The Scruggs Saga Comes Home To Hinds County

by Adam Lynch
Photos by Jaro Vacek
March 5, 2008

On June 11, 2005, Jackson Police Officer Jeffrey Middleton ran a red light on Highway 18 while coming back from Raymond. Middleton had no siren or police lights on at the time, and a cop car without a blaring siren is just another death machine when it decides to ignore a traffic signal. When Middleton slammed into a car making a turn under a green light, driver Desmonde Harris probably didn’t know what hit him—and certainly not that it was a man pledged to uphold the law.

Harris died immediately. The state charged Middleton with vehicular manslaughter with culpable negligence, a charge carrying up to 20 years in prison. 

Hinds County District Attorney Faye Peterson had Middleton in an ineluctable corner. The case was cut and dry. There were reliable witnesses. The work schedule and records were sound. That was definitely Middleton’s crushed car. That was certainly Harris’ car containing his crushed body. 

There was no getting around it: She had a tight case to put before a jury.

Knowing there was no room for either fight or denial, Middleton pled guilty to manslaughter, but then the policeman got a cushy deal from the state that, like Harris, he probably didn’t see coming.

Hinds County Circuit Court Judge Bobby DeLaughter virtually erased the plea by placing Middleton on probation for two years and withholding adjudication. In short, he refused to prosecute Middleton or put him before a jury that might not be so understanding.

Middleton was suddenly free and now immune from prosecution for Harris’ death. DeLaughter’s decision took away the possibility of another trial, with a different jury, with a different judge. Middleton was getting probation for wrongfully running a light and killing a man.

Enraged, Peterson howled, refusing to sign off on the court’s decision not to prosecute.

Last spring, DeLaughter refused comment to the Jackson Free Press regarding the suspicion of his ties to the defendant’s attorneys—former District Attorney Ed Peters and Tommy Mayfield, who worked as an assistant district attorney alongside him during Peters’ administration.

“I won’t discuss in the realm of the media a case that should be worked out in a courtroom,” DeLaughter told the Jackson Free Press for a story that appeared April 4, 2007.

In retrospect, perhaps Peterson shouldn’t have been too astounded. Stick around in one place long enough, and you start to grow roots, and former District Attorney Ed Peters—once her boss—has been around a long time. His style has raised questions from lawyers across the aisle from him over the years. But now, thanks to the twisting, dirty corruption saga surrounding Oxford attorney Dickie Scruggs, questions about Peters’ judicial successes are going from quiet whispers to central exhibits in prominent court cases.

A trail of legal documents, and testimony, has begun to tell a new story. Suddenly, Faye Peterson—who was defeated last November by a candidate coached and pushed by her former boss Peters—is no longer a lone voice publicly expressing doubt about Hinds County’s historical system of justice.


Dickie’s Growing Shadow
The developing Scruggs case—which keeps casting new shadows on a near-weekly basis—is emboldening more people to speak up about cases in which Peters, and his former assistant district attorney-turned-judge, was involved. 

“Very serious questions have been raised—and circulated throughout the entire country—about the relationship of Ed Peters and Judge DeLaughter. In this circumstance, the public interest in seeing that justice has been done impartially requires that the successor judge review these issues,” wrote attorneys for Jeffrey Frisby in a Jan. 24, 2008, motion for stay of discovery. Frisby is a defendant in a trade secrets lawsuit that Mississippi company Eaton Aerospace filed against Frisby Aerospace, of North Carolina. Eaton alleges former employees snatched trade secrets for military contracts from Eaton and handed them over to their new employer—an Eaton competitor.

Frisby wants discovery in his case suspended until a successor judge can review DeLaughter’s treatment due to Peters’ involvement.

(A federal grand jury has since indicted the former Eaton employees over the same allegations, though no date for the criminal trial has been set as of Feb. 29.)

Frisby’s lawyers indicate they have plenty of suspicion to draw upon in their argument for a stay of discovery, now made plain by the ongoing indictment against Scruggs, who headed the Katrina Group—attorneys who sued insurance companies over Hurricane Katrina claims. That battle began when former State Auditor Steve Patterson (who had resigned his state post in 1996 after pleading guilty to misdemeanor tax fraud regarding a license plate) pled guilty last year to attempting to bribe Lafayette County Circuit Court Judge Henry Lackey. Lackey supposedly approached federal authorities with the news of the purported bribe and worked with them in gathering evidence supporting the accusation.

Patterson’s guilty plea, which he submitted to U.S. District Court in Oxford, was a veritable monster, fresh off the lab table and lurching down the mountainside to the unsuspecting village of Hinds County. Patterson said the $40,000 bribe was an endeavor to obtain a favorable ruling in a $26.5 million suit against Scruggs regarding a dispute over Hurricane Katrina litigation fees. The Department of Justice indicted Scruggs, his son Zach and Patterson, along with attorneys Tim Balducci and Sid Backstrom in the Lackey case last November.

Ed Peters was one of the original Katrina Group attorneys, alongside Scruggs, Patterson, Balducci and others. 

