HUFFINGTON
02.03.13
DOUBT
The defensiveness and nonchalance
of Mississippi officials over the possible
wrongful conviction, imprisonment and
execution of innocent people is troubling
enough. (Neither Hayne nor Hood’s office responded to an interview request.
The Huffington Post was unable to reach
West.) But the Kathy Mabry case shows
that the harm Hayne and West have
done goes deeper still. The same problems that have allowed for the conviction
of innocents have also left brutal crimes
unsolved, leaving those affected to grieve
and worry, with little hope of closure.
“Good people live here. They deserve
to feel safe,” Roseman says. “I took
it personal.”
And there’s another corresponding
harm when the innocent are implicated:
The guilty often go free. Indeed, Kathy
Mabry’s murderer went on to kill again.
FRONTLINE
‘THIS IS YOUR MAN’
Julie Mae Wilson last saw her daughter
on Saturday, March 22, 1997, around 7
p.m. “She had just cooked up some fish
for the boys and said she had to go out
for a while,” Wilson says. “She said she’d
be back in an hour or so. I never did see
her again.”
Wilson has lived in Humphreys County all her life. The drive down historic
Highway 61 from Memphis, Tenn., slices
through the harsh, agrestic beauty for
which the lower belly of the Missis-
Medical Examiner Steven Hayne.
sippi Delta is known. There are scenes
of crushing poverty, gooey marshes and
quiet bucolic landscapes. The route
south backtracks the great black migration of the middle of the 20th century,
when Delta sharecroppers traveled upriver in pursuit of better lives in Detroit,
Indianapolis and Chicago. Like its neighbors, Humphreys County lost a good
chunk of its population then, and still
grows smaller with each census.
Wilson and her husband, now deceased, spent most of their working lives
in the cotton fields. The two had eight
children, including Mabry, and led the
typically hardscrabble lives of black farm
workers in the civil rights era.
Today, cotton has given way to a new
business, catfish: raising them, processing them, eating them and celebrating
them. Two-thirds of America’s farmraised catfish are grown within an hour
of Belzoni. It’s home to the World Catfish
Festival and the “Miss Catfish” pageant.
The downtown features a collection of