Days before the start of a trial that could send a Jackson woman to prison for decades, Hinds County prosecutors discovered a sheriff’s deputy had body camera footage they didn’t know existed and wasn’t turned over to the defense.
The footage showed a Hinds County Sheriff’s Department deputy administering a Breathalyzer test to Jada Kelly, then 22, who was accused of killing two people and disfiguring a third after allegedly driving under the influence in the early morning hours of Jan. 15, 2023.
How did this 3-year-old footage go unearthed for so long? The Jackson Police Department neglected to include the body cam in the case it turned over to the Hinds County District Attorney’s Office — a recurring problem that attorneys in Jackson have identified with the understaffed agency.
Instead, prosecutors repeatedly told the circuit court judge in recent weeks that they learned the footage existed after they interviewed Kenny Bryant, the deputy who conducted the Breathalyzer test, and he told them he was recording that night.
“Because multiple agencies were involved in the response and investigation, materials are sometimes maintained by different entities and are not always consolidated into a single submission at the outset,” Kayli Hankins, the communications director for the district attorney’s office, wrote in an email to Mississippi Today.
JPD did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
The video’s sudden discovery is one of several issues that Kelly’s attorney, Dennis Sweet III, raised at a hearing before Judge Debra Gibbs on Jan. 26.
Sweet is now seeking to suppress parts of the video, claiming it shows officers failing to properly inform Kelly of her rights before conducting the Breathalyzer. Gibbs did not rule on this motion, and the trial is underway.
If convicted, Kelly faces up to 75 years in prison. She was indicted in 2023 for three counts of aggravated DUI about four months after she was arrested for driving a Toyota Camry through a red light and colliding with Toney Payne’s Nissan Altima, killing sisters Azure Higgins, 45, and Valerie Lynch, 43, and leaving Payne permanently disfigured, according to investigators.
JPD responded to the scene at the intersection of Canton Mart Road and I-55 Frontage Road but called Bryant, a sheriff’s deputy who has done hundreds of sobriety tests since joining the Hinds County Sheriff’s Department in 2020, to determine if Kelly was under the influence.
Bryant found Kelly’s blood alcohol content was 0.18, more than twice the legal limit of 0.08. He did not test Payne, whom officers took to the hospital. There, his blood alcohol content registered at .10.
Soon after the indictment, Sweet filed a motion for discovery – a routine filing to ensure the defense has access to all available evidence – in June 2023. But it wasn’t until last week, six days before Kelly’s trial was set to begin, that prosecutors turned Bryant’s footage over to Sweet.
“Why am I just getting it now?” Sweet asked a prosecutor, Carrie Jourdan, before the hearing last week.
“Because I just found it,” Jourdan responded in frustration.
Hankins wrote that the district attorney’s office “promptly” turned the footage over once it was discovered. On Monday, Sheriff Tyree Jones said he was familiar with Kelly’s case but had to attend to another matter involving two homicides in rural Hinds County.
Matt Steffey, a professor at the Mississippi College School of Law, said he thought prosecutors should’ve known the footage existed much earlier, given the likelihood that Bryant’s name appears in JPD’s case file. While Mississippi Today has not reviewed the case file or the body cam footage, prosecutors included Bryant’s name on a witness list filed with the court earlier this month.
The late disclosure can lead to what is known as a Brady violation, the legal term for when the prosecution withholds evidence that can help the defense make its case. Brady violations result in cases being dismissed — another motion Sweet entered after learning the footage existed.
But Steffey said Sweet is unlikely to win that argument, since the evidence was also effectively withheld from the prosecution.
“It does show the chaos around the Hinds County law enforcement,” he said. “That they didn’t know about it is just as relevant as why are we talking about this 3-year-old case now.”
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