A well-known Balducci quote from the FBI indictment, possibly recorded through a phone tap or personal wire hook-up to Lackey or his office, depicts Balducci saying about Scruggs: “[H]e and I, um, how shall I say, for over the last five or six years there, there are bodies buried that, that you know, that he and I know where … where are, and, and, my, my trust in his, mine in him and his in mine, in me, I am sure are the same.”

Attorneys say there’s a big difference between Balducci promising bodies and Scruggs revealing said bodies.

In the meantime, Balducci is aiding the prosecution in gathering more dirt on Scruggs and those purported “bodies.” The trial is set for the remaining defendants on March 31.

The Mississippi Bar is withholding action against Scruggs, since he has not suffered conviction at this point, though the bar has asked the Mississippi Supreme Court to terminate Langston’s and Balducci’s law licenses.


A Local Burial Ground?
Hinds County Circuit Court could prove to be a burial ground for at least one of Scruggs’ “bodies,” according to The Clarion-Ledger, which connected Peters to Scruggs in a Dec. 16, 2007, story via a U.S. Attorney search warrant apparently leaked to the paper. The warrant sought “documents related to the Hinds County case, as well as documents regarding payments to Jackson lawyer Ed Peters, who played no known role in the case.”

Scruggs’ attorney, Joey Langston, soon added plenty to the federal case, particularly regarding Peters. Langston—known for helping bag $115 million for the state of Mississippi in 2005 in a suit against defunct telecommunications giant WorldCom for back taxes—initially defended Scruggs against the Lackey indictment, but wound up dumping the case and coming forward with his own guilty plea. Incredibly, Langston told authorities he had his own shady connections to Scruggs, and pled guilty to dangling a special kind of bribe before Hinds County Circuit Judge Bobby DeLaughteron behalf of Scruggs.

The indictment states: “From on or about January of 2006 and continuing until on or about March of 2007 … the defendant Joseph C. Langston, did knowingly and willfully conspire with Richard ‘Dickie’ Scruggs, Steven A. Patterson … and with others both known and unknown … to attempt to influence state Circuit Court Judge Robert ‘Bobby’ DeLaughter by providing a thing of value, that is, favorable consideration of Robert ‘Bobby’ DeLaughter for appointment to the federal district court bench in the Southern Judicial District of Mississippi, to obtain rulings in favor of Richard ‘Dickie’ Scruggs in the lawsuit styled Wilson v. Scruggs pending before Judge DeLaughter.”

Scruggs allegedly was preparing to make use of his connection to former U.S. Sen. Trent Lott—who announced he was retiring his senatorial post Nov. 26, 2007. Agents stormed Scruggs’ office with a search warrant Nov. 27, 2007. Lott is Scruggs’ brother-in-law, and Balducci said Lott went so far as to call DeLaughter on his brother-in-law’s behalf. Balducci also testified in February that Lott told DeLaughter he would put him on the list of potential candidates for the judgeship if he granted Scruggs a favorable ruling.

Lott has denied any involvement in the case and told reporters that his resignation had nothing to do with the brewing case against Scruggs. The Biloxi Sun-Herald reported this month, however, that both the defense and prosecution in the federal case against Scruggs plan to call Lott to the stand to speak on Scruggs’ past behavior if U.S. District Judge Neal Biggers Jr., gives them the go-ahead.

Scruggs has not yet been indicted in the DeLaughter case, and neither has DeLaughter, despite the implication of Langston’s plea. Scruggs himself denies any attempts at buying influence over any judge, and DeLaughter denies that he took any bribes.

The Langston indictment (again, to which Langston pled guilty) further accuses Langston and his co-conspirators of traveling “on several occasions from the Northern District of Mississippi to Jackson, Mississippi, for the purpose of engaging a close personal friend of Judge DeLaughter as a ‘consultant’ to assist them in the case of Wilson v. Scruggs.”

Langston specifically pled guilty to delivering $50,000 in cash in December 2005 to DeLaughter’s close personal friend “for the purpose of retaining the close personal friend to influence Judge Robert ‘Bobby’ DeLaughter.”

According to that same indictment, Langston admitted that around January 2006, Scruggs, Langston and the other co-conspirators agreed that if the Wilson v. Scruggs case “was resolved in (Scruggs’) favor” that Langston, Patterson and DeLaughter’s “close personal friend” could split the savings Scruggs would earn as a result of the favorable ruling.

The indictment charges that Langston, Patterson and the “close personal friend”—which it identified as Ed Peters—split $3 million saved by the case settlement between July 2006 and July 2007.

“… Langston, working with Balducci and Steven A. Patterson, contacted and retained the services ofEd Peters, a close personal friend of Judge DeLaughter. For his services, Langston agreed to pay Peters $50,000 in cash. After paying the $50,000, the parties agreed that they would also divide any money over and above what Scruggs was willing to pay in the Wilson matter,” the indictment states. “In the end, based on this reverse contingency fee, Peters received an additional $950,000 for his services.”

DeLaughter has not returned calls to the Jackson Free Press, but has denied the allegations to other reporters.