Jackson Free Press

Attorney General Jim Hood wants the state of Mississippi to kill two more men next month.

Last week, Hood asked a court to set back-to-back execution dates for Larry Matthew Puckett and William Gerald Mitchell on March 21 and March 22, respectively.

Puckett's death sentence resulted from his August 1996 conviction for the murder, rape and sexual battery of Rhonda Griffis, his former boss' wife. He appealed his case to the Mississippi Supreme Court, which, in 1999, ordered a lower court to determine why prosecutors excluded four African Americans from Puckett's jury pool. Forrest County Circuit Court Judge Richard McKenzie determined that prosecutors did not discriminate against the black jurors. Puckett is white.

The Supreme Court ultimately denied Puckett post-conviction relief in 2004 over his arguments that one of the members of his jury did not speak English, that jury members socialized with law enforcement, that the judge's allowing Griffis' children to testify prejudiced the jury and that he was not allowed to present character witnesses in his defense.

Then, in 2008, the Mississippi Innocence Project raised new questions about Puckett's conviction, partly because his trial included testimonies from Dr. Steven Hayne, the state's former forensic pathologist and Dr. Michael West, a dentist who served as Forrest County coroner at the time of Puckett's trial.

Both doctors were widely discredited. The American Academy of Forensic Science Ethics Committee suspended West in 1999, according to a 2008 Associated Press report, while doubts about thousands of autopsies Hayne claims to have performed over 20 years led to his firing in 2008 as Mississippi's medical examiner.

Mitchell's death sentence came in 1998. Harrison County law enforcement officials charged Mitchell for the beating, death and rape of store clerk Patty Milliken in November 1995.

Court records show that Milliken and Mitchell left the Biloxi store together to smoke a cigarette around 8 p.m. on Nov. 21, 1995. The next morning, Milliken's body was found. "She had been beaten, strangled, sexually assaulted both vaginally and anally, crushed by a car, and mutilated," a court document states.

In his post-conviction motion to the state Supreme Court, Mitchell made a number of claims, including that his lawyer failed to present evidence that Mitchell was mentally retarded during the sentencing phase of his trial.

The high court rejected Mitchell's request for relief in 2004. Of his mental retardation defense, Justice Michael K. Randolph wrote: "The record shows that Mitchell served four years in the military and attended college at Mississippi Valley State University for one semester.

"A clinical psychologist interviewed Mitchell for two hours after his arrest for murder in 1974. Dr. Donald Mathorne wrote that 'it was obvious that the patient had at least average intellectual functioning and a significant deficit in cognitive functioning was not noted during the interview."

Previous Comments

ID

167188

Comment

What questions were raised by the Mississippi Innocence Project? The article implies that Dr. Haynes and Dr. West gave questionable testimony during the trial, but it doesn't give the readers any specific information.

Author

Bill Morone

Date

2012-03-02T04:57:24-06:00