We had to check in on what’s going on with the “Sonya Massey Bill,” also known as House Bill 1953, that was working its way through the Illinois legislature.
You likely recall that Massey was the young woman who was inexplicably gunned down by an Illinois sheriff’s deputy in her home after she called authorities to report a prowler.
We are happy to report that the bill was passed by the Illinois House and is headed to the desk of Gov. J.B Pritzker, who is expected to sign it.
That has raised the spirits of Massey’s family in Illinois as well as, we are certain, her father, James Wilburn of Pine Bluff, who, whenever he talks about the case, pushes hard for the law, which would require law enforcement agencies to look harder at the records of candidates they are considering hiring.
In the Massey case, the deputy, who has been charged with murder in addition to other offenses, had been discharged from the Army for “serious offenses,” according to published reports, and then had bounced from one police agency to another, leaving behind a string of abhorrent behavior that should have raised enough red flags that he shouldn’t have been hired at the sheriff’s department in Illinois.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
And yet, he was. Some of the reasons for that were because his offenses were not reviewable by those who were interested in hiring him. And, as Wilburn has said, another reason is that, because the deputy had been through police training, the agencies could save money by hiring him over someone who would have to go to a training academy.
Wilburn has said that, while he cannot bring his daughter back, he can work toward the passage of such measures that would perhaps keep something like what happened to his daughter from happening again.
The tragedy in Illinois is a reminder of what happened here in Pine Bluff at the Jefferson County jail. In 2022, a jailer was videotaped beating an inmate in his care, hitting him with his fist in the face and head a dozen times and seriously injuring the man. His eye socket was broken, as was his jaw. The deputy had been fired twice before in his career, once from the state Department of Correction for using excessive force against an inmate.
From there, he went to work as a jailer at the Jefferson County lockup where he was later fired for, you guessed it, using excessive force against an inmate. And then he later came back to work at the jail and once again was “fired” for using excessive force against the above-mentioned detainee.
The firing didn’t stick, however, because Sheriff Lafayette Woods Jr. decided to keep the jailer on staff and send him to counseling – the same counseling he’d had on multiple occasions before. The sheriff has never explained why he kept someone in his employ who had such a serious record of offenses against inmates.
The system here continued not to work, in that the jailer, based on the video evidence, should have been arrested immediately and charged. That’s what would have happened to anyone else who was videotaped beating a defenseless person. But that didn’t happen, and because the prosecutorial staff here mostly lacks vigor, the case is not in the criminal courts but the civil courts.
In any event, based on that occurrence alone, it is clear that Arkansas, and every other state, needs a Sonya Massey law. The jailer here should never have been rehired and put in a position where he has failed on multiple occasions and where, with a bit more untethered outrage, he might have put the inmate in a coma or killed him. A law requiring a fuller, more transparent investigation of law enforcement hires would protect the public from elected and public officials who look the other way in filling out their ranks with substandard individuals, as happened in Jefferson County.
The Illinois law is a victory for the Massey family. A Sonya Massey law, copy and pasted across the country, would be a victory for everyone.