A one-year-old child was killed by police—and Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Finch called it justified. The child was Kohen Wiley, killed by an officer in Senatobia, Mississippi. Finch, a “law and order” Republican running for governor next year, said in 2024 that officers “should know that their AG will always have their back.” Her statement suggested not a commitment to impartial enforcement of the law, but a promise to protect the police. During her six years as attorney general, she has cleared officers in 82 of 86 police-involved shootings.
The Killing of Kohen Wiley
The killing of one-year-old Wiley occurred on June 14, 2026, after police responded to a Walmart report that diapers had been shoplifted.
When officers arrived, they saw two Black women entering a car and pulling out of a parking space. Police ordered them to stop, and five officers surrounded the vehicle with guns drawn. Vellesiya Wiley, seated in the passenger seat, held up the baby to show that a child was inside. As the car began to pull away, police opened fire, killing Kohen and wounding the driver. The shooting sparked outrage and multiracial protests. Four months later, on October 19, Finch declared the use of force justified. No body-camera footage was released until pressure from the family and attorney Ben Crump led to the release of a video showing the encounter from the officers’ perspective, but not the shooting itself. According to this account, the attorney general’s office interviewed neither the witnesses nor Kohen’s mother, Vellesiya Wiley.
The officer who shot Kohen had also reportedly been accused twice during the previous year of directing racially offensive language at coworkers. Senatobia’s former police chief, Harold “Hal” Vanderford, took no action against the officer and was later fired after The New York Times and Mississippi Today reported that he had routinely used racist slurs in private messages with a colleague.
The Case of Gregory Hill
This tragedy inflicted on a Black family reminded me of my June 2, 2018, Black Star News article, “New Dred Scott Ruling—One Cent Awarded in Police Killing,” republished by IBW21. The article examined the case of 30-year-old Gregory Vaughn Hill Jr., who was shot and killed by a police officer while he was listening to music in his garage. Authorities said Hill was intoxicated, and a grand jury found the officer’s use of deadly force justified.
Hill was the father of three children. His mother filed a civil lawsuit on behalf of his estate, and the jury awarded $4—$1 for funeral expenses and $3 to the estate. Because jurors found Hill 99 percent responsible for his own death, the award was reduced to four cents: one cent for the funeral and one cent for each surviving child. This was not fiction; it happened in 21st-century America during the first Trump administration.
Years apart, the deaths of Kohen Wiley and Gregory Hill reveal the same brutal pattern: deadly force used against Black people and officially declared justified.
A Broader Assault on Equal Justice
Although Black and brown people are killed by police across the United States, the devaluation of Black life is especially conspicuous in the former Confederate South. In these places, law enforcement can appear disturbingly close to its origins in slave patrols.
As racism and fascism increasingly shape the face of the federal government, racists and bigots have become emboldened. Their words and actions are normalized by a chief executive whose hateful, vulgar, and racist rhetoric would have made the segregationists of the Jim Crow South envious.
Beyond racist rhetoric, a coordinated campaign seeks to reverse the gains of the Voting Rights Act through baseless claims of voter fraud. During the next two years of the Trump presidency, there is a real danger that “zombie laws” still on the books across much of the South could be revived. These include vagrancy laws, bans on atheists and nonbelievers holding public office, pre-Roe criminal abortion bans, and restrictions on same-sex marriage. Even when old statutes remain dormant, replacement laws can reproduce their effects. Modern examples include Tennessee’s felony penalties for camping on public property, Georgia measures that penalize cities for failing to enforce bans on public sleeping, and targeted prohibitions on loitering or obstructing sidewalks. Such policies can recreate the day-to-day impact of post-emancipation vagrancy laws, which allowed authorities to imprison Black people who could not prove employment and force them into unpaid plantation labor.
These developments show how far the nation still has to go in its struggle for equality. Even landmark post–Jim Crow achievements—including the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Brown v. Board of Education, and other efforts to build a more perfect union—remain vulnerable. Rights that once seemed secure must be defended again and again.
Until Black lives are protected by the law rather than devalued by it, the promise of equal justice remains unfulfilled.
And the struggle continues.
