State pushes to execute Willie Jerome Manning before year’s end after key witness recants, claiming coercion
A key witness' retraction and DNA evidence could prove Willie Jerome Manning's innocence in a 1992 double murder, his defense team says—even as Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch is pushing to have him executed before year's end.
In 1994, an Oktibbeha County, Miss., court sentenced Manning, then 26, to death on two counts of first-degree murder for the 1992 shooting deaths of Mississippi State University students Tiffany Miller and Jon Steckler just outside of the Starkville campus.
Manning and his defense team filed for post-conviction relief on Sept. 29 in an attempt to stop his execution, citing the fact that a key witness now says he lied when he told a former sheriff that Manning privately confessed to the murders.
“There's newly discovered evidence also undermining his conviction,” Mississippi Office of Capital Postconviction Counsel Director Krissy Nobile told the Mississippi Free Press on Nov. 20. She joined Manning's defense team around a year ago.
Manning is now 55. Police have never recovered the gun used to kill the couple.
Fitch asked the Mississippi Supreme Court to set execution dates for Willie Jerome Manning and another death row inmate, Robert Simon Jr., within 30 days in a court filing on Nov. 9. The court has not yet responded to the request.
Key witness recanted testimony
Earl Jordan, a cousin of Willie Jerome Manning and an inmate who previously served his sentence alongside him at Mississippi State Penitentiary, told police that Manning confessed to him that he had murdered Tiffany Miller and Jon Steckler. But Jordan retracted his testimony earlier this year and said he lied to get a lighter sentence.
Voisin said Jordan was afraid of former longtime Oktibbeha County Sheriff Dolph Bryan and went along with what the sheriff suggested to stay on his good side.
“But since that person's no longer in office, he no longer has that same fear,” Voisin said. “So, this did not become available to us until recently.”
Jordan gave his sworn affidavit in Madison County on Sept. 29.
“I testified against Willie Manning in his trial for the murder of two college students in Starkville, MS. I testified that Manning confessed to me. … My testimony was not true,” the affidavit said. “My statements to the sheriff about Manning's confession were also not true. Manning never told me that he killed anyone. When I spoke to the sheriff about what Manning supposedly told me, I was in jail and could have been charged as a habitual offender. The sheriff never came out and told me directly that he would help me with the charges, but he had a way of making it clear that he would help me out if I helped him with Manning. The sheriff said he knew I could be charged as a habitual offender and that time was running out. I talked to the sheriff about four or five times. The sheriff told me the way he thought Willie had done the murder, and I changed some words to the way the sheriff said he thought it happened.
“The sheriff was satisfied. I was not charged as a habitual offender, and I also received some reward money,” the affidavit continues. “Over the years, Manning's lawyers came to ask me about my statement, but I always told them that I was not going to give a statement. I was afraid to tell the truth. But Dolph Bryan is no longer the sheriff. I am telling the truth now.”
When the Mississippi Free Press called Bryan on Nov. 22 to ask about the allegations that he had coerced Jordan into testifying that Manning had confessed to the murders, the former sheriff told this reporter to “have a nice day” and ended the call.
Debunked forensics and untested hair samples
Willie Jerome Manning and his defense team raised issues with his trial and the investigation to the Mississippi Supreme Court in 2013, but the justices dismissed their arguments. David Voisin, one of Manning's lawyers, told the Mississippi Free Press that, in 2019, prosecutors based part of their case on the fact that investigators found strands of hair at the crime scene and in Miller's car that they said came from a Black person.
“And the prosecutor was trying to prove, you know, ‘Here's the hairs from a Black man and there's the defendant, a Black man,'on top of everything else,” Voisin told the Mississippi Free Press on Nov. 20.
“The FBI since then refuted that type of analysis and said, ‘You can't do that, it's just not scientifically valid,'” he added. Voisin has been Manning's lawyer for over 20 years.
Examiners use a highpowered microscope to compare hair samples from a crime scene with a hair sample of a particular person. The examiner looks for similarities in the hair and deems it a match if a sample appears to be from the same person.
