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Attorney for 11-year-old Mississippi boy shot by police says there’s ‘no way’ he could have been mistaken for an adult | CNN

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Attorney for 11-year-old Mississippi boy shot by police says there’s ‘no way’ he could have been mistaken for an adult | CNN




CNN
 — 

An attorney for an 11-year-old Mississippi boy who was shot by a police officer after he called 911 for help said Thursday there was “no way” the boy could have been mistaken for an adult.

The attorney, Carlos Moore, is asking for “a full and transparent investigation” of the shooting.

Aderrien Murry is recovering after being released from the hospital, according to his family, who has called for the officer to be fired and charged with the shooting. The boy is traumatized and will require counseling, according to family attorney Carlos Moore.

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Aderrien was shot in the chest by an Indianola Police Department officer early Saturday morning while the officer was responding to a domestic disturbance call at the child’s home, according to his mother, Nakala Murry, and the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation.

Moore told CNN Thursday there is “no way” the boy could have been mistaken by the officer for the adult who was the subject of the 911 call – a man “over 6 feet tall.”

“This 11-year-old child was about 4 feet 10 it looks like and so he could not have been confused,” Moore said. “So we don’t know what happened, but we do know this officer’s actions were reckless, very reckless, and could have led to the loss of life.”

Moore said the boy “did everything right” the morning of the shooting and described him as “a good student” who obeyed his mother’s request that he call the police for assistance.

“No child should ever be subjected to such violence at the hands of those who are sworn to protect and serve,” Moore said in a statement earlier Thursday.

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“We must demand justice for this young boy and his family. We cannot allow another senseless tragedy like this to occur. We must come together as a community to demand change and accountability from our law enforcement officials.”

The circumstances of the shooting are under investigation.

Moore, the boy’s mother and others held a sit-in protest Thursday morning at Indianola City Hall. A march and rally to demand the firing of the officer and the release of body-camera footage is planned for Saturday.

“We are demanding justice,” Moore said outside City Hall on Thursday morning before the sit-in. “An 11-year-old Black boy in the city of Indianola came within an inch of losing his life. He had done nothing wrong and everything right.”

CNN on Thursday attempted to reach the police chief and other officials at the Indianola Police Department but was told they were not available.

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The boy was seriously injured and suffered a collapsed lung, fractured ribs and a lacerated liver from the shooting. He was released from the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson on Wednesday, hospital spokesperson Annie Oeth said.

“He still has lots of questions,” Moore said of the boy on Thursday. “He is emotionally distraught. He is glad to be alive.”

Murry said her son is “blessed” to be alive and is asking why the police shot him.

Murry told ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Thursday that arriving officers yelled “Open the door, open the door,” and when she opened it, an officer outside was holding up a gun, telling her to come outside.

Murry told the show she stepped outside and walked toward the end of a driveway, where her mother was, and then “heard a shot and I saw my son run out towards where we were.” He then fell, bleeding from a gunshot wound, she said.

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The officer who fired the shot told her that he had shot Aderrien after he came around a corner, she told the show.

Moore told CNN he met Aderrien in person for the first time on Thursday and described him as being “in good spirits” but “still shocked about what happened.”

He added, “He is afraid of the police. He is still in pain.”

Moore said the police department has yet to contact the boy’s mother.

Murry told CNN that the “irate” father of another of her children arrived at her home at 4 a.m. Saturday.

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Concerned about her safety, Murry asked Aderrien to call the police.

Murry said the officer who arrived at the home “had his gun drawn at the front door and asked those inside the home to come outside.” Murry said her son was shot coming around the corner of a hallway, into the living room.

“Once he came from around the corner, he got shot,” Murry said. “I cannot grasp why. The same cop that told him to come out of the house. (Aderrien) did, and he got shot. He kept asking, ‘Why did he shoot me? What did I do wrong?’” she said.

The shooting happened within what felt like “one to two minutes” after the officer asked those in the house to come outside, Murry said.

