How a murder suspect walked out of prison
A group of prisoners stabbed Charles Gordon seven times on Nov. 20, 2022. After they thrust a contraband knife 8 inches into his chest, blood filled Gordon’s chest cavity, causing his lung to collapse. He was taken to a hospital 12 miles away, and he was dead within the hour.
Authorities chose to prosecute three men suspected of killing Gordon. Two of them pleaded guilty.
The third man is missing.
Even though prison officials appear to have believed that Jason Turner participated in the fatal attack against Gordon at Whiteville Correctional Facility in Tennessee, they let him walk out of prison a free man less than three months after Gordon was killed. In fact, the first time the Tennessee Department of Correction told the local district attorney about Turner or the crime, it had already released him.
Now Turner is wanted, and U.S. Marshals do not know where he is. Prosecutors say TDOC could have taken steps to ensure Turner was taken to a local jail after his sentence expired to be booked, charged with the crime and held under bail.
Understaffing, overcrowding at Tennessee prison
In Whiteville, Tennessee, more people live in a prison cell than not.
As of the 2020 census, 2,606 people lived in the town. There are more than 3,500 people serving time in two privately operated prisons.
Whiteville Correctional Facility and Hardeman County Correctional Facility are separated by a mile-long stretch of two-lane road. The prisons struggle with understaffing, like many correctional facilities in Tennessee, as well as violence and contraband.
Whiteville Correctional Facility was filled to 101% of its capacity as of May 2023, an audit showed.
A lawsuit brought by Gordon’s widow accuses CoreCivic – a private prison company that operates dozens of prisons and immigration detention facilities in the U.S. – of “serially underinvest (ing) in prison staff, security, and inmate healthcare at its prisons, leading to predictable and horrific results.”
CoreCivic noted that correctional facilities across the country are facing staffing challenges. It said in an email that the company works to “meet or exceed” daily staffing patterns, but it did not say if it succeeds at doing that. A 2023 audit of Tennessee prisons, both privately and publicly operated, found an “ongoing and deeply rooted challenge of attrition within their ranks.”
The lawsuit said that understaffing “allows contraband weapons – including knives – to go undetected due to resource constraints that preclude meaningful and regular searches for weapons to be completed.”
CoreCivic told The Tennessean that it takes “very seriously our responsibility to provide a safe environment for those in our care and our staff.”
Gordon had been in prison since November 2020, serving a 41⁄2-year sentence.
In September 2022, Gordon and three other incarcerated men were involved in an attack in Whiteville Correctional Facility in which two other men were stabbed, according to the lawsuit brought by his widow. TDOC identified Gordon as an aggressor but he “maintained that he was being robbed and had to defend himself,” the lawsuit said.
Gordon was 32 when he was killed.
Turner’s disciplinary file shows officials noted on the day of the attack against Gordon that he participated in the assault with a weapon, Davidson said. Agents with TDOC investigated the crime as a homicide.
At some point after the attack, Turner was transferred to West Tennessee State Penitentiary, a prison in Lauderdale County about 60 miles away, a TDOC spokesperson said. Turner’s 10year sentence expired on Feb. 15, 2023, and he was released from there.
TDOC said in an email it had no legal justification to hold Turner past his release date because there was no legal detainer placed on him. However, Davidson said TDOC could have taken out an arrest warrant for Turner, given that officials knew or should have known his sentence was ending soon, rather than waiting for prosecutors to take the case to a grand jury and return an indictment.
If that happened, after Turner’s sentence ended, he would have been transferred to a jail in Hardeman County and had his bail set by a judge, Davidson said. Instead, Davidson said TDOC did not tell his office about the crime until it handed over its investigative file sometime around June 2023. After the county’s next grand jury returned an indictment for first-degree murder in September 2023, Davidson’s office thought Turner was still in prison, he said.
Deputy U.S. Marshal Seth Bruce confirmed there is an active murder warrant for Turner.
Marlo Davis and Nicholas Warren pleaded guilty to aggravated assault resulting in death and received six-year and five-year sentences respectively in this case. Prosecutors declined to prosecute the other man, who is still incarcerated with a release date of 2040.