Friday, May 5, 2023, 5:02 pm News Flash Archive

This morning, federal judge Sharion Aycock entered an order dismissing the lawsuit filed by Priscilla Sterling against Leflore County Sheriff Ricky Banks last February.

The court's action was in response to Ms. Sterling's attorneys' request that the lawsuit be dismissed, due to the April 25th death of Carolyn Bryant Donham, who was the subject of the lawsuit.

Ms. Sterling had asked the court to order Sheriff Banks to arrest Mrs. Donham, based upon an arrest warrant issued in 1955 against her, her husband Roy Bryant, and J. W. Milam, for the kidnapping of Emmett Till, a fourteen year old black youth.

Bryant and Milam were soon indicted and acquitted in the barbaric, gruesome murder of Till, to which they later admitted in an interview with a Look magazine reporter.

The unserved arrest warrant was discovered in early summer 2022 in the basement of the Leflore County court house, and some insisted that it should now be served on the 88 year old Mrs. Donham.

To read our original reporting on the lawsuit, see here: Emmett Till relative asks Federal Court to force Leflore County Sheriff to arrest Carolyn Donham in the kidnapping of Emmett Till

It was long suspected by some that Carolyn Donham may have been complicit in the kidnapping of Till, by helping her husband identity him as the young man who, she claimed, whistled at her in their store in Money, Mississippi.

However, nobody could ever prove Donham's complicity.

In Sheriff Banks' motion to dismiss the lawsuit, the fatal legal flaw was fully laid out: in fact, there have been no actual charges pending against Mrs. Donham since the first grand jury to consider the kidnapping charges refused to return indictments in November 1955.

Since then, two additional grand juries have convened (2007 and 2022) to consider the evidence against Mrs. Donham and others, but both have refused to issue indictments against her. Several United States Department of Justice and FBI investigations also failed to find any evidence to pursue a prosecution of Donham.

The Leflore County District Attorney W. Dewayne Richardson told one court recently that the intervening grand jury refusals to indict Donham render the 1955 arrest warrant moot. It cannot be served, since there are no longer any charges pending against Donham.

To read Sheriff Banks' motion to dismiss the lawsuit, see here: Leflore County Sheriff Ricky Banks asks the federal court to dismiss complaint in the Emmett Till Arrest Warrant Case

In spite of all this, Sterling's attorneys informed the court this morning:

Plaintiff, Priscilla Sterling will continue her fight for justice on behalf of the Emmett Till family pursuing legal action to get detailed answers as to why Carolyn Bryant [Donham] was never pursued [or] prosecuted for her actions against Emmett Louis Till by Mississippi authorities.

But since the mid-2000s, Donham was pursued, exhaustively, by both state and federal authorities, who could not find evidence sufficient to charge or convict her of complicity in the horrific crime.

It would have been legally impossible for Banks to arrest Donham before she died, since there were no pending charges, and extradition of Donham back to Mississippi would therefore have been impossible.

While her whereabouts were thought to be somewhere in Tennessee or Kentucky, in the end, Donham died in a hospice facility just outside St. Charles, Louisiana.

Today's Plaintiff's Motion to Dismiss may be seen here: Plaintiff's Motion to Dismiss

Today's Order of Dismissal may be seen here: Order of Dismissal with Prejudice

Ms. Sterling was represented by Black Lawyers for Justice attorneys Malik Z. Shabazz of Greenbelt, Maryland, and Trent Walker of Jackson.

John Pittman Hey
The Taxpayers Channel

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