Gee this is beginning to sound very familiar, a three pack

I was catching up on Jackson Jambalaya this morning and was cross pollinated, for lack of a better term on this post about Madison Businessman Cliff Torrence’s scrape with the law for allowing underage drinking at his residence in violation of Mississippi’s “social host” statute, which is invoked when an underage drinking party gets out of control and the police are called in. If it was not for the fact that I’m going to highlight three posts the post title for the Torrence saga alone would run under the lede: Judge Breland Hilburn: Where cases go to die a quiet death. Here’s why:

Thus, Mr. Torrence managed to escape the thirty-day sentence Judge McKinley wanted to impose and only paid a thousand-dollar fine. The 2014 violations occurred while he was serving the sentence of unsupervised probation. Mr. Phillips filed a motion to show cause on July 23, 2014 and asked the court to revoke his probation and incarcerate him for 90 days. The motion also disclosed Mr. Torrence had not completed the Courtwatch analysis program. Earlier post with copy of each case file.

The hearing was supposed to be held on August 18, 2014 but was continued until November 10, 2014. The November hearing did not take place as Judge Steve Ratcliff recused himself on November 7. He stated that the “court had been contacted by someone other than defense counsel on behalf of the defendant with information about this case.” The Mississippi Supreme Court appointed Retired Circuit Judge Breland Hilburn to hear the case on November 13.

The docket contains no entries after that date. There are no motions to schedule a hearing, no notices, no nothing. The case is just there, collecting dust.

Moving right along Kingfish has been giving daily updates on legendary Mississippi TeeVee reporter Bert Case, who died earlier this week after a long battle with sepsis. I’m not certain there is a TeeVee reporter in this area that can hold a candle to Bert’s lifetime body of work. For those of you down here that have no clue about Bert, here is a good place to start.

Finally Jackson Jambalaya is going to war, literally, with the Island View Casino over a public request JJ sent to the MDA involving the Tourism Sales Tax rebates paid to the Casino. I may have missed it but this story appears to have been ignored by the other local media which makes it all the more important that people down here know about it since it involves Gulfport’s sole Casino. Interesting is that once again shit house legal practice surfaces as Kingfish was outrageously deprived of basic substantive due process finding out about the lawsuit filed against him last September just a few weeks ago.