Anyone found guilty of manslaughter in Mississippi (or anywhere, for that matter) would naturally want their conviction overturned on appeal.
But most people don’t have the state attorney general backing them, much less when the local district attorney who prosecuted the case still wants the defendant behind bars.
So what’s different in the case of Anthony Fox?
He was a police officer, for one. Not only that but, as NBC News reported over the weekend, his case “pits a white Republican attorney general against a Black Democratic district attorney, both of whom are running for re-election this fall.”
The district attorney, Jody Owens, said the attorney general, Lynn Fitch, is undermining the jury that found Fox guilty last year. He was an officer in the state capital, Jackson, and was convicted of culpable negligent manslaughter in the death of a 62-year-old Black man, George Robinson.
In a remarkable brief on appeal, Fitch’s office said the evidence at trial “was insufficient as a matter of law to allow a rational juror to convict Fox of culpable-negligence manslaughter.” Sounding more like a defense lawyer than a tough-on-crime prosecutor, she said Fox, who is Black, “should never have been convicted and should not face another trial.”
In a stunning brief of his own, the Hinds County DA, Owens, said the state’s brief contains “factual misrepresentations” and “leaps in logic” such that Fitch’s office “has departed from its duty to represent the State of Mississippi, and instead, is zealously advocating for the interest of a convicted criminal defendant.”
In 2019, Fox and his colleagues, while searching for a suspect in a killing, supposedly spotted Robinson seemingly involved in a drug deal. Fox, with other officers, slammed the 62-year-old to the ground, NBC News reported.
Robinson died two days later from bleeding around the brain caused by “multiple blunt head injury,” an autopsy determined.
But despite his conviction by a jury, Fox received rare support from the state AG, Fitch, whose office handles criminal appeals. Indeed, while Fox is a “convicted criminal defendant” in the DA’s court papers, he’s referred to as “Officer Fox” in the AG’s.
And there are even broader issues at play.
Explaining those broader issues, NBC News cited NAACP President Derrick Johnson’s observation that Fitch’s actions should be seen as a preview of what could happen if a new law takes effect to create a state-appointed court to handle criminal cases in Jackson. The Justice Department endorses the NAACP’s challenge to the law, arguing that the Republican-backed measure discriminates against residents of Jackson, a majority-Black city, who would otherwise be served by judges they elect — hence curbing their voting power.
Speaking about Fitch’s support of Fox against the backdrop of the challenged law, Johnson told NBC News: “That’s what the rest of Jackson will be confronted with with the taking of local authority and home rule.”
Indeed, the notion of “local authority and home rule” could be seen as a conservative one, at risk of interference from meddling central planners. Thus, the Fox case highlights the lie behind the “law and order” credo — namely that it’s concerned with a strict application of the law, rather than to whom the law strictly applies.
To be sure, if there’s merit to Fox’s defense argument, then good for Fitch, who took office in 2020 and joined a failed lawsuit to overturn Donald Trump’s election loss. More recently, she successfully backed the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
To her credit, Fitch previously made the obviously correct choice to drop murder charges against Curtis Flowers, a Black man who was poised to be tried a seventh time by the same maniacal white DA, Doug Evans, for the same killings. After Flowers, who maintained his innocence, won his closely watched Supreme Court case in 2019 and Evans recused, Fitch’s office took over the case and dropped it. So in multiple ways, it wasn’t like Fox’s prosecution, where the attorney general is opposing the local DA while the case is on appeal.
Still, Fitch draws a through line between Flowers and Fox, her spokesperson, Debbee Hancock, told me in an email.
“She always sides with justice and when the facts mean an innocent man is in jail, like in the case of Curtis Flowers and the case of Anthony Fox, where the law and facts do not support prosecution, General Fitch has taken this bold step,” Hancock wrote.
The Flowers case was so problematic that any prosecutor should have come to the same conclusion. And again, if there’s merit to Fox’s argument, then any prosecutor should at least be keeping an open mind there as well.
Yet, when it comes to the full-throated defense Fitch is pushing for Fox, one would also hope she’d be doing so even if he hadn’t been a fellow member of law enforcement. But one wonders.
