State Rep. Kevin Horan, the defense attorney for Sheldon Timothy Herrington Jr., filed a motion in the Lafayette County Circuit Court on Nov. 28 to dismiss Herrington’s indictment on the charge of capital murder in the case of the death of Jimmie “Jay” Lee.
On July 22, 2022, Herrington was arrested by the Oxford Police Department and initially charged with Lee’s murder — however the charge was elevated to capital murder in the grand jury indictment on March 28, 2023.
According to the indictment, Herrington violated section 97-3-19(2)(e) of the Mississippi Code, or murder during the commission of a felony. The grand jury charged Herrington with murdering Lee while he was engaged in the act of kidnapping.
Horan’s motion to dismiss claims the indictment failed to include the statute for kidnapping, citing 14.1(c) of the Mississippi Rules of Criminal Procedure, which requires the indictment to state each provision of law that the defendant is alleged to have committed.
In the state of Mississippi, anyone found guilty of capital murder faces the possibility of the death penalty.
A decision on the motion has not been filed in the Mississippi Electronic Courts documentation system.
Jury selection for the trial is expected to begin on Monday, Dec. 2 outside Lafayette County. The decision to select the jurors from another county — which has yet to be released — was made by Luther in August after Horan filed for a change of venue, citing the amount of pretrial media attention the case had received.
After the jurors are selected, the rest of the proceedings are set to take place at the Lafayette County Courthouse. It is unknown how long jury selection will take. Jury selection could take multiple days, pushing the beginning of proceedings in the Lafayette County Courthouse to later in the week.
Lee was a 20-year-old who graduated from the University of Mississippi in 2022. He was last seen on July 8, 2022, at approximately 6 a.m. as he was leaving his apartment at Campus Walk just off of Jackson Avenue. Lee had driven away from his apartment, and his car was later found at Molly Barr Apartments. Although his body has yet to be recovered, Lee has since been declared dead. Lee was a prominent figure in the Oxford-Lafayette LGBTQ+ community.
In addition to the motion to dismiss the indictment, on Nov. 14, the defense filed a “Daubert Motion to Exclude the Testimony of the State’s Expert Angela Fletcher and Motion in Limine to Exclude or Limit any Offered Testimony of Elaine McKinney.”
Angela Fletcher is the Special Operations K-9 handler for the DeSoto County Sheriff’s Department, according to the motion. The Daily Mississippian could not identify Elaine McKinney in the context of this case.
While a hearing on the motion was scheduled for Nov. 25, an order by Circuit Court Judge Kelly Luther states that the defense and the prosecution, led by District Attorney Ben Creekmore, reached an agreement on Nov. 21 stating that “no testimony or other evidence regarding the purported detection of human remains shall be elicited from any witness during the State’s case in chief at the trial in this matter.”
The motion does not state the reason why the defense and prosecution came to this agreement.
According to Mississippi Today, cadaver dogs provided by the DeSoto County Sheriff’s Department found the scent of a dead body four times in Herrington’s apartment on July 22..
During the preliminary hearing on Aug. 9, Horan repeatedly asked Oxford Police Department detective Ryan Baker if OPD had reviewed the training DeSoto County gives its cadaver dogs, to which Baker responded that he had not.
Editors Note: The original article stated that proceedings at the Lafayette County Courthouse were expected to begin Dec. 3. This article was updated to reflect that the length of jury proceedings is unknown and could push the start date of proceedings at the Lafayette County Courthouse to later in the week.
