Investigating Crimes That Were Never Meant to be Reopened with Jill Collen Jefferson

Sometimes the hardest part about a crime isn't figuring out what happened — it's revisiting what's already been decided. Once a case is closed and a conclusion settles in, changing that can be just as difficult as investigating it was in the first place.

My guest today is Jill Collin Jefferson, a civil and human rights attorney and the founder of JULIAN, an organization focused on investigating modern-day lynchings. JULIAN works with families and communities seeking answers in cases that have often gone unresolved or unquestioned.

In this episode, we talk about how Jill approaches this work, how cases reach her in the first place, and what it takes to reexamine investigations that others have already moved on from. Jill walks us through the Willie Andrew Jones Jr. case in Mississippi, her arrest in Lexington while monitoring police, and the contentious relationships that come with exposing gaps in law enforcement investigations.

Jill Collen Jefferson, JULIAN’s founder and Executive Director, is a civil and human rights attorney who grew up in the racism and de facto segregation of rural Mississippi and was trained by the leaders of the civil rights movement. She was mentored by the great civil rights leader Julian Bond, the organization’s namesake, who taught her civil rights history and strategy. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia and her J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she is now faculty in its Trial Advocacy Workshop. She hails from a farm in southeastern Mississippi.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I'm Jeff Asher, and this is the Jeffalytics Podcast. Sometimes the hardest part about a crime isn't figuring out what happened. It's revisiting what's already been decided. Once a case is closed and a conclusion settles in, changing that can be just as difficult as investigating it was in the first place. My guest today is Jill Cullen Jefferson, a civil and human rights attorney and the founder of Julian, an organization focused on investigating modern-day lynchings and working with families and communities seeking answers in cases that have often gone unresolved or unquestioned. In this episode, we talk about how she approaches that work, how these cases reach her in the first place, and what it takes to re-examine investigations that others have already moved on from. We also get into the realities of doing this work in the field, the challenges of working across different jurisdictions, and the tension that can come with taking a closer look at cases that were never meant to be reopened. If you're looking for a conversation about what it takes to keep pushing when the answers aren't as settled as they might seem, this is it. My guest today is Jill Cullen Jefferson. Jill, thanks so much for joining.

SPEAKER_00 1:03

Thank you so much for having me, Jeff.

SPEAKER_01 1:05

So walk me through what is your background? What brought you here to us today?

SPEAKER_00 1:09

Well, I am a civil and human rights attorney. My background, I grew up in the sticks of Mississippi. Went to an undergrad, I met Julian Bond, who became my mentor and taught me everything I know about civil rights and human rights. He took me under his wing and he became my mentor. Years later, when I was in law school, I went to Harvard and I was working in the innovation lab to put together a civil rights organization that was unlike any other that existed. And I thought, what should I name this thing? And so I named it Julian after him. And founded Julian in 2020. We are the only organization in the country that has a focus on modern-day lynchings. Our mission is to end caste systems in America. And I think we've I think we've done some good work in getting to where we need to go and achieving our vision.

SPEAKER_01 2:04

And sort of what what motivates you to do all of this work?

SPEAKER_00 2:07

So it's my purpose on this earth. And I know that sounds weird, but like um when I was an undergrad, Professor Bond took me aside and he said, you know, your purpose in life is to be a disciple of civil rights because you understand it better than your peers. So you have a responsibility to teach them. And I really took that to heart, and it wasn't just him saying it, I fell in love with civil rights, like the history of it, the movement. I just I love it. I'm in love with it. And I had started to investigate civil rights cold cases from the 1960s, like during the civil rights era, people who had been lynched during that time. And at one of those conferences about historical lynchings, somebody said, somebody here got lynched two weeks ago and nobody's talking about that. And I said, Oh my gosh. And so at that point, my focus became focusing on modern-day lynchings and getting attention to those and solving those cases.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

I want to ask a very broad question that sort of comes from my personal experience. My dad grew up in Bogaloosa, Louisiana, which I guess would be the sticks of Louisiana. Um, are you familiar with Bogaloosa?

SPEAKER_00 3:27

I am, yes.

