Mississippi Judge Rescinds Own Guilty Verdict For Civil Rights Attorney Arrested For Filming Traffic Stop

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

Lexington police arrested Jill Collen Jefferson, who founded the grassroots group Julian in 2020, in June after she recorded officers performing a traffic stop.

Julian was already suing the police department at the time, and her arrest happened just nine days after the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division traveled to the small, predominantly Black city following multiple allegations of police abuse and excessive force.

Holmes County Justice Court Judge Marcus Fisher convicted Jefferson of multiple misdemeanors related to the incident on Jan. 31 after a bench trial.

But he rescinded his own verdicts in a one-page decision that mentioned only a “thorough review” of facts and evidence as a basis for the reversal.

Jefferson told local media she knew the verdict was going to be thrown out before her trial started. She noted she could tell Fisher did not write the verdict because he had trouble pronouncing the words.

In Fisher’s verdict document, he said he was “resending” the verdict instead of “rescinding.” Jefferson’s attorneys said they understand him to have meant “rescind,” but the court did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

“And when the trial was over and it was time for him to render his verdict, he read verbatim from that paper, even flipping 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, released a copy of