Who was Kevin Mullins, the district judge fatally shot in his chambers in Letcher County?
Here’s what we know about Letcher District Judge Kevin Russell Mullins, 54, who was shot to death on Thursday in his chambers in the Letcher County courthouse in Whitesburg.
▪ Mullins graduated from the University of Kentucky with a Bachelor of Arts and the University of Louisville Louis D. Brandeis School of Law. He was admitted to the Kentucky Bar Association in 1995. Based in Letcher County, Mullins handled a variety of criminal, civil and probate cases in the state and federal courts, according to court records.
▪ Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear appointed Mullins, then an assistant commonwealth’s attorney, to the district court bench in 2009. He’s been re-elected several times since then.
▪ Kentucky State Police arrested Letcher County Sheriff Shawn M. “Mickey” Stines, 43, on Thursday and charged him with murder in Mullins’ death. Police say Stines shot Mullins after a short “personal” argument inside the courthouse and then surrendered to police.
▪ Prior to his election as sheriff in 2018, Stines worked as a bailiff in Mullins’ courtroom.
▪ Mullins’ chambers — although not the judge — played a role in pending litigation against Stines.
Stines is a defendant in a federal lawsuit against himself and one of his former deputies, Benjamin Charles Fields, who was convicted on Jan. 17 of third-degree rape, third-degree sodomy and tampering with a prisoner-monitoring device.
Fields is currently on probation in that criminal case.
In the lawsuit, a former Letcher County criminal defendant, Sabrina Adkins, says Fields repeatedly coerced her to have sex with him in Mullins’ courthouse chambers by letting her avoid paying home-incarceration fees.
Fields wanted to use Mullins’ chambers because he knew they didn’t have the security cameras founds elsewhere around the courthouse, according to the suit. Like Stines, Fields had worked in Mullins’ courtroom as a bailiff.
Stines was named as a defendant for failing to properly supervise his deputy, according to the suit.
Bethany Baxter, a Lexington attorney who represents Adkins, said Friday that she took Stines’ deposition in the suit just four days ago, on Monday.
Mullins was not named as a defendant in the suit and is not accused of wrongdoing, Baxter said.
This story was originally published September 20, 2024 at 2:10 PM.
