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As those following the developments in the Scruggs cases know, Ed Peters was the former district attorney in Hinds County for decades and mentor to Judge DeLaughter, who was an assistant district attorney under him.  Attorney Joey Langston has told the prosecutors that he used Ed Peters as an intermediary in a scheme to illegally influence Judge DeLaughter in the Wilson v. Scruggs case.  We have just learned that Ed Peters has surrendered his law license, which strongly suggests he has cut a deal with the federal prosecutors (a deal that has been rumored for at least a year).

I’m going to post some things from the Mississippi Supreme Court about Ed Peters. It is strong stuff, and at times very offensive. It’s also very contentious– there are a lot of people (including lawyers, and worse, judges) who, viewing Ed Peters as an effective prosecutor, seemed really willing to turn a blind eye to the kind of thing I am talking about here. But I think it is an important part of the picture, and so here it is.

The point I am making here is that to a great degree, Peters was flying the pirate flag– he was playing to win, and didn’t really care what the rules were. He violated rules– against appeals to race, or commenting on the defendant’s failure to testify– that every lawyer knows. In these cases, it was easy for some to ignore because he was aggressively prosecuting “the bad guys.” But look back at what happened to Keith Shelton, and think about the recent triumph by the Mississippi and Louisiana Innocence Project in Cedric Willis’s case in which Peters and his assistant Bobby DeLaughter ignored exculpatory DNA evidence and proceeded to try an innocent man anyway.

So I want to talk about some of the tactics Peters used, because I think that this sort of thing is an important part of what’s wrong with him, and highlights problems with the system.

In the first case, Herring v. State, 522 So.2d 745 (Miss. 1988), Peters made remarks that the Mississippi Supreme Court called “utterly reprehensible.” Here they are (with emphasis added by the Mississippi Supreme Court):

BY MR. PETERS:
And, so, the question comes down-just as I asked you on the opening day of this trial-can you put race aside? Can you white members vote for a fair verdict? Can you black members vote for a fair verdict? You and I know there are people in this county and this state and this city that would say-you are wasting your time. You can’t have a jury with eight black people that are gonna vote for life for a black person raping a white person. Time will tell.

No matter if you’ve got his fingerprints all over the house. No matter if she’s beaten. No matter if her vagina is bruised and torn. No matter if her room is torn up. No matter if her door is forced open. You just can’t get any black people who are gonna vote for life against a black defendant who does that to a white person, You are not-

At this point (finally) there is an objection from the defense lawyer. The court said: “We uniformly condemn and roundly denounce such scurrilous tactics. ”

In West v. State, 485 So.2d 681 (Miss. 1985), Peters made an unambiguous comment on the defendant’s failure to testify, and then, in closing arguments, argued that a child witness would live in fear if there was no death penalty although the jury heard no such evidence. The Mississippi Supreme Court, reversing, said:

The argument of the district attorney was blatantly inflammatory and outside the evidence before the jury. Although the court sustained the objection and instructed the jury to disregard the comment, he overruled the motion for a mistrial without having first determined as a fact from the jury that they could disregard this argument. The court then, rather than asking and requiring an affirmative promise from each of the jurors that they could disregard the argument, simply concluded by their silence to his question whether they could disregard the argument, that “apparently ” they could.

It is doubtful that this line of argument could have been erased by the most conscientious effort on the part of the circuit judge. The perfunctory treatment of the highly prejudicial comment in this case gives no comfort of removing the prejudice.

In Stringer v. State, 500 So.2d 828 (Miss. 1986) the court described a Peters argument, and noted: “We deplore this practice.” In Griffin v. State, 533 So.2d 444 (Miss. 1988), the court noted that comments by Peter “were wholly out of line, a matter which all should take note.” After frustration over Peters’s attitude toward the rules of discovery, in one case the court stated that his office “seem to ignore or skirt” the rules in a “seemingly deliberate attempted avoidance of discovery” and threatened to sanction “those who ignore this important and fair rule” if the violations did not stop. That’s in Kohlberg v. State, 704 So.2d 1307 (Miss. 1997).

That’s not my whole “Ed Peters” file, it is a decent sampling.

This is not “standard stuff”– prosecutors– particularly those in the largest city and capital of the state– are not singled out for this kind of treatment. It is not just a matter of his longevity, or the kinds of cases he prosecuted. And the toleration of this behavior by the trial court in Hinds County also strongly suggests a problem.