SPEAKER_01 3:28

All right. I haven't been there. I think he took me there when I was two. Um, was the most recent I've been there, and I know it's changed a lot since then. But he would tell me stories of my grandfather and my great uncle, like as one of like six Jewish families in town, they were targeted by the Klan. Um, and he would tell me stories about them uh staying up, like sleeping by the door with a rifle and like just ready to for anything that might happen from the clan. And my my very broad question is having been involved in this work, uh, how do you think through like communicating all of this, all of this struggle, everything that happened in the the um during the civil rights movement to a generation that maybe doesn't have those firsthand uh stories to live by?

SPEAKER_00 4:16

Yeah. So we talk about the evolution of lynching. We talk about what it was before and what it is now in terms of, you know, before it would be um mob violence, and people would take souvenirs, like they would cut off body parts as souvenirs and things like that, and take photographs and and share those photographs around like baseball cards. And a lot of those photographs still exist to this day, and you can go online and see them. We talk about that and we talk about the transition to lynchings being more underground. The fact that lynchings now happen through not mob violence, but a couple of people who get together and they're usually radicalized online and they get together and they carry out this act, there's still the aspect of spectacle to it, like there was in the civil rights era. But now lynchings, they're they're carried out by small groups, but they're also in some in some instances carried out by police. I would call what happened to George Floyd a lynching.

SPEAKER_01 5:27

How would you sort of define? Do you have a definition of lynching in the modern sense? Or is that something that just sort of you look at a case and you you can kind of feel it?

SPEAKER_00 5:38

Yeah, a lynching is an extrajudicial killing. A modern-day lynching, to be to be clear, isn't is a discriminatory killing committed in the late 20th or early 21st century by more than one person carried out for an alleged offense with or without a legal trial or due process? And our definition of lynching expands the definition to include cases that are like LGBTQ PLUS and Indigenous women and things like that that haven't historically been included in the definition of lynching.

SPEAKER_01 6:14

So, what what is your sort of investigative process when you're looking at a case? Are these the type of things that someone brings brings potential cases to you? Do you have research that that looks into these things and finds them first? Is there a like first thing that comes to mind that makes you want to investigate a certain case further?

SPEAKER_00 6:34

The first thing that comes to mind is always, is it a lynching or was it a suicide or something else? And figuring that piece out. These cases come to us in different ways. Sometimes people call us and ask us to get on a case. In one case, a police officer came to my mother's house and asked me to look into the case. In other cases, family members will contact us. And in some instances, we find the case on our own and we contact them and see if they would like assistance. And so the investigative process, it really looks like after we get the case, the first step is to talk to family and friends. A lot of times, family and friends have gotten leads or have ideas of maybe what happened to someone that I that's really helpful to kickstart an investigation. The next step is to get all the paper you can possibly get, if there are court documents, if there are police documents, to get all the paper and examine it. And then after that, it's a matter of following the individual leads and seeing where they take you, making sure that you don't miss any gaps, making sure that you fill the gaps that the police may have missed and things like that.

SPEAKER_01 7:56

And how does the process, the investigative process, work from there?

SPEAKER_00 7:59

Once we have basically figured out what happened, we then take our information to authorities, whether it be the FBI or the State Bureau of Investigation or local authorities. Usually local authorities are not willing to do anything because they're the ones who botched it in the first place. And they don't want, they're more concerned about their image than they are about justice, is what I've found. And so by any means, we take these facts and everything that we learn to them and we give them all the evidence and when that we urge them to take action to charge the people criminally with murder and with lynching. And so in these instances, we haven't, we've gotten some cases reopened, but the local DAs and the local police have been in the way of actually getting new charges filed.

SPEAKER_01 8:58

So is there a sort of a communication pattern that you tend to sort of operate within when you get this information? I'm sure you frequently law enforcement is certainly skeptical, I'm I imagine. The public might be skeptical. You sort of have to overcome a level of skepticism. How do you go about sort of overcoming that? And what role does just communicating what you're finding play into that?

