Many locals may be puzzled — even frustrated — by the outcome of the second murder trial of a young Natchez man accused of gunning down another teen in December 2014.

The shooting of 16-year-old Jessie Taylor rocked our community when it occurred. The shooting was just days after Christmas.

It was one in a string of senseless, difficult to fathom acts of violence our community has witnessed in the last few years.

Police quickly identified suspects and uncovered what they believed happened. Taylor, investigators said, was trying to buy synthetic marijuana when he rode his bicycle to Beaumont Street.

Investigators say when Taylor arrived, the source and an accomplice headed inside a house, but rather than retrieving goods, they instead retrieved two pistols.

Prosecutors believe the main criminal in the case was a young man named Eddie Minor III, 19. On Friday, a jury convicted him of armed robbery, but could not agree on whether the prosecution has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Minor killed Taylor.

What exactly happened when the three met on the streets is subject to debate. A co-defendant, Emanuel Latham Jr. , who is 17 years old, testified that Minor was the mastermind of the shooting and that he merely participated after the shooting started.

Minor’s defense painted a picture of a botched investigation by the Natchez Police. It was the same tactic used in the November 2015 trial that also ended in a mistrial after the jury could not reach agreement.

This time, it seems, the prosecution managed to convince jurors that Minor did, in fact, rob Taylor at gunpoint. Minor was sentenced to 35 years in prison for the charge.

We’re a nation of doubters. Our leaders — and prospective leaders — regularly twist the truth or just outright lie about things.

Americans from all walks of life have begun to distrust authority. It’s been that way for years and years — perhaps forever in some cases.

Sadly though, such outright, blanket questioning of authority leads to great struggles for criminal investigators and criminal prosecutors.

All a good defense attorney must do is poke around and find the one or two things that may have been dropped by investigators and wave them wildly in the air as proof that a reasonable doubt exists.

They should not be blamed. Providing an aggressive defense to their clients is their job.

But it is no wonder that prosecutors and investigators struggle to convince 12 jurors that someone did a crime without having the crime occur on video with three or four cameras capturing the act from various angles.

We doubt everything.

Look no further than the credibility scores our two leading party candidates for president earn.

Each candidate is not trusted by more than half the population. How can it be that our nation’s top selections to lead the country are so disliked? Because neither is trustworthy.

That spills over into all walks of our lives and it seeps down into credibility and trust concerns for many Americans over our judicial system. The juries in both of Minor’s murder trials did their jobs and did what they were told — weighed the evidence and made the best decision they could make, with what was presented them.

I have to wonder if the same case were tried 15 or 20 years ago, however, would the outcome be different?

Have we become more jaded and less trusting as a country? It certainly seems that way.

 

Kevin Cooper is publisher of The Natchez Democrat. He can be reached at 601-445-3539 or kevin.cooper@natchezdemocrat.com.