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STORY: "Appeals court orders new murder trial for Mississippi mother of four," by Senior Investigative Reporter Jerry Mitchell, published by Mississippi Today, on December 15, 2025. (The stories of investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell have helped put four Klansmen and a serial killer behind bars. His stories have also helped free two people from death row, exposed injustices and corruption, prompting investigations and reforms as well as the firings of boards and officials. He is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a longtime member of Investigative Reporters & Editors, and a winner of more than 30 other national awards, including a $500,000 MacArthur “genius” grant. After working for three decades for the statewide Clarion-Ledger, Mitchell left in 2019 and founded the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting.)
GIST: The Mississippi Court of Appeals has ordered a new murder trial for Tameshia Shelton, a 47-year-old mother of four who has long insisted on her innocence in the death of her sister’s boyfriend.
Judges vacated her conviction and ordered the new trial.
“After 10 long years in prison, it is time for Ms. Shelton, who did nothing wrong, to come home. The charges should be dismissed. If there is a new trial, the jury should hear all of the evidence, including the evidence of Ms. Shelton’s innocence that the original jury never heard,” Shelton’s attorney, Sandra Levick, said.
The Mississippi Attorney General’s Office has asked the judges for another hearing. Special Assistant Attorney General Barbara Byrd argued that the defense lawyer’s failure to put an apparent suicide note from the victim into evidence “does not reflect deficient performance.”
Courts cannot presume prejudice, she wrote. “This Court’s opinion nevertheless assumes the ‘potentially exculpatory’ letter would have been admitted, credited by the jury, and outcome-determinative. These assumptions are unsupported by the record.”
In 2024, Clay County Circuit Judge James Kitchens Jr. rejected Shelton’s request for a new trial, despite the state pathologist reversing his original ruling and saying the death was more likely a suicide.
The appeals court concluded Kitchens erred in denying Shelton’s request for a new trial. The court cited the pathologist’s reversal and the failure of defense lawyer Rod Ray to introduce the victim’s apparent suicide note into evidence at the murder trial.
Mississippi Innocence Project lawyers wrote that if it “offends the 8th and 14th Amendments to execute a person who could prove his actual innocence, then it offends the Constitution as well to consign her to prison for the remainder of her natural life for a crime she did not commit.”
“It’s been a long time coming,” said Shelton’s sister, Shenikia. “Finally, I feel like our voice is getting heard and they’re seeing that an injustice was done. We’re extremely happy, and we’ve been thanking God ever since.”
She said her sister is “very happy and very excited” at the news.
In 2015, a Clay County jury convicted Shelton of murder in the 2009 shooting death of her sister’s 21-year-old boyfriend, Danelle Young. Shelton, who was sentenced to life, won’t be eligible for parole until 2043.
The prosecution never presented a motive for why Shelton would have killed Young.
In April 2022, Kitchens presided over the last of three days of hearings over whether Shelton deserved a new trial. Those hearings revealed evidence never shown to the jury, including an apparent suicide note Young wrote.
In 2009, forensic pathologist Dr. Liam Funte ruled Young’s death a homicide, basing that decision on the trajectory of the bullet from the front of the chest to the back “without significant deviation to left or right.”
Under questioning byLevick, Funte said at the time he had not seen that in a suicide, but he said he has seen such cases since and was “leaning toward suicide.”
In reversing the original ruling, he cited scientific studies on bullet trajectories in suicides and homicides. In one study, more than 36% of suicides had bullet trajectories that did not deviate to the left or right.
After a verbal argument in which Shelton’s sister said she told Young that she didn’t want to live with him, Young walked to Shelton’s trailer.
Shelton told authorities she was already in bed with her infant daughter when Young knocked on the window of the trailer. She went to the front door, and she said he told her that he only needed one bullet to kill a raccoon.
She said she replied that he might need more than one bullet and loaded her small .22 pistol and gave it to him.
After she heard a shot and he failed to return, she said she went outside, found him collapsed on the gravel driveway and called 911.
In the autopsy report, Funte concluded Young had been shot in the chest and that the gun was fired from less than an inch away.
Both he and another forensic pathologist, Dr. Randall Frost, demonstrated at hearings how the small gun could fire a self-inflicted shot, following the same path the bullet traveled through Young’s body.
Funte said he would now rule the death “undetermined.”
Kitchens never addressed the apparent suicide note in his 15-page decision. In that note, Young wrote, “I have no life without her (Shelton’s sister Ketina). … These are my last words. … Tell (your daughter) Treasure about me one day. Bye. Bye.”
At the hearing, Funte testified that the note would have been relevant to determining the manner of death.
“Considering the potentially exculpatory nature of this letter, we find it difficult to conclude that its absence did not prejudice Shelton’s defense,” Chief Judge Donna Barnes wrote for the appeals court in its 7-3 decision.
In his dissent, Judge John Emfinger wrote that a study provided by Shelton’s lawyers actually supports Funte’s original opinion of a homicide. That study showed that 82.4% of suicides were shots to the head and 16.3% were shots to the chest.
“So, according to that study, looking at those numbers, if it was a suicide, it would have been much more likely to be a shot to the head than to the chest, correct?” Special Assistant Attorney General Jackie Bost II asked Funte at the hearing.
“Yes,” Funte replied. “According to the study.”
This is why the trial judge determined that Funte’s change of opinion and the evidence used to support the changed opinion didn’t support reversal of the case, Emfinger wrote.
The entire story can be read at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
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FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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