Oklahoma County Commissioner Laments He Cannot Lynch Random Black People: "You Can't Do That Anymore. They Got More Rights Than We Got."
Also discussed on a secret recording: hiring assassins to murder a local reporter, where to bury his body, and joking about a woman who burned to death in a house fire trying to save her dogs.
I don’t know why any person who follows the news would need any additional evidence that police and other law enforcement officials in the United States are racist, violent sociopaths. If you do need more proof, there is evidence reported nearly every single day. (Police in the U.S. kill an average of 1,000 people every year.)
The most recent account of the U.S.’s police culture comes from Oklahoma, where a county commissioner pined for the good old days when you could get some rope, grab a Black man from a jail cell, and lynch him. Other topics during the conversation included hiring an assassin to murder a local journalist and a discussion of where to bury his body. They also joked about a woman who burned to death in a house fire four days earlier when she went back into the house and tried to rescue her two dogs, likening her to “barbecue”.
The comments were recorded on March 6, 2023, after a public meeting of the McCurtain Board of Commissioners, when that local journalist, suspecting additional county business would be discussed without members of the public present (a violation of Oklahoma’s Open Meeting Act), hid his voice-activated recorder in the room. [Full recording (3.5 hours) here.]
From Jonathan Edwards’s reporting in the Washington Post:
During the ensuing conversation, a county commissioner lamented about how they could no longer yank Black people out of the jail, “take them down to Mud Creek and hang them up with a . . . rope,” according to McCurtain Gazette-News, which later published a recording online. . . .
Over the weekend, the newspaper published an article recounting a portion of that alleged conversation, promising to follow up with more reporting in coming weeks. The paper also posted snippets of the audio online. Gazette-News reporter Bruce Willingham told KWTV he left his recorder hoping to get evidence that officials were holding secret meetings.
“I was completely appalled and frightened, quite frankly,” Willingham told the station.
On Sunday, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) called for the resignation of four officials who, according to the Gazette-News, were part of that conversation, including county commissioner Mark Jennings, Sheriff Kevin Clardy, sheriff’s investigator Alicia Manning and county jail administrator Larry Hendrix.
“I am both appalled and disheartened to hear of the horrid comments made by officials in McCurtain County,” the governor said in a statement provided to The Washington Post. “There is simply no place for such hateful rhetoric in the state of Oklahoma, especially by those that serve to represent the community through their respective office. I will not stand idly by while this takes place.”
The Republican governor is asking them to resign? Are you fucking kidding me? These vile, hateful assholes should have been fired immediately.
Yesterday, the Oklahoma Sheriffs Association (OSA) announced McCurtain County Sheriff Kevin Clardy, investigator Alicia Manning, and Jail Administrator Larry Hendrix had been suspended, but not yet fired. Today, Mark Jennings, McCurtain County Commissioner, resigned on Wednesday. On the recording, he is the one lamenting he can’t “take [Black people] down to Mud Creek and hang them up with a damn rope. But you can’t do that anymore. They got more rights than we got.”
One of those additional “rights” Jennings is so annoyed about is the right not to be lynched and have his corpse left swinging from a tree branch by Jennings and his gang of good ol’ boys.
The recording also includes Jennings telling Clardy and Manning that he knows of “two big, deep holes” if they needed them. Jennings later said he’d come across “two or three hit men” in his life who “would cut no . . . mercy” to Chris Willingham. And: It’s no surprise at all that the background of this story includes a police deputy killing a man by tasering him.
Edwards:
On March 6, the same day as the secretly recorded meeting, [Gazette-News reporter Christopher] Willingham had sued county commissioners, the sheriff’s office, Clardy and Manning in the U.S. District Court of Eastern Oklahoma, accusing them of slandering him.
