JACKSON — The Mississippi Court of Appeals on Tuesday reversed the murder and attempted murder convictions of James Banks Jr. in a 2023 Yazoo City shooting that killed one teenager and wounded another. The court ordered a new trial.
In a unanimous decision, the court ruled that jurors should not have heard two officers repeat what people who never testified told them about who fired the shots.
Banks and co-defendant Kendrick Myers were convicted in March 2025 in the Feb. 3, 2023, shooting at a home on Shady Drive. Jaylen Littleton, 16, and De’Vontrez Nelson, 15, were each shot seven times. Littleton died before he could be taken to the hospital. Nelson was airlifted to the University of Mississippi Medical Center and survived.
Circuit Judge Barry Ford sentenced both men to life in prison for first-degree murder and 40 years for attempted murder, with the sentences to run concurrently.
Tuesday’s ruling applies only to Banks. Myers’s appeal is pending before the Mississippi Supreme Court.
At trial, a Yazoo County sheriff’s deputy testified that an unidentified man at the scene told him the shooters were “James Banks and Little Kenny.” The deputy never got the man’s name. A Mississippi Bureau of Investigation agent testified that another man, who did not take the stand, told him Littleton said “Little James” shot him before he died or was taken away by ambulance.
Prosecutors argued that the testimony only explained how investigators developed suspects. Presiding Judge Jack Wilson, writing for the court, disagreed. He wrote that the statements mattered “only because they incriminated Banks.”
The court also found that the error was not harmless. The state’s case rested largely on Nelson, who testified that Banks and Myers shot him and Littleton. Nelson had told officers at the scene, and an MBI agent two days later, that he did not know who shot him. At trial, Nelson said he had been too scared to name them. Two of Banks’s cousins testified that he was at home all evening.
Wilson wrote that the hearsay effectively gave jurors two more witnesses naming Banks, and that “neither of these non-testifying witnesses could be cross-examined.”
Because the court ordered a new trial, it did not rule on Banks’s other argument. Banks argued that jurors should not have heard that he had been charged with, and acquitted of, the killing of Nelson’s 13-year-old cousin, D’montae Lee. Banks was awaiting trial in that case when Littleton and Nelson were shot.
When the two men were arrested in February 2023, police said the shooting may have been tied to a recent fight at a high school.
The case returns to Yazoo County Circuit Court, where District Attorney Akillie Malone-Oliver’s office prosecuted it. The state can ask the Court of Appeals for a rehearing or ask the Mississippi Supreme Court to review the decision.
