As won’t surprise you, Joey Langston’s sentencing ledes all the major Mississippi papers today.
Seems it’s the season for software updates (‘ow you like ours, cherie?), and the Clarion-Ledger must have had one, since Jerry Mitchell’s story has all manner of new sidebar bells-&-whistles. Check ‘em out: not only Paul’s video but also a podcast of Kathleen Baydala, Chris Joyner, and Jerry discussing yesterday’s hearing in the context of Scruggs I/II (hey, it’s new — they’ll get better with practice), a pdf link to Joey’s remarks, and some kind of stats gizmo up top that it doesn’t look as if anybody’s played with yet. Good on the C-L for trying new tricks. And Jerry was apparently the only reporter to snag Judge Lackey:
The judge who reported the bribe in the Lafayette County case, Henry Lackey, worries what might happen to public perception of the judicial system if more indictments are handed down.
“I hope we are recovering from the fallout, but when the other shoe drops, as I expect it to do briefly, I fear it will impede what progress we have made,” he said.
Not sure what to make of that. My assumption that “briefly” here means “soonish” could be wrong, but mostly I wonder about his impeding-progress remark. Seems to me that getting all the sunlight we can on this set of crimes to finish the disinfection is progress. But apparently for Judge Lackey, professional mortification remains the main impression.
The Sun Herald must not have sent Anita Lee to Oxford; instead they run the AP’s write-up, with a Bruce Newman photo of Joey and Tony striding away from the courthouse.
At the DJournal, no new Patsy Brumfield story yet, but they do link the 17-page transcript.
If you missed Alyssa Schnugg’s story for the Eagle yesterday, it’s here, and the Eagle‘s homepage has another Bruce Newman photo of Joey in the courthouse lobby (maybe some of you locals can ID the bystanders for us?).
For the Daily Mississippian, Paul Quinn observes, “Many of the lawyers caught up in the judicial bribery scandal that rocked the Mississippi legal community are University of Mississippi Law School alumni. Scruggs and Langston also donated heavily to the law school.”
There you go, that’s a good one just to leave percolating . . .
