What do you do when a Sheriff shoots a judge? Everyone is running around screaming about tightening security. At the same time, they’re forced to accept that the cooperative killer, Mickey Stines, was in charge of protecting Judge Kevin Mullins, who he shot multiple times, in his own courthouse chambers. Not much you can do about that unless you see it coming. Nobody did. The killer had lunch with his victim only a short time earlier.
Sheriff in custody
There still isn’t much known publicly about the specific motive which prompted Sheriff Shawn “Mickey” Stines to shoot District Judge Kevin Mullins, “multiple times.” We know they had an argument which ended in the shooting. Kentucky State Police are still piecing the puzzle together.
There is one thing which stands out that could be related. It seems that Stines is being sued. The judge wasn’t involved directly, as far as we know. His private office “chambers” were. It was the scene of that crime, too.
The town of Whitesburg, Kentucky is “tiny.” Tucked into the rural Appalachian hollows where everyone knows everyone because they’re practically all related, sometimes two or three ways. “It’s just so sad. I just hate it,” Mike Watts laments.
He’s the Letcher County circuit court clerk. “Both of them are friends of mine. I’ve worked with both of them for years.” The sheriff and the judge are two of the towns “most prominent citizens.”
Watts “saw Mullins and Stines together shortly before noon Thursday.” Three hours later, Judge Mullins was dead and Sheriff Stines behind bars. He “went into the judge’s chambers to ask him to sign some papers. Mullins and Stines were getting ready to go out to lunch together.”
Everything was normal except Stines appeared to have something on his mind because he “seemed quieter than usual.” Watts “knew of nothing that could have prompted the violent encounter. Stines had been a bailiff in Mullins’ courtroom for years.”
Sex in judges chamber
On Monday, Stines sat for a deposition in a civil case against him. The criminal case involving his deputy that it’s based on is old news. Two women filed the lawsuit but one of them is dead, so her part fell off. The other woman “alleged that a deputy forced her to have sex inside Mullins’ chambers for six months in exchange for staying out of jail.”
The sheriff is being sued for “deliberate indifference in failing to adequately train and supervise” the deputy. That’s what lawyers and insurance companies are for and such matters usually get settled quietly behind the scenes, without murder.
The disgraced and fired deputy, Ben Fields, “pleaded guilty to raping the female prisoner while she was on home incarceration.” Another judge gave him “six months in jail and then six and a half years on probation for rape, sodomy, perjury and tampering with a prisoner monitoring device.”
The sheriff probably has some professional liability but that doesn’t mean he had direct knowledge. Settlements usually keep such questions from ever being actually answered.
Having both a judge and a sheriff out of commission at the same time is throwing a monkey wrench into the county’s judicial process. Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman said “his office will collaborate with a commonwealth’s attorney in the region as special prosecutors in the criminal case.”
He promises to “fully investigate and pursue justice.” Sheriff Stines surrendered immediately after executing Mullins and is “cooperating” with the investigation.
