I got to tell ya, this woman won’t give up. And I love it. She’s back with a wonderful perspective, and the whisky and smoke voice to deliver the goods in thought and words. For those of you looking for a little more background on Tyler Edmonds’ amazing transformation from those who know him, please read the following letter from one of his biggest supporters:
THE REAL TYLER EDMONDS?
Hello, I am back. Thanks for posting my message to provide some additional perspective, which I am again feeling compelled to do 
.
Bad things don’t “just happen”???? Oh yes, they do. Sure they do…this happens all the time. Wake up! There is a whole world out there full of very diverse people and bad things are “just happening” to them all the time.
Regarding Tyler, I would have to say that “bad things just happened” to him
even though he did something incredibly dumb. Smart kid who did something dumb. People have a hard time understanding that, because they have lost touch with their own childhood. My 8 year old is very smart…gifted…she does dumb things all the time. I’m sure you did something incredibly dumb thing when you were a kid…I did.
We just had the protections of adults that Tyler should have had and did not receive.
Tyler, “bad”? Oh my gosh, you need to get to know this kid…he helped out with the special ed kids when he was in 7th grade…age 13…upon release,..age 19 spent this past summer helping a friend who suffered brain damage due to encephalitis…has been a friend to him.
Have you read his writing? He has become an excellent writer…his essay for his college psychology class on gang organization as illustrative of social psychology phenomena was first class…an A., His letters are gentle, gracious, generous, always trying to be thankful for “what he has”…while he is in adult prison with people getting raped and their heads smashed in all the time.
If you knew Tyler, and you said you don’t, but you should, you would know that the words “Tyler” and “bad” do not go together…those 2 words don’t belong in the same room.
His attorney is so fond of him, he let Tyler live with him for a while…considers him the son he never had. Got him a college scholarship. You attorneys don’t usually do that, do you? To do that, a kid would have to be mighty special, and Tyler is really just a regular kid, exceptional in some ways, but a regular kid. People are so fond of him and so proud of him for just staying alive and sane and good throughout this horrible nightmare. He had something special inside going in, and he hung onto that and kept it safe and protected, did not let the system take his sense of self away. He came out slightly disabled, but that something inside is still there…now he’s 19 and kind of a regular 19 year old…he uses curse words now, for instance …but yeah, a bad thing “just happened” after he made a very big mistake. .
Bad things DO “just happen.” Tyler did something dumb, but the *adults* were even dumber, and they were not 13!
These adults certainly contributed to the bad thing “just happening” to Tyler.
1. Voters in many states have allowed legislation to be passed so that your kid can be picked up by the police, asked if they would be willing to talk to them, brought down to the station, asked to waive Miranda rights, they go ahead and do that not knowing any better, then conduct a very leading interview that goes on for hours on end, and they DO NOT have to inform parents at all…all this can happen without the parents ever knowing…see case of Central Park jogger by Steven Drizn Northwestern University Law School. 5 kids confessed to raping the jogger…years later, all 5 cleared through DNA. What were they doing to promote this bad thing happening to them?….Well, they were in the park when the police came by…that’s it.
So, we have voters and legislators who do not know how the laws can impact kids, and this contributes to “bad things just happening.”
Tyler was this white kid, A/B honor roll, adored by teachers and this happened to him. How many not so caucasian, not so smart, not so well-liked kids are rotting behind bars because the law in many states does not recognize that kids are different from adults and need special protections….the very fact there is a law in every state about juveniles and Miranda Rights implies that they need special protection, but the way the law is written in about half the states, the law does absolutley nothing to protect. It’s this Totality of the Circumstances Test, which is never actually conducted, according to experts on that topic.
While I’m raging about law here ..for some crazy reason, in MS, the crimes of murder, rape, and burglary result in an automatic sentence of life without parole when a juvenile is involved….but not when the convicted person is an adult. When it’s a juvenile, there is nothing a judge can do to reduce the sentence….good example of how laws are not fair to juveniles…we have been in a Let’s Blame Juveniles for All the World’s Problems for some time now, and this allows bad things to “just happen.”
