A Lafayette County circuit judge ended an attempt to prosecute Sheldon Timothy Herrington Jr., the son of a prominent north Mississippi church family who is accused of killing a fellow University of Mississippi student named Jimmie “Jay” Lee, for evidence tampering.
In a March 7 order, Kelly Luther wrote that Herrington cannot be charged with evidence tampering because of the crime’s two-year statute of limitations. A grand jury indicted the University of Mississippi graduate last month on the charge for allegedly hiding Lee’s remains in a well-known dumping ground about 20 minutes from Herrington’s parent’s house in Grenada.
“The Court finds that prosecution for the charge of Tampering with Physical Evidence commenced outside the two-year statute of limitations and is therefore time-barred,” Luther wrote.
In order to stick, Luther essentially ruled that the prosecution should have brought the charges against Herrington sooner. In court last week, the prosecution argued that it could not have brought those charges to a grand jury without Lee’s remains, which provided the evidence that evidence tampering occurred.
The dismissal came after Herrington’s new counsel, Jackson-area criminal defense attorney Aafram Sellers, filed a motion to throw out the count. Sellers did not respond to a request for commend by press time.
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