A court has rejected the appeal of a man convicted of murdering and sexually assaulting a 10-year-old Columbia girl in 1993.
James Earnest “Squirrel” Watts is serving life without parole, but the 51-year-old had argued the law only allowed him to be sentenced to life with the possibility of parole.
However, the Mississippi Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that there was no error warranting reversal.
The body of Vanessa Lumpkin, a third grader at Columbia Primary School, was discovered on Dec. 20, 1993, in a wooded area near a stream between the Hendricks Street Apartments and Rest Haven Cemetery, according to C-P reports from the time. Family said at the time they believed she was abducted while sleeping at her grandmother’s home the night before.
It was the first case in Marion County where DNA was used to get a conviction, prosecutors said. Investigators found blood on Watts’ jacket that matched the victim’s.
He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1996. The Mississippi Supreme Court upheld the conviction but reversed the death sentence, saying the trial court had not properly instructed the jury on the three sentencing options in capital murder cases: death, life without parole and life with the possibility of parole. The jury was told it only had two options: death or life with the possibility of parole.
At the time the crime was committed in 1993, the law only allowed for death or life with the possibility of parole. However, between the time of the crime and the trial, the law changed in 1994 to allow for life without parole.
During resentencing in 1999, Watts accepted a plea deal for life without parole. He is serving his sentence at the Marshall County Correctional Facility in Holly Springs
Watts filed a motion in 2017 to modify his sentence, saying the law only permitted him to be sentenced to life with the possibility of parole. Marion County Circuit Judge Anthony Mozingo rejected it, and he appealed to the state Court of Appeals.
In a nine-page handwritten brief, Watts, who was representing himself in the case, makes an array of legal arguments. Among them is that the state parole board has the exclusive authority for granting parole and, thus, his sentence of life without parole was illegal.
However, the Court of Appeals said the State Supreme Court previously determined that a defendant can waive his rights and “knowingly enter into an agreement to be sentenced to life without parole in order to avoid the death penalty.”
A three-judge panel made the ruling, and the rest of the court unanimously concurred.