For instance, in the U.S., we currently have about 2,500 juveniles serving Life Without Parole Sentences…you will never believe how many juveniles there are in the rest of the world serving a sentence of a similar length….12…yeah, in the whole world combined.
So, in essence, we have things set up rather nicely for bad things to happen…assuming most of those 2,500 did contribute to their circumstances…but 2 other juvenile LWP convictions were overturned in MS last summer.
We are convicting juveniles and sentencingt them to LWP, but so many “mistakes” are being made, 2 more convictions were overturned in a summer?
The MS Supreme Court almost never overturns convictions…maybe one or 2 a year…The fact that there were 2 last summer is telling me that bad things, terrible things can happen…and unsuspecting juveniles are easy targets.
2. Bad things just happened to Tyler, because the sheriff wasn’t even there when he was brought in for questioning…He shows up for work about once every 2 weeks. The police use this Inblaugh Manual for questioning which, if you looked at it, would make you think you are living in Nazi Germany or Russia…there are excellent, reliable and valid guides available for police interviewing, but they like to do it Inblaugh Style in MS…use false evidence and such to get that confession…buddy up with the kid…act like a father figure.
.
This helps bad things to just happen when kids are suddenly in an unpredictable situation with no attorney present, and in Tyler’s case, a sister was assisting the police….how was she able to deliver him notes while he was in the jail telling him what to say and that he would just go to juvenile court but they would kill her if convicted?
He was set up for bad things to happen..
Bad things just happening…being born the younger half-brother to the most manipulative callous female on the planet who is the person, the only person, who will help you visit your father.
Not getting to visit/know your father…bad thing just happening…how would a kid contribute to that?
Tyler should have known he needed an attorney? Yeah, sure. We teach our kids that police are their friends…we need to respect those guys, so when they pull out the false evidence, as they did with Tyler (an alleged 8 page confession…handwriting on notebook paper) and say she said he did it, he thinks his goose is cooked for sure, might as well cooperate, he can be a little hero and save her, but if something goes wrong, his mom will just get it all straigthened out, because Moms are magic and can always do that., Research shows that juveniles believe the more you cooperate with police, the better your trial will go…plus, people have been telling them for years that the police are “helpers” and they are acting like helpers in getting you to confess…until you go to court and they testify against you or make statements to the press.
That’s being a kid…vulnerable not contributing to one’s plight.
When juveniles are “interviewed”…it usually is not videotaped, it is written by the police officer and the kid just signs…or, they tell the kid what to say and say, “sign here.” They construct the crime scene and the kid just agrees or disagrees..”Now, we already know you did this, so I’m just going to write that down, and we also know you did that, so I’ll include that, too…anything else you think I should add? Okay, sign here.” No kidding.
In Tyler’s videotaped confession, ..the officer demonstrates how he held the gun. “So, you were holding the gun like this…?” and this guy is a police officer, so he surely would know how to hold a gun, so the kid just says, “yes.” No attempt to negate the possibility that the confession was false, which is a standard component of police interviewing….for instance, seeing if he agrees with some statement that is known to be false..holding the gun in several different ways, some that would match the crime scene others that would not, .
I have seen the most abysmal police interviews you can imagine….the worst is their interviewing of young children about sexual abuse…they just lead the little kids straight through.
They use the Inblaugh method and a lot of leading questions, and this helps bad things just happen, for instance, adults being convicted of sexual abuse based on horrible police interviewing of a 4 year old child.
3. We have a judge who makes 5 serious “mistakes” in Tyler’s trial…State Supreme Court says this 13 year old received a “fundamentally unfair trial.” Judge recuses himself from case. Tyler did not arrange things so that he could have an unfair trial. He became a political prisoner…seriously, his attorney called him that. It’s not exactly clear why this judge behaved this way, but the appearance is that the judge and the DA work together to promote each others’ careers….in fact, this judge was fairly new to the bench, and his former boss, as in the person who was his supervisor the previous year and helped him get elected as judge, was Forrest Allgood, the DA.
