Former Kentucky Sheriff Indicted for Murdering Judge in Chambers
Shawn “Mickey” Stines, 43, the former Sheriff of Kentucky’s Letcher County, was indicted by a grand jury on November 21, 2024, for the murder of state District Judge Kevin Mullins. The 54-year-old judge and then-Sheriff Stines had just finished lunch with a group on September 19, 2024, when they returned to Mullins’ chambers in the County Courthouse and Stines allegedly shot him to death. The former Sheriff then retired on September 30, 2024.
Surveillance footage played for the grand jury captured Stines as he hunted down the judge, who was hiding behind his desk, shooting him repeatedly; the Sheriff then began to leave but turned back to shoot the judge a few more times. Immediately before the shooting, Stines had reportedly demanded and gotten Mullins’ cellphone, using it to place a call to Stines’ daughter and then trying again to contact her on his own phone. Testimony presented to the grand jury showed it was not the only call from the judge’s phone to Stines’ daughter, who was not named.
Defense attorneys didn’t deny that Stines executed the judge, arguing instead for a manslaughter charge due to an “extreme emotional disturbance” that he was suffering. Stines’ replacement, Billy Jones, was sworn into office on October 1, 2024. Stines was denied bail and remains in the Leslie County Jail. His attorneys also argued that the shooting is connected to a deposition that the former Sheriff gave in a civil case filed by a woman molested by former Deputy Ben Fields, who dangled favorable incarceration terms to extort sex from her in Fields’ chambers, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, June 2022, p.62.]
Fields, 38, was convicted in June 2024 of third-degree rape and sodomy, plus second-degree perjury and witness tampering; he received a five-year sentence, with a month in jail and the rest to be spent under supervision. Attorneys for his victim, Sabrina Adkins, lost a bid to wrest the deposition from state Attorney General Russell Coleman (R) on August 28, 2024, when the federal court for the Eastern District of Kentucky ruled that Coleman was immune from her civil suit. See: Adkins v. Fields, 2024 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 158804 (E.D. Ky.). If that deposition is released during Stines’ trial, it may prove crucial to Atkins’ recovery, too.
Source: CNN, Louisville Courier Journal
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