SPEAKER_00 9:23

Yeah, so it's never as easy as just communicating what we found. With every single modern-day lynching case, we have to overcome a suicide designation first. The coroner, the crime lab, the police rule it a suicide, and you have to prove that it's not before they will actually, you know, listen to you and what your theory is. So you have to disprove theirs. And so that's always an uphill battle. You have to show the gaps that they've they had in their investigation, the people they didn't talk to. You have to present the evidence to them that they missed, essentially, and show them, hey, if you had gotten this right, then you would have seen this different outcome. But yeah, we in every case, we have to overcome the designation of suicide first. And that's always hard. If it's under the jurisdiction of the FBI and you have a good president and administration in, then they can be very helpful in getting things moved and getting states to give traction to things to investigations, but we don't have that right now. And so it's basically just down to us to prove the cases on our own and with the evidence that we have and hope that the local authorities will listen.

SPEAKER_01 10:51

What has your experience been with that? Is it sort of hit or miss based on the jurisdiction and the police department or or sheriff's office and coroner, or is it certain states or cities that do better that you've come across, or is it just sort of random scattering of you get lucky sometimes?

SPEAKER_00 11:08

Um, I have found that it's always an uphill battle. I have not come across a situation where it just happened like in terms of like routine. It's always been having to, like I said, disprove and then prove. And when you're talking to these DAs, the thing you have to realize is that they work with these police every day. And their motivation a lot of times is to protect the people they work with, to protect the police, not really to get justice in the case. And so I found in pretty much every instance that we have to go head to head with the DAs in order to get them to seek justice on behalf of these families.

SPEAKER_01 11:59

Can you walk me through any like success stories in terms of your work and taking a case and overcoming all of those hurdles and reaching a conclusion where at least sort of the truth of the case is at least acknowledged?

SPEAKER_00 12:14

The Willie Andrew Jones Jr. case is one that I reference often in terms of a victory, even though the DA hasn't completely come around yet. Um, we have gotten the case reopened by the Miss City Bureau of Investigation to just set the facts of that case. Willie was a 21-year-old black man who was found hanging from a tree in his white girlfriend's front yard in 2018. Authorities ruled it a suicide. Within 40 minutes of Willie's mother being on the scene, they told her it was a suicide. They had not interviewed any witnesses. They had not canvassed the crime scene. They had not roped off the crime scene. They basically had not investigated at all. Yet they they came up with this determination. We came in, we found a ton of gaps. We found witnesses that they had not spoken with, people who heard Willie fighting for his life. We put all of that evidence forward to the DA, and the DA still didn't budge. We got help from the FBI and in the state U.S. attorney's office to put pressure on the local DA and the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation. And so the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation reopened the case and put pressure on the DA and got the DA to say, you know, if I I am willing to to prosecute this, if the evidence is there, but of course the evidence has been there all along. And so we we've gotten the case reopened, but we still haven't gotten a favorable ruling.

SPEAKER_01 13:54

And it's been what, eight years from that for that case?

SPEAKER_00 13:58

Yes. It takes a lot of time. The investigation itself doesn't have to take that long, but usually um when you're dealing with getting other authorities to move or to change their, to change their minds on something, they dig their heels and they it is it is hard to get things reversed.

SPEAKER_01 14:21

Uh sort of on the opposite end, has there been cases where you felt, like at least initially, that there was strong evidence to support your work, to support an investigation, and then the evidence just sort of didn't pan out and despite initial suspicions and and sort of how how do you handle situations like that?

SPEAKER_00 14:40

There have been situations where we thought potentially it was a lynching, and then through investigation we found that it was a suicide instead. In those instances, what we do is we we always work closely with the families. We don't reveal the identities of the people whose investigations we came out with as suicides, or we work closely with the families to make sure that they get some level of closure. In some of these cases, they might disagree, you know, but after we show them the evidence, they tend to, they tend to be more on board. But in those instances, is a very, it's a very delicate balance. You have to be very aware of their feelings and and the situation. Um, and you also have to just really be aware of your own investigation to make sure that you didn't miss anything. Like the police missed things in the first place. And so, yeah, it takes it takes a lot. It's a delicate balance when you find out that it wasn't a lynching. You a lot of times have families who have been believing the opposite for years. And so it's a matter of of of helping them come to terms with what actually happened.

SPEAKER_01 16:04

Have there been any cases where you were sort of, I mean, you're probably uncomfortable with many of the findings, but sort of uncomfortable or unexpected conclusions that sort of complicate everything for you and and have been sort of difficult to wrap your head around? And sort of like, I'm just curious, how do you handle like real, like strong complexity and uncertainty? Because that's something that at least in in the crime data world we deal with all the time. And how do you how do you express perceptions or express trends where the data's really the information's really uncertain?

