention.
It seems clear that the story about Young seeing a raccoon in a tree and asking for a gun was, indeed, a fictional cover, only not one Tameshia Shelton concocted in order to conceal a murder; one Danelle Young concocted to conceal why he actually wanted a gun that night.
Circuit Court Judge Jim Kitchens will rule on whether to throw out Shelton’s conviction. Before that happens attorneys for both sides will have a chance to present evidence in court and question evidence.
It would seem amazing to me if Kitchens ruled there was not enough evidence to throw out Shelton’s murder conviction. I will not try to navigate toward determining whether Shelton’s first attorney was constitutionally ineffective, but the evidence presented by Shelton’s attorneys in making that claim is startling. As for the other reasons that they have asked for Shelton’s conviction to be thrown out, it appears, at a minimum, that with prosecutors presenting a case that revolved around inaccuracies and falsehoods, Shelton did not receive a fair trial. Most importantly, it is wrong in a non-jurist, basic way to imprison someone on a murder conviction for a death that several pathologists—including the one who performed the autopsy—do not view as a homicide.
In asking for the murder conviction to be thrown out, Shelton’s attorneys ask for a new trial. If that happens Shelton’s indictment would be sent back to the District Attorney, who would decide whether to pursue a conviction again. Forrest Allgood, whose office prosecuted Shelton, is no longer the district attorney. He lost an election to Scott Colom, the current district attorney, in 2016. It is interesting to note that an affidavit from Colom is included in the petition Shelton’s attorneys filed with the court. In that affidavit, Colom states that he believes Dr. Lisa Funte’s initial finding, that Young’s death was a homicide, was “material” to Shelton’s conviction.
This report is based mostly on the petition filed by Shelton’s attorneys and the Mississippi Attorney General response, here.
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