A Clarksdale, Miss., judge has been the target of a slew of violent, threatening social media posts, and police believe it is possible that the threats stem from Judge Carlos Moore’s decision to remove the controversial Mississippi state flag from his courtroom earlier this summer.
“Your [sic] not untouchable you can’t hide behind the court system or closed doors if I were you I would start checking my surroundings,” one threat read, according to WREG.
“You’re a piece of [expletive]. I guess you need a bullet in the head,” said another.
As we all know, the Mississippi state flag features a small inset of the Confederate battle flag. Not the kind of thing anybody wants to look at, especially nowadays, with the majority of the country moving toward removing monuments, flags and other symbols of the Confederacy that are used as emblems for white supremacy, segregation and the continued terrorization of minority groups.
So we can all probably take a wild guess about what kind of people were actually sending those threats.
At any rate, local police decided to quickly nip that mess in the bud, issuing warrants for the arrests of Paul Millwood and Jeff Porch on charges of cyberstalking-email threats and harassment.
“We’re working with the social media site to try to determine where their location may be,” Assistant Clarksdale Police Chief Robbie Linley said.
Linley acknowledged that currently, there doesn’t seem to be any link between the men and a hate group, but police are taking these threats very seriously: “We take any threat against any of our sitting judges. Whether they are in our jurisdiction, whether they are a county judge, a city judge, a circuit judge ... we take those very serious. And we’re going to do everything we can to prosecute anyone that makes any physical threats against those individuals.”
Additional officers have been assigned to the municipal court building where Moore sits, Linley confirmed, and police will be looking into whether either Millwood or Porch ever knew Moore or ever appeared before him in court.
Read more at WREG.