So, things are set up for bad things to just happen so that a DA and a judge can work together to improve their chances of re-election and promote each others’ careers, and you can’t sue them or do much about that..
4. We have elected DA’s who can do anything they want…they run on the Get Tough on Juvenile Crime Platform, and so when time comes, they better get tough…forget about pursuit of justice…it’s all about conviction rates and re-election…
Main DA is a bulldog first trial, his assistant who went for the jugular cried when Tyler was sentenced to LWP…she conveniently quit “to spend more time with her children” a couple days before Tyler’s second trial was originally scheduled.
These DA’s are so hung up on getting their convictions, no matter what it takes they…..
5. use taxpayer money to pay the quack forensic expert, who didn’t even pass the state exam and is therefore not supposed to be conducting autopsies at all, and this guy was the “physician” whose horrible conduct led to the exonneration of a death row inmate this summer and another inmate who had life without parole…those guys had served 15 years…they were going to kill one of them…the DA and the doctor work together to make it so “bad things can just happen”…the quack doctor just makes things up to support the DA’s case…this is real, I am not making it up,..couldn’t possibly make something up like this…these guys cleared through DNA evidence….80 cases being investigated currently, two other juvenile convictions overturned this summer based on this doctor’s work..
Yes, yes, yes bad things can “just happen” especially if you are poor, uneducated, feeble, or young.
But, maybe you do have a point here in the case of Tyler. Bad, bad, bad, terrible, horrible, awful, traumatic things just happend to him…such a good kid…why?
I know him…I saw the whole thing…powerless to do anything about it…absoltuel agonizing and emotionally draining to watch him go through it year after year after year.
Why Tyler?
The best example I can think of involve’s Miissippi’s State Prison: Parchman…horrible place built, essentially, to keep revenue rolling when slavery was abolished….a slavery prison farm. Although it’s still really, really horrible, it was even more horrible many years ago, until…
….a white kid died of exhaustion while working out in the fields, essentially performing slave labor….former high school football player, young, well-liked. For once, investigators looked into it and how it was handled when a person passed out…just thrown in the back of a pick up truck to bake in the MS sun. The death of this young man led to reforms for the prison that benefitted all.
Because of Tyler’s case and the hard work of his attorney and support from his family and friends, miraculous change is taking place in MS…legislators are questioning the way laws are written concerning juveniles, the heinous doctor has finally been ousted after 20 years of frightening work, 80 cases of (most likely) wrongful convictions due to Dr. Hayne’s shoddy practice are being investigated, two other kids who likewise received unfair trials are getting a second chance to defend themselves and their lives.
The bad judge’s political career is OVER, but the DA and the sheriff’s department will get off, scott-free…unless there is some kind of legal means, for instance a lawsuit against the county, that will call attention to their roles in Tyler’s case.
You put all of this stuff together, and this is exactly how a very dumb mistake made by a kid can turn into a terrible, terrible, terrible thing “just happening.”
In my hometown, this never would have just happened…a completely different way of viewing adolescents. Not a lot of murders going on there, but had this case been handled in Brookings, SD, the law would have bent over backward, seeking to ensure in every way possible that something bad didn’t “just happen.”
Had Forrest Allgood thoroughly reviewed the transcripts of Tyler’s confession, he would have seen that the details in the confession do not add up and are not consistent with external evidence.
In his confession, Tyler said he saw blood on white sheets when the gun went off. Crime scene shows absolutely no blood at all, because the wound was to the back of the head and all blood rushed forward…the sheets weren’t white, they were tan with a paisley print. Case closed. Let’s fight some real crime instead of ruining some kid’s life.