The boy was given a chest tube and placed on a ventilator at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson. He had a collapsed lung, fractured ribs and a lacerated liver because of the shooting, his mother said. He was released from the hospital Wednesday. CNN has reached out to the hospital.

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Two other children, including Murry’s daughter and 2-year-old nephew, were also in the home at the time of the shooting, she said.

Moore told CNN the incident was captured on police body camera video.

The attorney said his request for the body camera footage was denied due to “an ongoing investigation.”

Moore said he was told there is also video of the incident from a nearby gas station.

The Indianola Police Department confirmed that the officer involved in the shooting is named Greg Capers but did not provide any additional details on the shooting, telling CNN the police chief was unavailable.

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CNN reached out to Capers for comment but did not immediately hear back.

On Monday evening, the Indianola Board of Aldermen voted to place Capers on paid administrative leave while the shooting is investigated, according to the family attorney.

In a statement over the weekend, the MBI said the agency is “currently assessing this critical incident and gathering evidence” and would turn over its findings to the state attorney general’s office after the investigation is complete.

On Wednesday, MBI spokesperson Bailey Martin declined to answer additional questions, telling CNN in an email, “Due to this being an open and ongoing investigation, no further comment will be made.”

CNN has contacted the District Attorney’s Office for the Fourth Circuit Court and the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office for comment.

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Murry said that after her son was shot, she placed her hand on his wound to apply pressure as he “sang gospel songs and prayed while bleeding out.” The officer, she said, tried to help render first aid and placed his hand on top of hers to try to stop Aderrien’s bleeding.

When an ambulance arrived, medics were “very attentive,” she said.

“Aderrien came within an inch of losing his life,” Moore said. “It’s not OK for a cop to do this and get away with this. The mother asked Aderrien to call the police on her daughter’s father. He walked out of his room as directed by the police and he got shot.”

Murry said police told her that her daughter’s father was taken into custody later in the day on Saturday but eventually released because she had not filed a police report against him.

“When was I going to have time to do that? I was in the hospital with my son,” she said, reacting to the news of the man’s release from custody.

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Four days after the shooting, Murry told CNN that “no one came to the hospital from the police station” nor had she spoken to any police investigators about the shooting.

“I’m just happy my son is alive,” she said through tears.

Moore told CNN that he is furious that Capers remains employed by the Indianola Police Department.

“We believe that the city and the officer should be liable to Aderrien Murray, for the damages they have caused,” the attorney said.

Indianola is a small, mostly African American town with 31% of the population below the poverty line. It lies in the Mississippi Delta, about 100 miles north of Jackson.

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Mississippi

Attorneys want the US Supreme Court to say Mississippi’s felony voting ban is cruel and unusual

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Attorneys want the US Supreme Court to say Mississippi’s felony voting ban is cruel and unusual


By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court should overturn Mississippi’s Jim Crow-era practice of removing voting rights from people convicted of certain felonies, including nonviolent crimes such as forgery and timber theft, attorneys say in new court papers.

Most of the people affected are disenfranchised for life because the state provides few options for restoring ballot access.

“Mississippi’s harsh and unforgiving felony disenfranchisement scheme is a national outlier,” attorneys representing some who lost voting rights said in an appeal filed Wednesday. They wrote that states “have consistently moved away from lifetime felony disenfranchisement over the past few decades.”

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This case is the second in recent years — and the third since the late 19th century — that asks the Supreme Court to overturn Mississippi’s disenfranchisement for some felonies. The cases use different legal arguments, and the court rejected the most recent attempt in 2023.

The new appeal asks justices to reverse a July ruling from the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which said Mississippi legislators, not the courts, must decide whether to change the laws.

Stripping away voting rights for some crimes is unconstitutional because it is cruel and unusual punishment, the appeal argues. A majority of justices rejected arguments over cruel and unusual punishment in June when they cleared the way for cities to enforce bans on homeless people sleeping outside in public places.

