Senatobia's "Justified" Verdict Was Reached With the Evidence Locked Away

Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch declared on Monday that the police use of force in the June 14 shooting in Senatobia was “justified.” Martin Zummach, the lawyer for the officer who fired, went further: Latoya Ferrell tried to kill his client, and the officer had no choice but to fire his weapon.

An armed state agent killed a one-year-old sitting on his mother’s lap. The state’s top lawyer has called it justified. The video that would show what happened sits in a drawer. That is the relationship on trial — a toddler, an officer’s firearm, a state that has already reached its verdict, and evidence the public is not permitted to see. Everything else is commentary.

Follow the benefit. A “justified” verdict issued without disclosure is cheap to produce and expensive to challenge, and three parties hold the receipts on what it is worth. Zummach’s client — the officer who fired — walks through his account untested by a single frame of video, his version of events carried into the record as fact because no competing version has been allowed to exist. Fitch’s office closes the most scrutinized police shooting in the state without producing a document anyone can contest. And the Senatobia police institution — the department that fired its white chief last month after text messages surfaced in which he repeatedly used racial slurs — gets to bury a killing that happened on Juneteenth. The secrecy serves them. It does not serve the public, which is the only party to this proceeding with no lawyer at the table and no copy of the record.

Here is what is established. Police were called to a Walmart after a report that diapers and baby clothing had allegedly been stolen. Officers arrived to find Vellesiya Wiley, Ferrell, and Wiley’s one-year-old son, Kohen, walking toward a car. Kohen was on his mother’s lap in the passenger seat. The vehicle was allegedly driven at an officer and nearly struck him. One officer opened fire, killing Kohen and critically injuring Ferrell. Neither Wiley nor Ferrell has been charged. Wiley has denied that either woman was stealing and has said she lifted her son from her lap so officers could see the child was there before the gunfire struck him.

Now the arithmetic the state does not want performed. The autopsy places the fatal round as coming from the side of the car, not the front. Zummach says the car came at his client. Those two accounts do not sit comfortably together, and only one of them is being tested anywhere — and it is not the one written by the medical examiner. The body-camera footage and the parking-lot CCTV have been in state custody since June. Fitch’s office reviewed the case and issued its ruling without releasing a frame. That is not the behavior of an institution holding evidence that vindicates its agent. That is the behavior of an institution holding evidence it has already read and knows it cannot survive publication.

Benjamin Crump, the Wiley family’s lawyer, rejected Fitch’s finding and demanded release of the footage. “How can anyone accept that conclusion,” Crump asked, “when Kohen’s family and the public still have not been allowed to see the body-camera footage?” The question answers itself, and it has been answered before — protesters have been asking it since June. The state’s answer, four months on, is an adjective.

Consider what the state is asking this country to accept. A call about baby clothes. A child too young to walk reliably, on his mother’s lap. A single officer’s firearm discharged into a passenger compartment. A state investigation that produces the word “justified” and produces no evidence. Two women, both Black, uncharged and unreconstructed — not exonerated, not accused, simply held in the position where their account matters least. And a police department that a newspaper had to force into firing a chief for racist text messages, now entrusted with the sole custody of the recording that would tell the country whether race shaped this shooting on the day the nation marks the end of slavery.

That is not a transparency failure. Transparency failures are what happen when an institution is careless with records. This is an institution that knows precisely where the record is, precisely what it shows, and has calculated that the cost of releasing it exceeds the cost of refusing. The calculation is correct so long as nobody names it. So I name it: the footage is withheld because releasing it would test the official account against the only evidence that can test it — and the state has already seen the result.

This is what concentrated power does when it is cornered by its own documents. It does not destroy them, not anymore. It simply declines to produce them, issues its conclusion, and waits for the news cycle to accept the conclusion as the fact. The word “justified” is doing the work the video was supposed to do. In a country where the state monopolizes lawful lethal force, an official adjective issued over sealed evidence is not a finding. It is a claim of immunity.

The arc does not bend on its own, and it has never bent toward a verdict handed down in a locked room. But it bends when the people of Senatobia keep asking, as they have since June, for the one thing the state cannot produce without consequences. It bends when a family refuses to accept an adjective in place of a record. It bends when the specific demand is made specific — not for better policing, not for training, not for a review board, but for the recording. Give us the recording. If it vindicates the officer, the state loses nothing but its secrecy. If it does not, the state loses exactly what it should. Kohen Wiley was one year old. He was on his mother’s lap. The evidence exists. Release it, or admit what the withholding means.