Melton Asks Warner to Oversee Ex-Con Staff
by Donna Ladd
August 30, 2007
At District Attorney-elect Robert Smith’s victory party, Mayor Frank Melton said that Smith is one of his long-time “kids” who will now help him with the young men of Jackson he is trying to save. "I thank God tonight that I have somebody now who will help me with these children ... who will put these drug dealers in jail."
A primary way Melton is trying to save young people is by giving them city jobs ranging from lawn workers to managerial positions in Parks and other departments. The day before the election, Melton announced that the “formerly incarcerated” would be directed by Marlon Warner—a formerly incarcerated man who pled to the lesser charge of manslaughter in 1994 after being charged with the murder of Willie Everett. More recently, Warner, 33, pled to possession of cocaine on Feb. 2, 2005. The private attorney who asked for that plea deal was Robert Smith.
Warner’s plea from murder to manslaughter came under District Attorney Ed Peters. The prosecutor in the case was then-Assistant District Attorney Bobby DeLaughter, who is now a Hinds County Circuit Judge, and Warner was then defended by Public Defender Tom Fortner’s office. Warner served six years for Everett’s death and was released in 2000. He later served about a year for the cocaine charge.
Prior to his new job helping supervise the “formerly incarcerated” hired by Melton, Warner worked in the Parks Department. Recently, Melton called the Jackson Free Press to say that Warner and Anthony Staffney—another long-time Melton mentee acquitted of the murder of Carey Bias last year—were the two city employees who helped him oversee the camp for teen boys he held recently in Jefferson Davis County. This is the work they are paid to do, Melton said then.
Melton has told the Jackson Free Press that he has known Marlon and his brother Maurice Zedric Warner—tried alongside Staffney and Vidal Sullivan for the Bias murder—since they were children, as well as Anthony Staffney. Melton was good friends, he said, with Staffney’s brother Joseph, who was killed in the early 1990s in an unresolved case.
Anthony Staffney served seven years in federal prison for a 1996 conviction on a crack distribution charge. He had two cocaine-sales charges dropped in 1997, which were prosecuted by then-Assistant District Attorney Tommy Mayfield.
Staffney went to work for Melton at the city within weeks of his acquittal of the Bias murder charge. The men were acquitted after the primary witness recanted at the last hour. Robert Smith was Staffney’s attorney in the Bias case.
The Warners and Staffney come and go freely from Melton’s home and office and interact regularly with the minors he mentors. He says repeatedly that he trusts them with his life—even more so than he has trusted the police over the years who, he said, targeted these men when they were kids back in their neighborhood.
In March 2006, Melton went into a bizarre and public panic after Vidal Sullivan was released from jail on a different charge, declaring that he was the “most dangerous man in Jackson” and must be "brought in" and that he might have to resign the mayor’s office to hunt him down. After several days of drama, Sullivan turned himself into Melton and Police Chief Shirlene Anderson who took him before Judge Melvin Priester, not allowing media in the courtroom. The mayor and chief then drove Sullivan away, but reporters could later find no trace of him in jails in the region. That weekend—as the Sullivan saga remained unresolved—Melton and his two bodyguards were spotted by a friend of the Jackson Free Press in the Dallas airport en route to Miami, and then Bermuda, for a BMI music convention.
Within weeks, Sullivan was seen coming and going freely from City Hall. In May 2006, Melton told the Jackson Free Press that Sullivan was in City Hall to get money from Melton to buy school clothes for his young son.
In a twist of mayoral irony, in April 2005, Melton had walked out of a candidate forum presented by the Jackson Association of Neighborhoods at the Jackson Medical Mall, saying he refused to "sit next to a convicted felon."
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