This article is missing information about the criticism of her conviction and sentence in a law review.(December 2021) |
Jennifer Mee | |
---|---|
Born | Jennifer Ann Mee [1] July 28, 1991 [1] St. Petersburg, Florida, U.S. |
Known for | "Hiccup girl" |
Criminal charge | First degree murder |
Penalty | Life in prison without the possibility of parole |
Partner(s) | Laron Raiford and Lamont Newton |
Details | |
Victims | Shannon Griffin |
Imprisoned at | Lowell Correctional Institution |
Jennifer Ann Mee (born July 28, 1991) is a convicted American murderer known as the "Hiccup Girl" for her long-lasting case of the hiccups. Mee appeared on national American television shows such as NBC's Today Show many times. Mee was arrested for first-degree murder in 2010. After a trial she was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole in 2013. [2] M. William Phelps wrote a book about her that was published in 2016. [3] Her transmutation from "media darling" to convicted murderer attracted renewed national attention. [4] [5] [6]
In 2007, when Mee was 15 years old, she gained international fame when she developed a case of uncontrollable hiccups. She appeared on television shows all over the United States hoping to find a cure. Mee claimed to be hiccupping 50 times a minute. [7] [8] National media competed to book her for morning shows. [4] [5] Her "world record" bout of hiccups has been compared to the world record for sneezing. [5] The causes and treatment of her condition were disputed, but her popularity as an internet search item was long lasting. [9] Her search for a hiccup cure included "[ingesting] sugar, peanut butter, breathing in a bag, [and] having people scare her". [2] The hiccups were stopped after Mee was treated by Dr. Bob Linde.[ citation needed ]
Mee continued to get media attention after her hiccups stopped. In June 2007, she ran away from home and it was reported in the newspapers. [2] She later dated a man named Lamont Newton. As she had a plan to find robbery victims online and set them up, Mee recruited Newton and another friend, Laron Raiford, to help her rob victims. [4]
In 2010, Mee met up with a 22-year-old man she encountered online. She invited the man to a vacant home where two of Mee's friends robbed him of less than $50 and shot the man, killing him. As an accomplice to the crime, Mee was charged with murder. [8]
After meeting the victim (Shannon Griffin), Mee led him around to the back of a vacant home where her two friends (Laron Raiford and Lamont Newton) were waiting with a .38 caliber handgun. [2] The victim was shot four times, but police did not know which suspect did the shooting. [10]
Mee, Raiford, and Newton all lived together and were arrested within hours of the crime. [2] [11] According to Sergeant Skinner of the St. Petersburg Police Department, Mee and her accomplices admitted to their involvement in the crime. [12]
Prior to the trial, Mee's lawyer, John Trevena, [13] offered to have Mee plead guilty in exchange for a 15-year sentence. [14] Laron Raiford had been offered a sentence of 40 years in exchange for a guilty plea, but he rejected the deal. [15]
During the trial, the prosecution played a recording of a jailhouse phone call between Mee and her mother. During the call, Mee told her mother, "I didn't kill nobody...I set everything up. It all went wrong, Mom. It [expletive] just went downhill after everything happened, Mom." Also, experts testified that Mee's DNA was found on the victim's shirt. Mee's lawyer claimed his client had schizophrenia. The judge ordered a psychological evaluation; however, it was determined that Mee was competent to stand trial. [16] Another defense used by her lawyer was that Mee's hiccups were a symptom of Tourette's syndrome. [17] [18]
In 2013, Mee was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. [19] Her co-defendants – Laron Raiford and Lamont Newton – were also convicted of first-degree felony murder and sentenced to life in prison. [8]
Mee's attorney moved for a new trial, which was subsequently denied. [20] Her sentence was criticized in an article in the Hastings Women's Law Journal as purportedly disparate from that which would be imposed upon a similarly situated male. [21]
The Wah Mee massacre was a mass shooting that occurred during the night of February 18–19, 1983, in which Kwan Fai "Willie" Mak, Wai Chiu "Tony" Ng and Keung Kin "Benjamin" Ng bound, robbed and shot fourteen people in the Wah Mee gambling club at the Louisa Hotel in Seattle, Washington, United States. Thirteen of the victims died, but Wai Chin, a dealer at the Wah Mee, survived to testify against the three in the separate high-profile trials held between 1983 and 1985. It remains the deadliest mass murder in the history of Washington State.
Lionel Alexander Tate is the youngest American citizen ever sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, though this sentence was eventually overturned. In January 2001, when Tate was 13, he was convicted of first-degree murder for the 1999 battering death of six-year-old Tiffany Eunick in Broward County, Florida.
William LaFortune is an American politician who served as the 37th Mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma from 2002 to 2006 and is currently a district judge in Tulsa County.
Roderrick Justin "Rod" Ferrell is an American murderer and cult leader. He was a member of a loose-knit gang of teenagers from Murray, Kentucky, known as the "Vampire Clan". Ferrell claimed to be a 500-year-old vampire named Vesago, a character he created for himself after becoming obsessed with the role playing game Vampire: The Masquerade. It was his mother, Sondra Gibson, who first introduced this game to Rod. In 1998, Ferrell pleaded guilty to the double slaying of a couple from Eustis, Florida, becoming the youngest person in Florida on Death Row at that time. Originally sentenced to death, Ferrell's penalty has since been reduced to life imprisonment.
