YAZOO CITY - Yazoo County District Attorney James Powell III is no stranger to high profile capital murder cases. But perhaps none have caught the nation's attention quite like his latest challenge has.
Powell is preparing to prosecute a man accused in the violent St. Valentine's Day murders of three members of a Mississippi family, which made front pages and network newscasts last month.
In his Yazoo City office, where stately homes border rows of shotgun houses, Powell recalled the most vicious criminals he has prosecuted in his three-county district of about 70,000 people in the Mississippi Delta.
Now, his attention is focused on Ernest Lee Hargon, who is accused of capital murder in the shooting death of his cousin, Michael Hargon, and the strangling of Michael Hargon's wife, Rebecca, and 4-year-old son, who were from the Vaughan community in Yazoo County.
The family was missing for two weeks before their bodies were recovered March 1 in rural Covington County. The father had been shot, his wife and child strangled.
Hargon faces an April 19 preliminary hearing.
And while Powell, 49, said he has a strong case thanks to a tireless investigation by a team of law enforcement officers, experience has taught him that the outcome of a criminal case is never certain until the verdict is read.
Powell recalled the two times he prosecuted Elliot Culp.
Culp was acquitted in the 1995 robbery and murder of 64-year-old Mary Roberts after he was accused of beating the woman to death with a pipe wrench when he was only 13 years old.
Powell said Culp's acquittal came despite strong evidence and taped statements by witnesses.
"He was kind of like a thorn in my side and we were waiting for someone else to have to die before we could get something done," he said.
A few years later, someone else did die. Culp was charged with capital murder in the March 2000 slaying of 15-year-old Texas runaway, Allen Scott. He was also accused of beating and stabbing Scott's 17-year-old pregnant girlfriend.
A jury rejected a capital murder charge but convicted Culp on counts that included aggravated assault, armed robbery and rape. He was sentenced to 60 years.
"He should have been convicted on the first one, and the second one wouldn't have happened," Powell said. "That's why it was more difficult. … We had to go through two deaths instead of one to get him where he needs to be."
In another perplexing jury decision, Goodman police officer Eddie Myers was acquitted of shooting his sister-in-law, also a police officer, 14 times in September 2000.
Myers claimed self defense.
"The victim never pulled a weapon or even unsnapped it from its holster, (but Myers) was so scared of her that he emptied three guns and reloaded one of them a second time - firing in excess of 30 shots," Powell said with a dose of sarcasm.
"With those facts, and I mean there really weren't any facts contradicting what had occurred there at the house, you just don't expect an acquittal," he said.
Not all cases have been so disappointing for Powell, a 1979 graduate of the University of Mississippi law school and a father of four.
Powell said cases that make his job rewarding are ones like his efforts to seek justice in the beating death of Rainey Pool, a one-armed black man. That case went cold for three decades before convictions were handed down.
In that case, a jury convicted three whites - brothers James and Charles Caston and their half brother, Hal Crim - of beating Pool in a racially motivated attack after a night of drinking.
When asked why he pursued a case that sat dormant for so long, Powell said, "There just wasn't a reason for us not to prosecute it. … Clearly, the crime had occurred, and these men probably did it and there needed to be a resolution of it."
But even when there is a resolution, Powell said the memories remain. And he expects the Hargon case to be no different.
"I have a family myself, and I have grandchildren that are about the age of James Patrick, you know. This is something that all of us are potentially exposed to … I do feel strongly about it," Powell said.
Powell's current workload also includes two separate fires that killed 11 children, leading to manslaughter and child neglect charges against one of the mothers.
A Holmes County grand jury recently indicted Angela Williams after a blaze swept through her mobile home killing six children. Powell expects a grand jury in April to indict Clara Bell for the fire that killed five children in her Yazoo City home.
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