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“[Y]ou get down to the area though where . . . . let’s see if I can bluff a plea out of this guy by indicting him. . . . . I’ve always had personal problems with it, to indict a case that I know deep in my heart that if I have to go to trial I can’t win it. That was okay with [Ed] Peters, he was willing to have his people indict on a dare.”

— Former Hinds County Senior Assistant District Attorney Robert Taylor, deposition testimony to the Complaint Tribunal of the Mississippi Supreme Court in In Re: Petition for Reinstatement of J. Keith Shelton, Case No. 2005-BR-2366, taken March 13, 2007

The wretched tale behind Case No. 2005-BR-2366 has, I must tell you, shocked and appalled even those as inured to Scruggsiana skulduggery as NMC and I. Among its features are these (all, by the way, now well-documented by the Mississippi Bar):

1. Former Hinds County District Attorney Ed Peters initiated, and for many years his office maintained, the prosecution of criminal charges against an attorney and the attorney’s client when Peters knew that he lacked probable cause to do so (just as did North Carolina’s ex-prosecutor — indeed, now ex-attorney and current convict — Mike Nifong, in the Duke Lacrosse case).

2. Peters’ senior assistant, disturbed by what had happened, prepared for the file a memorandum (one-page pdf) stating that — despite the fact that Peters, Tommy Mayfield, and another prosecutor had reviewed the cases against the attorney and his client and determined that “there was no case” against either of them — “for reasons which were unclear to me, and will never be clear, the case against [them] is presented to the Grand Jury with the recommendation of this office that True Bills be returned as to both defendants for Conspiracy and Bribery. This was in fact done. … This case lacks, and never has had any prosecutive merit.”

3. In nudging the DA’s office to that point, Hinds County Judge Houston J. Patton seems to have withheld clearly exculpatory evidence (84-page pdf) and almost certainly lied to law enforcement investigators.

4. In his written report to the Mississippi Commission on Judicial Performance on a complaint that the attorney’s client had filed against Judge Patton, investigator Terry Grice alleged that he had interviewed two witnesses regarding the claims, and that both stated that they did not believe Judge Patton had done anything wrong. In fact, the two witnesses (twelve- and nine-page pdfs) swore that Grice had never interviewed them, and that if he had, both would have directly contradicted the opinions he attributed to them.

5. In its response (two-page pdf) to the complaint tribunal’s findings and report (64-page pdf), the Mississippi Bar reversed its previously-strong opposition to the suspended attorney’s petition for reinstatement.

This complete reversal, dated December 11, 2007, and signed by Adam B. Kilgore, was based on the Bar’s finally learning of and reviewing both law-enforcement tape recordings of conversations between the attorney and Judge Patton and the documents the two were discussing on the tapes. One of these was a copy of an original document that, according to the Hinds County DA’s office, Judge Patton had withheld from the office, even though the document was discussed, and even read from, in the taped conversations.

The Bar now urges that the attorney’s license to practice be reinstated immediately.

6. The Mississippi Supreme Court received the Bar’s recommendation in early December (but since this case doesn’t involve football . . . ).

The Jackson Clarion-Ledger once covered this now-nearly-11-year-old story in a series of articles (eight-page pdf) firmly slanted pro-Patton. The Bar’s factual findings, legal conclusions, and endorsed recommendation — all diametrically opposed to the C-L reporters’ spin — sit waiting at the Mississippi Supreme Court. When the justices finally rule, will the Clarion-Ledger remain mute?

I’m also highly interested to see what the Mississippi Bar and Judicial Performance Commission might want to do about Ed Peters and Houston Patton, given the news of their behaviors now publicly available.

Finally, I want to know whether the Hinds County DA’s office dropped its cases against the attorney and his client not so much because it knew the evidence would clear the defendants but because it knew that evidence would damn two better-positioned actual wrongdoers.

In the following post, I begin to summarize the Bar’s findings of fact as to exactly what happened between attorney Keith Shelton, his client James Jennings, Judge Houston Patton, and the now all-too-familiar Ed Peters.

Fair warning: this story is more outrageous than any you’ve yet had from folo. There’s more than one version of it, but the version I’ve accepted to pass along to you comes straight from the Mississippi Bar. It tells of an attorney whose life and livelihood were wrecked by Ed Peters’ decision to “indict on a dare.”

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