Shawn Hodges has been in prison for 26 years. He was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and grew up in the Austin Homes Community. Originally built for white residents, Austin Homes eventually became a close-knit community for black residents, including Shawn’s grandmother, who was one of the first black residents to move in. However, over the years, Austin Homes became infested with crack cocaine and many of the youth began selling drugs. Shawn himself was involved in running drugs for older guys, but he never committed any violent crimes.
During the 1990s, there was a push for federal funding to remove lifelong residents from Austin Homes. Gentrification efforts, funded by the Hope Six program, aimed to transform the public housing into prime real estate. As Austin Homes was conveniently located close to downtown, there was a motive to declare it a public nuisance and tear it down.
In 1997, Shawn Hodges was arrested for the murder of Benny Boling, a relative of former university president Edward J. Boling, for whom the Thompson Boling Arena was named.
Attorney Brandt Davis was appointed to represent Shawn, but he proved to be ineffective throughout the entire process. There were instances where Shawn felt his lawyer was intoxicated and couldn’t remember the details he shared. Davis even attempted to coerce Shawn into pleading guilty. Despite several requests for a new attorney, Judge Mary Beth Leibowitz denied them.
The case against Shawn was built solely on eyewitness testimony since there was no physical evidence connecting him to the murder. However, six witnesses denied Shawn’s involvement or presence during the incident near his grandmother’s apartment. Prior to the shooting, Shawn had been involved in a fight along with his cousin and the son of Debra Henderson. One of the witnesses who identified Shawn as the shooter was Debra Henderson, the mother of the person involved in the fight. Another witness was her cousin, Patricia Hamilton, who testified as the state’s star witness, claiming she had no history of dishonesty.
Anthony Purcell, the jury foreman, had previously served on a jury where another defendant was found guilty in a murder case. During Shawn’s trial, the jury requested to visit the crime scene to determine if the state’s witnesses could have seen the crime from their apartment windows. However, Judge Leibowitz denied this request, and the predominantly white jury took less than an hour to convict Shawn of first-degree murder, sentencing him to life in prison.
After Attorney Brandt Davis passed away, Shawn spent many years in prison without legal representation until he filed for post-conviction relief and was assigned a new attorney, Stephen Ross Johnson. Although Johnson managed to get Patricia Hamilton to recant her testimony, he couldn’t obtain any records regarding her because she had several aliases. However, Judge Leibowitz deemed Hamilton’s recantation not credible and believed it wouldn’t prove Shawn’s innocence.
In 2019, Shawn reached out to Black Lives Matter, and they conducted an independent investigation and traveled to Georgia and spoke with government & court officials. They spoke with the state’s original investigator, a retired Knoxville Police officer who remembered the case vividly. He revealed that he had given all his notes and records to Marsha Mitchell, the lead prosecutor in the case. Prior to working in Knoxville, for District Attorney Randy Nichols, Mitchell had worked in Memphis under Shelby County District Attorney Bill Gibbons but shortly transferred out of his office. Mitchell had a history of frequently changing offices throughout the state of Tennessee and had since left the country.
The retired police officer, and former (KPD) Knoxville Police officer said he always investigated cases thoroughly. He felt that Shawn’s case never sat right with him because he only wanted to put guilty people in prison. He assisted Black Lives Matter in discovering that a governor’s warrant had been issued for Patricia Hamilton since she couldn’t be located in Tennessee. Normally, a governor’s warrant is required when a person is in custody in another state. Further investigations by Black Lives Matter uncovered jail and court records in Calhoun, Georgia, indicating that Patricia Hamilton was in custody and facing felony indictment for multiple crimes investigated by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. It was revealed that Hamilton’s testimony was likely perjury and she could not have seen any crime in Tennessee because she was in Georgia.
Shawn Hodges filed a Writ of Error Coram Nobis, requesting that the new evidence demonstrating Hamilton’s perjury be introduced and that he be granted a new trial.
On June 27, 2023, his new attorney, Mary Eugenia Lewis, argued for an evidentiary hearing to review the documents uncovered by Black Lives Matter in Georgia. The fate of Shawn’s life now rests in the hands of three older white appellate judges who were practicing law at the time of the trial and attended the University of Tennessee, where the Thompson Boling Arena hosts its graduations.
In seeking justice, it is important to note that the evidence does not definitively prove Shawn’s innocence but does indicate that Assistant District Attorney Marsha Mitchell was involved in suborning perjury, leading to an innocent man being incarcerated. Ultimately, only God knows the truth in this complex and troubling case. We at Black Lives Matter Memphis are not against all police just crooked a** police but grateful for the ones who are honest like the white investigator/KPD officer who remember all the facts of this case, and did his job with integrity. We just pray that the 3 judges who don’t look like Shaun Alexander Hodge will have the courage to give him a new trial or set him free no matter what the cost. A lifetime for a lie. Justice Denied! Justice delayed! (Thurgood Marshall Justice Committee Sponsored) #FreeShuanHodges #blacklivesmatter #blacklivesmatterknoxville.
#BlackLivesMatter Memphis Chapter 