His suit followed years of reporting on the sheriff’s department for the Gazette-News. In November 2021, the newspaper ran the first article in what would be an eight-part series about misconduct in the sheriff’s office, according to the lawsuit. Over the next five months, the newspaper exposed several instances of alleged misconduct in the sheriff’s office based on interviews with current and former employees, including homicide evidence that had been tainted, questionable hirings of employees with no previous law enforcement experience and an investigation into who in the sheriff’s office was leaking information, the suit says. . . .
In June 2022, Manning allegedly retaliated against Willingham for his reporting by telling someone that the reporter had traded marijuana for child pornography. That same day, Manning said in a teleconference that Willingham was “one of them,” mentioning the name of a man who had been convicted of having child pornography and sexually abusing a child, Willingham’s suit alleges.
Those were lies to smear Willingham and destroy his credibility as a journalist, it adds.
Four days after the March 6 meeting, Willingham and the Gazette-News also sued the sheriff’s office and Clardy, this time in state court, alleging the office spent months illegally denying public records requests related to 45-year-old Bobby Barrick, who died in March 2022 after a deputy Tasered him, the suit alleges. The FBI and the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation later investigated Barrick’s death, it adds.
The Willinghams’ lawyer, Christin Jones, said in a statement that their family has owned the paper for more than 40 years. For nearly a year, they have suffered intimidation, ridicule and harassment for trying to report the news to their fellow McCurtain County residents, the lawyer said. . . .
The newspaper plans to run two more stories based on those and has promised to release the full recording once the series has been published. . . .
Transcript and Audio Links (my emphasis):
Sheriff: Anyway, you know we wrap it up in tinfoil to preserve the body and stuff like that. And Dot kept them, all the body, heart, stuff like that. Anyway, Kyler was out there.
Jennings: Oh, body parts? She’d come apart?
Sheriff: Yeah. Some parts of bodies. And…
Heather: They really fall apart when they’re burnt?
Larry: Yeah. You never had barbecue?
Sheriff: That’s another thing.
Heather: Yeah?
Larry: Same thing.
Beck: I’m hungry.
(talking over each other)
Sheriff: So we get her in the body bag and Kyler goes, you do know what we gotta do now, right? Faith goes, no, what? He goes, you gotta pre-heat the oven 350 degrees, leave her in there for 15 minutes. And she went (vomit sounds) (laughter). Bless her heart. It was… and then the medical examiner asked her, said hey we're fixing to go eat. And he looked her in the face and said you wanna go with me and go eat barbecue? (big laughter)
Jennings: It’s like somebody wanting this job, they don’t realize, like your job. I heard it the other day, said I heard 2 or 12 people were going for sheriff. I said fuck, lets get 20. They don’t have a goddamn clue what they’re getting into. Not this day and age. I’m gonna tell you something. If it was back in the day, when that when Alan Marshton would take a damn black guy and whoop their ass and throw him in the cell? I’d run for fucking sheriff.
Sheriff: Yeah. Well, It’s not like that nomore.
Jennings: I know. Take them down to Mud Creek and hang them up with a damn rope. But you can’t do that anymore. They got more rights than we got.
Manning: They [the Willinghams, the family who owns the local paper] are insignificant in my life, really. They bring no (indistinguishable)
Sheriff: The old saying is, what goes around goes around. It will. I told you it will.
Jennings: I know where two big deep holes are here if you ever need them.
Sheriff: I’ve got an excavator.
Jennings: Well, these are already pre-dug.
Jennings: But the thing of it is, you know.
Manning: We actually told the truth.
Jennings: I’ve known, I’ve known two or three hit men, they're very quiet guys…
Manning: Yeah?
Jennings: And would cut no fucking mercy.
Manning: Yeah.
Jennings: In Louisiana. Cause this is all Mafia around here.
Kevin: Oh yeah
Manning: Yeah, but here’s the reality. If a hair on his wife’s head, Chris Willingham’s head, or any of those people that really were behind that, if any hair on their head got touched by anybody, who would be the bad guy?
Sheriff: Who would be blamed for it?
Manning: Yeah!