A thorough investigation would have been a responsible thing to do, especially when the suspect was a 13 year old, and the charge was capital murder that comes with the automatic sentence for juveniles. I’m sure Mr. Allgood is a smart guy. However, that he, as DA, salary paid by taxpayers, did not make any reasonable effort to determine whether Tyler was actually guilty or not is totally irresponsible at best. But, this is not the first case in which Mr. Allgood failed to do a reasonable job and the consequences for the innocent suspects were dire: He was the DA in both DNA exonnerations that took place last summer.
Mr. Allgood was not satisfied with just a death penalty conviction for Tyler’s half-sister, he got greedy and decided he needed the LWP conviction for the kid, too.
If there was a mechanism or more of a mechanism or if the mechanism that exists for holding DA’s accountable for their actions was ever actually exercised, I would not be at all surprised if something “bad just happened” to Forrest Allgood because in that case, he would have definitely contributed to his own undoing.
However, when it comes to Tyler, something bad did “just happen,” but actually, it didn’t “just happen.,” Flaws in the law, shoddy police work, greed, desires for political power, and a fundamental misunderstanding of young people came together and something beyond belief “just happened.” . .
Oh well.
very, very good assessment. Judge Kitchens just got elected to the Supreme Court, so his political career goes on. Only in MS.
The DA made his usual and customary trip to Hayne and told him Tyler confessed to helping his sister pull the trigger so he had to come up with a theory to support the confession. Of course he gets paid dearly for that. So he came up with the “two fingers on the trigger” fantasy. In other words, he could tell by the bullet wounds that two fingers (different people’s fingers) were on the trigger. Kitchens let that kind of stuff into a trial. Now he is on the highest court in the state. The new judge (Lee I think) would not allow it. He only let Hayne testify to cause of death, a bullet wound. That is what Kitchens should have done if he had any integrity, morals or professionalism. But he didn’t.
Tyler was Hayne’s undoing. In the preposterous theory he put forth he cut off the limb he was teetering on. It was only a matter of time. He became so bold, and with the wrong kid, he buried himself. Now he’s suing the IP. Unbelievable.
Yes, bad things happened to Tyler Edmonds for all the reasons you lay out here. I have been supporting Brett Jones, another child who had bad things happen to him. His PCR application was Accepted by the MS Supreme Court and this summer was granted the chance to go back to trial court, a rare ruling indeed. Once he got an attorney who was qualified and who care, the truth was able to come out. We’ve had to jump through more hoops than Tyler because we are at a different stage of the proceedings. We’ve cleared 3. His conviction was affirmed by the Appeals Court in Sept, ’06 so we had many hoops to jump through just to get the opportunity to get back to trial court. Both cases are excrutiatingly exhausting and unnerving, maddening and draining on a daily basis and expensive. But it’s been infinitely worse for both Tyler and Brett who at very young ages have had to survive adult county jail and gladiator school known as Walnut Grove. Only 15 months apart in age, they were the 2 youngest thrown into the grove, juvenile maximum prison. Tyler was in 24/7 lockdown for his own protection, Brett chose to stay in the general population. It has taken a toll on him, but he is surviving.
Brett’s judge never ruled on the motion to suppress the confession therefore a “totality of the circumstances test” was never done. He claims he forgot and Brett’s attorney never reminded him. During the “cause of action” face of the trial his lawyer withdrew the motion. Says, it wasn’t that damaging. TOC is a safeguard left there to protect kids when these draconian and cruel laws were enacted giving children a sentence to die in prison, It is rarely used. The Youth Court Act is thrown out supposedly when a child commits murder, even though officially they are not charged until the Grand Jury indictment. That has been twisted and courts refuse to rule on it. Children are being abused by these harsh laws charging them as adults and no one is doing anything about it. Only in the U.S. do we do this. Bush refused to sign the Rights of the Child Treaty. He say Lwop is reserved for the worse of the worse, such as Tyler Edmonds and Brett Jones and 2,000 other evil children. Apparently only the U.S. and Somalia have evil children. That’s our claim to fame. Wow. I’m proud.