Attorneys who sued Mississippi over voting rights say the authors of the state’s 1890 constitution based disenfranchisement on a list of crimes they thought Black people were more likely to commit. A majority of the appeals judges wrote that the Supreme Court in 1974 reaffirmed constitutional law allowing states to disenfranchise felons.

About 38% of Mississippi residents are Black. Nearly 50,000 people were disenfranchised under the state’s felony voting ban between 1994 and 2017. More than 29,000 of them have completed their sentences, and about 58% of that group are Black, according to an expert who analyzed data for plaintiffs challenging the voting ban.

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To regain voting rights in Mississippi, a person convicted of a disenfranchising crime must receive a governor’s pardon or win permission from two-thirds of the state House and Senate. In recent years, legislators have restored voting rights for only a few people.

The other recent case that went to the Supreme Court argued that authors of Mississippi’s constitution showed racist intent when they chose which felonies would cause people to lose the right to vote.

In that ruling, justices declined to reconsider a 2022 appeals court decision that said Mississippi remedied the discriminatory intent of the original provisions in the state constitution by later altering the list of disenfranchising crimes.

In 1950, Mississippi dropped burglary from the list. Murder and rape were added in 1968. The Mississippi attorney general issued an opinion in 2009 that expanded the list to 22 crimes, including timber larceny, carjacking, felony-level shoplifting and felony-level writing bad checks.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a 2023 dissent that Mississippi’s list of disenfranchising crimes was “adopted for an illicit discriminatory purpose.”

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AP Decision Notes: What to expect in Mississippi's judicial runoff elections

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AP Decision Notes: What to expect in Mississippi's judicial runoff elections


Voters in central Mississippi and the Delta and Gulf Coast areas will return to the polls Tuesday for a runoff election to resolve two state judicial races in which no candidate received the required vote majority in the Nov. 5 general election



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Mississippi Supreme Court balance of power at stake in upcoming runoff

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Mississippi Supreme Court balance of power at stake in upcoming runoff


JACKSON, Miss. (WLBT) – Four of Mississippi’s Supreme Court Justices were up for re-election this year. Two of those had opponents. One lost in the general election and the other is going to a runoff.

The outcome of next Tuesday’s runoff could change the overall balance of power on the court.

Michigan State University College of Law Professor Quinn Yeargain explains that nonpartisan elections make it tough to get a sense of the ideology of state supreme courts.

The best way to get a glimpse of how the court leans is to look at previous decisions. Yeargain pulled six notable cases to examine.

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“In recent years the Mississippi Supreme Court has been more of a far-right court or very conservative court than a moderate-conservative court,” noted Yeargain who is a state constitutional law scholar.

He created a color-coded chart with pink indicating more conservative decisions and green the more moderate ones.

“And so a lot of the decisions that it has reached have been or have had a tendency to be a little bit more extreme, more deferential to the state legislature, more deferential to the governor, less willing to recognize individual rights and liberties, less willing to believe that the government has isolated peoples, individual rights and liberties,” said Yeargain.

The more conservative opinion won out in all of the example cases. But one of those four justices that leaned that way every time referenced is now being replaced. Justice Dawn Beam was defeated by Gulfport lawyer David Sullivan.

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“There’s still a lot that will need to be learned about the ideology of the new justice,” Yeargain noted.

Then there’s this runoff for Central District 1 Position 3 with Jim Kitchens and Jenifer Branning.

“Justice Kitchens has been more willing to hold the government to account, to express skepticism about the nature of what the government is doing, and how it is acting,” he said. “But Senator Branning, for example, has been in the government. She has been one of these actors and I think it’s fair to conclude that she might be more deferential to the legislature or to the Governor in how she approached her rulings.”

Yeargain notes that it’s not to say that would be the case for Branning.

He hopes voters will do research about the positions of the judges before returning to the polls for the runoff.

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