A convicted killer charged in the February slaying of his girlfriend in Greenwood managed to be released from state prison after serving half his sentence in a 1998 slaying.
Ben Meeks III, 46, who is charged with capital murder in the Feb. 10 murder of 27-year-old Reshunda Moore, served as a trusty at Parchman and the Carroll-Montgomery Correctional Facility before being released in January 2011 after serving 12 1/2 years.
Judge Betty Sanders had sentenced Meeks to 25 years in prison and a five-year suspended sentence after he pleaded guilty to two counts of manslaughter in the 1998 beating death of his pregnant girlfriend, 28-year-old Donna Kinds, whose body was discovered inside an abandoned building on Walthall Street.
A variety of factors led Meeks to serve only a portion of that sentence behind bars. Service performing clean-up work in the wake of a February 2001 tornado in Leflore County and state laws allowing for reduced prison sentences for trusties and well-behaved inmates all factored into Meeks’ release.
An arrest for domestic violence in April 2014 may well have returned Meeks to state prison but local authorities failed to inform the Mississippi Department of Corrections, said Grace Simmons-Fisher, a spokeswoman for MDOC.
According to a police report, officers had been called to a home in the 1000 block of Mississippi Avenue in the early morning of April 6, 2014, after Meeks’ apparently estranged wife, Cynthia Meeks, had slashed the tires on his truck. In a statement to police, Cynthia Meeks alleged that Ben Meeks had choked her, taken her purse and threatened to kill her.
Meeks was arrested two weeks later. A municipal court judge ordered him in November to attend counseling, but records indicate he never showed up. He was charged with contempt of court on Feb. 2, just a week before the slaying of his girlfriend, and was released on bond; he has since pleaded guilty to the charge.
Greenwood Police Chief Ray Moore said he was unable to confirm whether the Department of Corrections had been informed of Meeks’ arrest.
“As a general rule, if we’re aware that somebody is on paper, whether for probation or parole, we alert MDOC,” Moore said.
Even if state prison officials had decided to return Meeks to state prison following the April 2014 arrest, he would have been released again no later than September of last year — long before an argument with his girlfriend over money allegedly led to her grisly slaying in February.
That’s because reductions in his prison sentence for a variety of factors meant that his final discharge date — at which point Meeks was completely released from MDOC oversight — had been moved up from 2023 to 2014.
Mississippi law allows prisoners convicted of violent offenses to be released after serving 85 percent of their sentences. Trusties receive additional time off, and Meeks had another six months knocked off his sentence as a result of Executive Order 863, signed by then-Gov. Ronnie Musgrove, which granted inmates who volunteered to help with disaster cleanup in Leflore County up to 180 days toward their sentences.
As for the five-year suspended sentence, Simmons-Fisher said a 2009 Mississippi Supreme Court ruling held that only a judge — and not the Department of Corrections — can impose its terms. Simmons-Fisher said that MDOC “would have notified the court of the violation and the court, of course, had the authority to undo the suspended sentence.”
Meanwhile, Meeks remains at the Leflore County Jail, where he has been held without bond since Greenwood police officers discovered him hiding under a bed at a local motel, hours after the slaying.
According to police and relatives, the couple had been arguing about money. Moore had recently received her income tax refund and police suspect that Meeks took money from the home after the slaying.
Moore’s family said the murder came after a chronic pattern of domestic violence and physical abuse in the relationship. Gathering outside the home where Moore’s body was discovered in February, an aunt and several sisters said they’d urged Moore to leave Meeks and that he’d given her black eyes and injuries that required hospital trips during previous disputes.
Moore was a mother of three boys, the youngest of whom, according to police, was found crying near her body.
A grand jury has not yet returned a formal indictment on the capital murder charge, but Meeks could now be facing the death penalty in the slaying. Meeks, who also has prior burglary convictions stretching back to the 1980s, may also be indicted as a violent habitual offender, a designation that carries a minimum mandatory sentence of life without parole if convicted.
• Contact Bryn Stole at 581-7235 or bstole@gwcommonwealth.com.
