Kentucky sheriff accused of killing judge makes first court appearance
District Judge Kevin Mullins was shot and killed in his chambers at the Letcher County courthouse in Whitesburg, Kentucky. (Kentucky Court of Justice)
A sheriff in eastern Kentucky will make his first court appearance Wednesday morning, nearly a week after he was accused of shooting a local district judge in a courthouse killing that shocked and mystified the small Appalachian town of Whitesburg.
Shawn “Mickey” Stines, the 43-year-old Letcher County sheriff, will be arraigned via virtual hearing before Chief Regional Judge Rupert Wilhoit, who was appointed to serve as the special judge on Stines’s case.
Stines faces first-degree murder charges in the death of Kevin Mullins, a 54-year-old Letcher County district judge and a longtime colleague of Stines. Before Stines’s election as sheriff in 2018, he served as Mullins’s courtroom bailiff; as sheriff, Stines was responsible for providing security for courthouse employees, including its judges.
The unexplained killing of one of the county’s most prominent officials by its top-ranking law enforcement officer has destabilized Whitesburg, a tight-knit town of about 1,700 people roughly 145 miles southeast of Lexington.
Now a crime scene, the Letcher County courthouse in Whitesburg will remain closed through the end of the month. Cases and courthouse activity have been put on pause, while the sheriff’s office—also closed until October—tapped a chief deputy to serve as interim sheriff. Matt Butler, the county’s top prosecutor, recused himself in the case in part because Mullins was his brother-in-law through their wives. One of Butler’s employees, among the roughly 50 courthouse staff in the building during the shooting, was in Mullins’s judicial suite and is likely to be a witness, Butler said last week.
As the county adjusts to its new reality, the biggest question that looms is “why.”
“The motive, what led up to the shooting, is what we’re trying to figure out,” Trooper Matt Gayheart, a Kentucky State Police spokesman, said during a news conference last week.
State police and the attorney general’s office, which will prosecute the case, have released few details on the crime. According to the Kentucky State Police, on Sept. 19 just before 3 p.m., Stines shot Mullins after an argument. Stines allegedly walked into Mullins’s outer office and told court employees that he wanted to speak with the judge alone, the Mountain Eagle reported.
Once alone, the newspaper reported, Stines allegedly shut the door, and the sound of gunshots followed.
Mullins was pronounced dead at the scene, and Stines was arrested without incident, state police said. Since the shooting, Stines has been held at the Leslie County Detention Center, about 60 miles away.
In addition to the murder charge, Stines remains the subject of a federal lawsuit that accuses his former deputy of coercing women into sex when they couldn’t pay the fees related to their ankle monitors required for home confinement.
In the 2022 lawsuit filed in the Eastern District of Kentucky, one of the plaintiffs alleges that Stines failed “to adequately train and supervise” the deputy, Ben Fields, and “knew or should have known” that Fields was sexually abusing the women in his charge.
Fields, who had succeeded Stines as Mullins’s bailiff, allegedly took the plaintiff into the judge’s chambers after hours to coerce her into sexual acts because he knew there were no cameras in the room, the complaint says.
Attorneys for Fields did not respond to a request for comment last week. Fields, in court documents, denied some of the allegations and exercised his Fifth Amendment rights on others. He pleaded guilty last year to criminal charges of rape, sodomy, perjury and tampering with a prisoner monitoring device. He served six months in jail and was released on probation, according to Whitesburg-based newspaper the Mountain Eagle.
Mullins was not named in the lawsuit and was never accused of wrongdoing in the case.
Fields was fired from the Letcher County sheriff’s office. Stines, his jailed former boss, technically remains in charge.
Letcher County Attorney Jamie Hatton explained to local TV station WJHL that since Stines was elected to his role, under Kentucky law, he remains in office until he resigns or is somehow removed by other action.
“Although he’s charged with this horrible crime, he’s still our sheriff,” Hatton told the station. “So we’re working on procedures to ascertain … if he plans to resign that position or retain that position. And based on that decision, we have to determine what is the next step if he doesn’t wish to resign and how do we run our local sheriff’s office.”