But in 2015, the FBI'S Microscopic Hair Comparison Analysis Review found that 26 of 28 FBI hair examiners, or around 93%, committed errors while testing hair samples. The federal government had found about 3,000 cases at that time in which FBI agents testified at trial or gave reports using microscopic hair analysis.
“These findings confirm that FBI microscopic hair analysts committed widespread, systematic error, grossly exaggerating the significance of their data under oath with the consequence of unfairly bolstering the prosecution's case,” Innocence Project Co-director Peter Neufeld said in an April 20, 2015, press release.
Manning's defense team and the State agreed to submit the hairs to a lab for mitochondrial testing in 2019, but the lab could not determine the DNA because the samples were too old and had worn away over time, Voisin said.
The lawyer said the team had since found a lab that specializes in mitochondrial analysis with a “90% rate of developing profiles” and asked the court for permission to send the hairs to the lab. But Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch said no and the court agreed with her, saying the team had already submitted the hairs to another lab and could not send them again, Voisin said.
“For years—since 2019— he (Manning) has possessed full or partial DNA profiles for five hairs from the victims' hands,” Fitch's office said in a statement to the Mississippi Free Press on Nov. 17. “He has never used these results to seek relief and has never presented to any court a comparative DNA analysis using those results. Instead, he has sought more testing.”
Nobile said Manning has always claimed his innocence and wanted to test crimescene evidence for DNA.
“Manning has always wanted to test any and all DNA available, especially the hair DNA that another lab can test and develop mitochondrial DNA from, and it was the attorney general that opposed that. … And the state agreed with the AG,” Nobile said.
‘Consistent pattern of desperate people lying’
Tiffany Miller and Jon Steckler's murders are not the only ones prosecutors have pinned on Willie Jerome Manning. About five weeks after the Miller-steckler murders, someone murdered 90-year-old Emmoline Jimmerson and her 60-year-old daughter Albertha Jordan at their Starkville, Miss., apartment during an attempted robbery on Jan. 18, 1993. A Starkville jury convicted Manning of the murders and the court sentenced him to death for those, too, in July 1996.
In February 2015, the Mississippi Supreme Court reversed the verdict in that case and set a new trial. But the Oktibbeha County district attorney dropped the charges against Manning for Jimmerson and Jordan's murders on April 21, 2015. This case is unrelated to Miller and Steckler's murders.
Voisin said he believes some witnesses also gave false testimony against Manning in the Jimmerson-jordan double murder trial to get their records expunged.
“There's a consistent pattern of desperate people lying (in Manning's case),” he said.
The State has not filed a formal answer to Manning's postconviction relief request. Voisin said Manning's defense team has not heard back from the Mississippi Supreme Court about the post-conviction relief request.
Robert Simon Jr.’s Case
In addition to pushing for Willie Jerome Manning's execution, Fitch is also pushing for the Mississippi Supreme Court to schedule Robert Simon Jr.'s execution. In October 1990, a jury convicted Simon on four counts of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death for the February 1990 murders of Carl, Bobbie Joe, Gregory and Charlotte Parker in Quitman County, Miss.
The murders were not connected to the Oktibbeha County murders. Simon filed for post-conviction relief several times between 1998 and 2002, but the court denied those motions.
Simon was found unconscious in his cell on Jan. 7, 2001, and spent a few days at the hospital in the Mississippi State Penitentiary, court records show. The prison chose mentalhealth experts to examine him.
Simon was previously set to be executed in May 2011, but the 5th U.S. Circuit of Court of Appeals in New Orleans panel stopped the execution, citing the need for a mental evaluation. He said he suffered from amnesia after a fall and should not be put to death.
In 2015, U.S. District Judge Sharion Aycock said in a ruling that she believed Simon was faking amnesia, did not have a history of mental illness and had not suffered a traumatic brain injury. His efforts to appeal the decision failed.
Fitch's Nov. 9 motion argues that “no legal impediment exists” to executing Manning or Simon and that the court should set execution dates because both men have “exhausted all state and federal remedies.”