Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch told a Black family that when a jury is tied, “the benefit of the doubt goes to our law enforcement officers.” A Hinds County judge has now ruled that her office was showing exactly that: bias in favor of police.
Circuit Judge Faye Peterson refused the attorney general’s bid to permanently end the manslaughter case against Michael Lamar Rhinewalt, a former Capitol Police officer who fired the shot that killed Jaylen Lewis, a 25-year-old Black man from Jackson, in September 2022. A second trial could begin as soon as February, Peterson indicated.
Prosecutors said Lewis and his passenger did not know they were being stopped by police, because the officers were in unmarked cars, in plain clothes and wearing vests. Rhinewalt and a second former officer, Steven Frederick Jr., testified that they opened fire in self-defense after Lewis rammed a police vehicle and drove toward them.
In late September a Hinds County jury acquitted Frederick and deadlocked on Rhinewalt. Hours after the mistrial, Fitch’s office, which prosecuted the case, said it would not try him again. Peterson answered in writing: “The Court does not operate in (a) vacuum and is aware that on the date the case was announced as a mistrial, the Office of the Attorney General announced it would be abandoning its duty to pursue prosecution of this case due to a bias in preference of law enforcement rather than upholding the oath of the office to pursue prosecutions of cases without bias, sympathy or prejudice.”
The attorney general’s office then filed a request on Friday, Oct. 23 for a temporary dismissal instead. We have found no report of a ruling on that request.
This is what makes the case matter beyond Jackson. A September analysis described the indictment of these officers as rare among Mississippi police shootings. For Black families in Mississippi, where a police killing so rarely reaches a courtroom, a prosecutor walking away at the first hung jury closes the one door they had. A hung jury means twelve people could not agree. It does not mean a prosecutor may decide the matter alone, and decline to ask again, because the defendant wore a badge.
Arkela Lewis, Jaylen’s mother, said the ruling gave her “a little bit more faith.” She added: “It doesn’t give me peace, but I can breathe a little bit knowing that she’s speaking out for my family, for my son.” Jaylen’s father, William Drake, called the decision not to retry “political.”
The office has a fair point on one thing: retrying a case is a judgment call prosecutors make every day. But a judgment call needs reasons, and the one Fitch gave was that officers get the tiebreak. No Mississippi prosecutor should be allowed to run a justice system on that rule. Rhinewalt faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted, and Peterson has not yet said whether she will grant the temporary pause.
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