WEST POINT — A Mississippi judge Wednesday threw out the murder indictment against Tameshia Shelton, putting an end to the case that has haunted the mother of four for nearly two decades.
Shelton, now 48, was slated to face a new murder trial in Clay County on Monday, but Circuit Judge James T. Kitchens canceled the trial and agreed with Columbus-area District Attorney Scott Colom that the murder indictment should be dismissed.
Shelton, who has maintained her innocence, served 11 years in prison after a jury convicted her of murder in the 2009 shooting death of her sister’s 21-year-old boyfriend, Danelle Young. Shelton was freed on bond in June, after the state Supreme Court upheld an appellate-court ruling overturning her murder conviction and ordering her a new trial. Young’s family could not be immediately reached for comment.
Tameshia Shelton beams at a crowd of family members after her release from the Clay County Detention Center on June 29, 2026. She walked out in a shirt from her niece, featuring a photo of her taken before she was sentenced to life in prison 11 years before. Credit: Claudia Amendoeira/Mississippi TodayWhen Shelton heard Wednesday that the judge had dismissed her murder indictment, she said she felt ecstatic. “Now I can breathe,” she said. “God, thank you.”
The dismissal marks the end of the nightmare that began 17 years ago when authorities first accused her of murder, she told Mississippi Today. “It’s been a long time coming. It feels like a whole lot of weight has been lifted off my shoulders.”
She said her sister, Shenikia, told her, “Now, we can celebrate.”
The dismissal means this judicial district that covers Clay, Lowndes, Noxubeeand Oktibbeha counties has seen seven people freed from prison after courts overturned their murder convictions — the most of any judicial district in the state. All were prosecuted under the previous district attorney, Forrest Allgood.
Allgood has told Mississippi Today that just because people have their convictions tossed doesn’t mean they’re innocent. “Only God knows if a man is innocent,” he said. “That’s why we have no verdict of ‘Innocent’ in our law — just ‘Guilty’ or ‘Not Guilty,’ or, in Scotland, ‘Not Proven.’”
Last December, the Mississippi Court of Appeals ordered a new trial for Shelton, saying prosecutors failed to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” she killed Young.
Jurors never heard the apparent suicide note that Young wrote after Shelton’s sister decided against living with him.
“I have no life without her,” he wrote. “These are my last words. Bye, bye.”
Three jurors shown the note this year told Mississippi Today that Shelton deserved a new trial.
On June 1, Mississippi Today published its four-year investigation into Shelton’s case, showing how much of the evidence suggested that Young died from suicide. The pathologist who originally ruled the death a homicide reversed himself.
Days later, the state Supreme Court let stand the appeals court’s decision, clearing the way for Shelton to receive a new trial. The judge has now canceled the trial and dismissed the murder indictment.
“At last, this case that should have never been brought is over,” said Shelton’s lawyer, Sandra Levick. “Ms. Shelton was convicted of a murder that never happened at a trial that was not fair by a jury that never heard all the facts.”
She thanked Colom, who had directed Shelton’s family to the Innocence Project in 2018. “If he had not agreed to look into this case,” Levick wrote, “this day would never have come.”
She also said, “We are grateful as well to generations of law students at Ole Miss, to our many experts including Dr. (Liam) Funte who did the hard thing and admitted that he had been wrong.”
She also thanked her co-counsel Jake Howard from the MacArthur Justice Center, Tucker Carrington, director of the Mississippi Innocence Project, and “everyone else who helped claw back this injustice.”
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