Constable to alter plea in gun case
A Phillips County man elected constable last year despite being a felon has indicated in court papers filed this week that he’ll change his plea in a federal gun case.
James Weldon King, 51, is scheduled to appear in federal court Dec. 13 to make the plea change in a case that accuses him of illegally hoarding unregistered automatic rifles, as well as possessing firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition while being a felon.
King’s plea change comes about 10 months after he pleaded innocent to one count of being a felon in possession of a firearm and another count of possessing an unregistered firearm, according to a court order entered Tuesday.
A federal grand jury handed up the charges in February, after FBI agents found that King had been carrying a gun since his election as the constable of St. Francis township last year despite having been convicted of two felony counts of grand larceny in Jackson County, Miss., in the mid-1980s.
On Jan. 30, federal agents went to King’s house to serve a search warrant, and he greeted them at the door in his pajamas with a .25-caliber pistol strapped to his ankle.
After agents took the gun from him, they said they found buckets of ammunition, numerous loaded firearms and several partially assembled machine guns in violin cases scattered around King’s home.
Agents also said they found at least nine unregistered fully automatic rifles in three large plastic tubes that appeared to have been buried at some point. The tubes were unearthed in a storage room attached to the rear of King’s house, according to court papers.
It is legal to own automatic firearms registered with the federal government before 1986. And it is also legal to transfer those guns to other owners using the registration process, but federal agents have testified that King had not done so.
Regardless, they said, his felony conviction would have made it illegal for him to possess any firearms. An agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has also testified that even if King hadn’t been a felon, some of the weapons recovered from his home couldn’t be possessed legally because their barrels were shorter than lawfully allowed.
King was charged only with possessing the .25-caliber pistol that agents took from him during his arrest and a single fully automatic AK-47, but prosecutors have sought forfeiture of all firearms they said were recovered from his property.
In a filing last month, prosecutors listed nearly 60 firearms in various stages of assembly, including several handguns, shotguns, lever-action rifles and at least 20 “machine guns” of various calibers.
The list also included five AK-47s identified as machine guns and a .50-caliber single-shot rifle that federal prosecutors listed as having an “unknown manufacturer.”
Despite his felony past and state law barring felons from holding public office, officials in the Phillips County clerk’s office said Thursday that King is still considered a constable because he’s never formally resigned or been removed by court order.
King has been jailed by order of a federal magistrate judge since his arrest after prosecutors presented evidence that he had been arrested at least 11 times on misdemeanor charges since his felony conviction and that he was mentally unstable.
During testimony at an earlier hearing concerning King’s mental state, an FBI agent said King made paranoid comments during his arrest, including expressing his fear of people in helicopters shooting at him near his Phillips County home.
Under federal law, King faces up to 10 years in prison on each charge.