SPEAKER_00 16:39

In terms of how we investigate, we investigate until we are certain about something. Um, we feel like there's more to find. Um, if we're uncertain that there are more people to talk to, more perspectives that we haven't gotten that we need to get. Right now, in in one of our open investigations, there is uncertainty about what the cause of death was. And that to me just means that we haven't talked to enough people or investigated deeply enough or gotten enough, enough evidence. There have been some situations where like the autopsy will say something and witnesses will say something different. And that situation is one where you have to really figure out what happened because obviously the independent autopsy, especially, is is is going to be clear about what happened. Maybe not the first one by the state. But in those instances, you really just keep digging deeper and you talk to additional pathologists to get their perspective and you go back over your notes. You know, in terms of like these investigations, I haven't gotten to one yet where I couldn't find for certain what happened to someone, whether it was a suicide, whether it was an accident, or whether it was a lynching. And so that hasn't come up as much. It just so far, it just means that we need to keep looking. But I haven't gotten to a case where at the end of the case, we're still uncertain.

SPEAKER_01 18:11

Do you have any idea how law enforcement perceives you? Are there just sort of law enforcement and criminal justice system actors, I guess? Are there DAs and sheriffs and police officers that sort of respect your approach but don't necessarily agree with the findings? Um, or do you feel feel that there's sort of a contentious relationship pretty much always?

SPEAKER_00 18:31

With the exception of one case, it has been contentious every time. People do not like me. The authorities don't like somebody coming in and looking at gaps in their work. They don't like being exposed for having missed things. No. And then this work happens in the deep south. And I am not naive enough to think that who I am doesn't play a role into it. I'm a black woman doing this work. And I'm sure that that doesn't make it any easier for anybody to to like me or to get on board with what we're doing. And so, with the exception of one case, a case where the it was actually the police who asked us to investigate the case, it has been contentious the entire time.

SPEAKER_01 19:22

And how do you sort of handle that? How do you protect sources and continue investigating, knowing that you sort of have a contentious relationship out there somewhere?

SPEAKER_00 19:32

I have allies. I don't want to say who they are, but I have allies.

SPEAKER_01 19:36

Name all of your sources on this podcast, please.

SPEAKER_00 19:40

Our allies really do a lot in taking the heat off. They will sometimes they'll file things so that I don't have to, so that there isn't a focus on me. Sometimes they will have, they'll take meetings so that I don't have to take them and so my identity doesn't have to be involved. And so that is how we get around it, having good allies, honestly.

SPEAKER_01 20:04

Can I ask you about your sort of somewhat high-profile arrest in 2023?

SPEAKER_00 20:09

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 20:10

Is that is that okay?

SPEAKER_00 20:11

I mean, I don't want to I'm just curious, like how nobody's ever asked me if they could ask first.

SPEAKER_01 20:19

It feels polite, right?

SPEAKER_00 20:20

Like it is polite, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:22

So what one is uh can you sort of describe what happened? And two, I'm just curious how has your work or has your work at all changed since that offense or since that that incident, I should say?

