Category: Civil Rights

Today, January 30th 2019, April Malone and Celitria Watson made an appearance in Federal court in Magistrate Judge Tu M Pham.

As we saw in our previous post,  Ms Malone and Ms Watson are the falsely-arrested women who faced manufactured wiretap data, where MPD Organized Crime Unit detectives used a Stingray device to alter texts between Ms Watson and her incarcerated brother, Kendrick Watson.   She had an automated cloud backup of all her phone activity and was able to produce the original backup of her texts to prove the police alteration of the evidence.   Their cases were dismissed and expunged, but Kendrick Watson was convicted on evidence from those same cops.

Today’s hearing was a scheduling conference where the due dates for the various activities leading up to a December 2019 jury trial.  From the docket (PDF) “Pro-Se Plaintiffs April Malone and Celitria Watson present.  John M. Jones and Emmett L. Whitwell  appearing for defendant Shelby County.  Darius Walker, Jr. appearing for the City of Memphis. Betsy McKinney making a limited appearance on behalf of defendants Thurmond Richardson, Jonathan Overly and William Acred.  The parties submitted a proposed scheduling order.  The court discussed the dates and deadlines with the parties.  Plaintiffs made an oral motion to waive the mediator fees pursuant to the Mediation Plan for pro se civil cases with parties granted IFP status.  The court granted plaintiffs oral motion and waived the fees.  Mediator will be selected by the court.

A motion or several motions for dismissal are expected from the defendants.

Here is the scheduling order that Judge Pham made today.    Disclosures will be done in the next two weeks, where the plaintiffs have to provide copies of the documentation they have and a list of damages and time off work.   The defendants also have to produce their documents and details of any expert witnesses.    The next step will be the appointment of a mediator.

Any attorney who would like to jump in here would be most welcome.   Ms Watson and Ms Malone need to know what will happen in the mediation.

Also in court today, Mr Earley Story, who also has a pro-se Federal civil rights case coming up in February.   We will be following Mr Story’s very interesting case here on MemphisTruth.com.

See the short video here. (2:30).
More information here.

(2/3/2019) April Malone and Celitria Watson have started a gofundme to fund their legal representation.

To be continued.

Me