Enmund v. Florida, 458 U.S. 782 (1982), is a United States Supreme Court case. It was a 5–4 decision in which the United States Supreme Court applied its capital proportionality principle, to set aside the death penalty for the driver of a getaway car, in a robbery-murder of an elderly Floridian couple. The court ruled that the imposition of the death penalty under the felony murder rule when the defendant did not intentionally kill the victim constituted cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment of the United States constitution.
Tison v. Arizona, 481 U.S. 137 (1987), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court qualified the rule it set forth in Enmund v. Florida (1982). Just as in Enmund, in Tison the Court applied the proportionality principle to conclude that the death penalty was an appropriate punishment for a felony murderer who was a major participant in the underlying felony and exhibited a reckless indifference to human life.
Channon Gail Christian, aged 21, and Hugh Christopher Newsom Jr., aged 23, were from Knoxville, Tennessee, United States. They were kidnapped on the evening of January 6, 2007, when Christian's vehicle was carjacked. The couple were taken to a rental house. Both of them were raped, tortured, and murdered. Four males and one female were arrested, charged, and convicted in the case. In 2007, a grand jury indicted Letalvis Darnell Cobbins, Lemaricus Devall Davidson, George Geovonni Thomas, and Vanessa Lynn Coleman on counts of kidnapping, robbery, rape, and murder. Also in 2007, Eric DeWayne Boyd was indicted by a federal grand jury of being an accessory to a carjacking, resulting in serious bodily injury to another person and misprision of a felony. In 2018, Boyd was indicted on state-level charges of kidnapping, robbery, rape, and murder.
Crystal Gail Mangum is an American former exotic dancer from Durham, North Carolina, United States, who has been incarcerated for murder since 2013. In 2006, she came to attention in national news reports for having made false allegations of rape against lacrosse players in the Duke lacrosse case. Mangum's work in the sex industry as a black woman while the young men she accused were white generated extensive media interest and academic debate about race, class, gender, and the politicization of the justice system.
Robert Joseph "Bobby Joe" Long was an American serial killer and rapist who was executed by the state of Florida for the murder of Michelle Denise Simms. Long abducted, sexually assaulted, and murdered at least ten women in the Tampa Bay area in Florida during an eight-month period in 1984. He released 17-year-old Lisa McVey after 26 hours. McVey provided critical information to the police that enabled them to arrest Long.
The Union Correctional Institution, formerly referred to as Florida State Prison, Raiford Prison and State Prison Farm is a Florida Department of Corrections state prison located in unincorporated Union County, Florida, near Raiford.
Lowell Correctional Institution is a women's prison in unincorporated Marion County, Florida, north of Ocala, in the unincorporated area of Lowell. A part of the Florida Department of Corrections, it serves as the primary prison for women in the state. Almost 3,000 women are incarcerated in the complex, which includes the Lowell Annex. As of 2015 2,696 women are in the main Lowell CI, making it the largest prison for women in the United States; its prison population became larger than that of the Central California Women's Facility that year.
Angela Corey is a former Florida State's Attorney for the Fourth Judicial Circuit Court, which includes Duval, Nassau and Clay counties—including Jacksonville and the core of its metropolitan area. She was elected in 2008 as the first woman to hold the position, and was defeated on August 30, 2016 by Melissa Nelson, the second woman to hold the position. Corey was catapulted into the national spotlight on March 22, 2012, when Florida Governor Rick Scott announced that she would be the newly assigned State Attorney investigating the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.
Capital punishment is a legal penalty in the U.S. state of Florida.
Jennifer Lee Daugherty was an American woman who was torture-murdered in Greensburg, Pennsylvania as an act of revenge in February 2010. Daugherty, who was mentally disabled, was tortured and murdered before being wrapped in Christmas decorations, put inside a garbage can, and dumped in the parking lot of Greensburg-Salem Middle School.
Travis Victor Alexander was an American salesman who was murdered by his ex-girlfriend, Jodi Ann Arias, in his house in Mesa, Arizona. Arias was convicted of first-degree murder on May 8, 2013, and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole on April 13, 2015.
Anthony Kirkland is an American serial killer. Between 2006 and 2009, Kirkland murdered two women and two girls in the Cincinnati area, following a 16-year prison term for the 1987 killing of his girlfriend.
On November 23, 2012, Jordan Davis, a black 17-year-old high-school student, was murdered at a Gate Petroleum gas station in Jacksonville, Florida, by Michael David Dunn, a white 45-year-old software developer, following an argument over loud music played by Davis and his three friends, in what was believed to be a racially motivated shooting.
Shawn Michael Grate is an American serial killer and rapist who was sentenced to death for the murders of five young women in and around northern Ohio from 2006 to 2016. Grate was convicted on two counts of aggravated murder on May 7, 2018, in Ashland County, pleaded guilty to two additional murders on March 1, 2019, in Richland County, and pleaded guilty to an additional murder on September 11, 2019, in Marion County.
Killer Women with Piers Morgan was a British television documentary series, broadcast on ITV and consisting of interviews by Piers Morgan with convicted American women murderers. The first series, of two episodes, was broadcast in May 2016, and the second series began its run in June 2017.
Murder in Florida law constitutes the intentional killing, under circumstances defined by law, of people within or under the jurisdiction of the U.S. state of Florida.