I feel your outrage here. I am outraged too. I am also helping another child in MS- Leon Trotter who was treated the same way as Tyler & Brett by the police. He is black and he will slip through the cracks no doubt. Hayne testified in his trial, his lawyer filed for discovery the day before trial. Needless to say the trial went forward and he was convicted with no investigation done by his lawyers and given lwop. His appeal just failed, which took 4 years to happen because the trial transcripts were never transcribed and not until the court reporter was threatened with jail time did she “find the tape” and transcribe them. Another instance of Mississippi justice against a teenager. His case is a mind boggling mess, but he’s black and no one will care. Every day I get up I face this shit. I’m a juvenile justice advocate and my heart aches every day seeing and reading about what has happened to kids in the adult system. A system they are not equipped to navigate; and most lawyers aren’t either when it comes to kids. Tyler’s sister was corrosive, and bad things did happen to him because of her.
Bad things happened to Brett also because he was young and niave and unfamiliar with the law and police tactics. He was interrogated without parent or lawyer present, gave an involuntary confession after being told he would “get the needle in his arm in a year if he didn’t confess”. He was told the police would go easy on him and his girlfriend if he confessed. He was coerced and threatened. He did not see a friendly face for weeks. He was charged with capital murder for trying to defend himself. Yes, bad things certainly do happen to kids put in situations that our laws allow and sanction. These laws charging children as adults are state sanctioned child abuse and our lawmakers have paved the way for bad things to happen to kids. Judicial review, guaranteed for juveniles, has been eroded. Mandatory adult sentences are the replacement. It’s sad.
http://www.myspace.com/savebrettjones
Well that sure was one, long, angry post and rightfully so. Many have been angry about what happened to Tyler for years and fought hard to win him his freedom. We also fought hard to change the laws and the legislatures that made them. We fought hard against corrupt judges and yes, the unqualified pathologist. Many there believed in our goal but were to scared to join in for fear of retaliation. After all, it is good ole’ boy country.
I have been by Tyler’s side since shortly after his arrest. He is now considered a member of my family. His faith in God, his family and those who have supported him gave him the strength to get through this. We provided him college courses in prison, sent books and did what ever we could to keep the juices flowing for freedom.
He wrote poems, drew beautiful pictures, wrote me letters signed always with smiley faces because he knew, I always ended our letters or phone calls with “Smile.”
He found a bunny outside a small window in his cell he yearned to watch and keep tabs on. He saved a bat stuck in the barbed wire and drew a safety poster for me for a Nuclear Plant that won in the contest. He waited patiently for over four years because we promised one day he would be set free.
That day has finally arrived.
The above poster is correct on all the issues he/she raised about why this happened to Tyler. It doesn’t only happen in MS, it happens all over. That is why I advocate, why I Administrate Justice For Juveniles, why I involve myself in children’s lives because if it weren’t for people like myself, these kids would be pushed through the cracks by the very people sworn to protect them.
It’s hard to get people involved. They don’t want to get involved or think it would never happen to them. It can and in Tyler’s case, it did. To many are warehoused for life while adults who commit the same crimes are offered freedom after their set term. It’s not fair, it’s not right and it’s the adults who make these laws that need to realize that children deserve MORE SO a second chance at life, redemption and rehabilitation than adult offenders do. After all, it’s the adults that mold and govern our children. Why should a child come second to any grown up?
Please visit http://www.justiceforjuveniles.org
Meet the other kids I speak of and the wonderful members from all over the country who work tiressly to save them. Trust in your ability to change a child’s life and to change our laws.
Keep close the inspirational words of Winston Churchill:
“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
Youth that are not guilty can not defend themselfs in an adult court.
myspace.com/triedasadults
The ‘New South’ law enforcement at work. Don’t get in trouble there or you’ll be railroaded.