SPEAKER_00 20:36

What happened was that Julian, my organization, had sued the Lexington Police Department. They had been just completely violating people's rights. There were Fourth Amendment violations, 14th Amendment violations, like they were targeting black people, they were using excessive force, they were retaliating against people for free speech. It was it was just ridiculousness. It was the worst police crisis this country had seen in 50 years. And so something that was happening was that this was before the DOJ got involved and before people were were paying attention to what was happening. I would go to Lexington and kind of patrol and police the police. Um, and so one night when I was doing this, I saw the police pulling somebody over like they were in the process of arresting someone, and I drove by and recorded it. I drove back by, and when I drove by the second time, they stopped me and asked me why I was recording them. And then proceeded to try to arrest me. Well, not try, they did arrest me. They told me to get out of the car, would not get out of the car. I asked them why they had stopped me because it wasn't a roadblock, you know. So why are you just stopping me in the Middle of the road and demanding to see my ID. From the perspective of like, like the legal perspective of a stop, things just were not right on their end. They things were just really off. And so I was not going to get out of the car and I was not going to just allow myself to be arrested. So they they pulled me out of the car, pushed me up against the side of the car and put my hands behind my back. And and and when they put me in the police car, the white officer who had arrested me, he shaped his hands into like the shape of a gun and acted like he was like putting it to my head and shooting me. So we got to the police station and he was really just um, he thought he was gonna intimidate me. He was telling me, you know, you're going, you're gonna go to jail tonight. And I was like, okay, let's go to jail. He ended up taking me to the jail. And I spent, I think it was three days in jail. But it was honestly a blessing in disguise. So we knew that the police had been harassing women and stopping women for the purpose of getting their phone numbers or asking them out on dates and things like that. And if the one, if the woman said no, the police would then figure out a way to arrest her, ticket her, or something like that. And so I had been trying to reach those women. And it came to find out, they ended up being my cellmates. Like I get in, I get in jail, and these women are my cellmates. The guards were able to get me some paper and a pen. I just wrote down their stories and wrote down their contact information for when I got out. And so um it ended up being something that was really helpful to our efforts, actually. And since then, you know, it's it's definitely set the tone in these cases to show how lawless these this department was, and how they tried to make a point to the community by arresting the leader of their of their local movement. They they wanted to send a message to the community that that they could not be stopped, that the police could not be stopped. And thankfully that did not go over well. Um, and the opposite was shown. What they were doing is still what stop was put to it, and justice was found, and at least a DOJ findings report for these victims.

SPEAKER_01 24:29

And how how has that impacted your work going forward?

SPEAKER_00 24:32

Well, now when somebody googles me, the first thing they see is that I was arrested.

SPEAKER_01 24:38

And so that was not the first thing. I I was I yeah, I read about it. I there was an interview you were giving, I think to the University of Virginia. I read about it, so that wasn't the first thing.

SPEAKER_00 24:50

Okay, it wasn't the first thing, but is there it's one of the most more prominent things there. I think it's you know thank you to you for continuing to read, but a lot of people don't keep reading. They they it's like, oh, she's been arrested. I don't want to work with her. Why would an attorney get arrested? And so I I haven't seen it be like, you know, a positive thing for for the work. Um, to be honest with you. It's been something that's been more like if people don't get past the headline and like read what actually happened. It's it's more like it it looks like incompetence on my end or that I was doing something wrong other rather than the police actually targeting me and arresting me. And that was something else that I I forgot to mention that we did find out that the police had targeted me. It was a if a former police officer told us that the police had been plotting to arrest me for some time, but they just couldn't figure out how and when um in the right circumstances. And so um everything came together that night for them.

SPEAKER_01 26:03

Yeah. Well, I I really appreciate you sharing. Um it's it's obviously such a unique and important perspective. So I really appreciate that. I want to sort of turn to the future. And I'm curious, do you have a vision for what the future of your work, for what your organization looks like? And this is a question I've started asking all of my guests that is there a role for AI specifically in this, or is that just not something that's on your radar?

SPEAKER_00 26:27

AI is on my radar. Yes, it is. We have to be careful with like the AI data centers and things like that to make sure they're not polluting communities that are already vulnerable. I will say that. It also just sometimes, like, you know, it can be helpful in brainstorming. And so AI does have, does have a place in Julian's future. And what I see our work being is that we're gonna end lynchings for real this time. We're going to end lynchings. We are going to eliminate systems of caste in America. But the biggest thing in that is making sure that these families and these communities are taken care of, making sure that what their vision for what they want and what their future, what they want their future to be, is what we uphold. And so I'll say I have a vision for Julian overall to end lynchings, and modern-day lynchings, and to eliminate caste. But when it comes down to like the individual details of that, that that depends on the communities that we work with and what they want and how we can help them get there.

SPEAKER_01 27:47

That's great. Well, it's certainly an inspiring story and an inspiring uh organization. So I really appreciate you coming on, Jill. Um, keep up the good work and I wish you luck.

SPEAKER_00 27:56

Thank you so much for having me, Jeff. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 28:00

Thanks for listening to the Jeffalytics Podcast. Be sure to subscribe and to learn more, head on over to ahdatalytics.com for more information and previous episodes. If you like what you heard, please leave a glowing review, which will help others to discover the show. Until next time, I'm Jeff Asher.