LETCHER COUNTY, Ky. (Court TV) — Despite video showing what appears to be a cold-blooded murder, the attorney representing former Sheriff Shawn ‘Mickey’ Stines insists there’s more to the case than meets the eye.
Shawn ‘Mickey’ Stines walks into court on Nov. 25, 2024. (Court TV)
Stines is charged with murdering District Judge Kevin Mullins in his chambers on Sept. 19, 2024. A video inside the judge’s chambers captured the shooting, which appeared to show Mullins trying to hide beneath his desk as Stines repeatedly fired shots.
“It’s extremely complicated,” Stines’ attorney, Jeremy Bartley, told Court TV’s Vinnie Politan on Tuesday night. Bartley said the story behind the shooting actually spans several years and is not limited to what’s seen on the video. In fact, just a few days before the shooting, Stines sat down for a deposition in a case involving Mullins.
READ MORE | Former Sheriff Shawn ‘Mickey’ Stines indicted for murder of Kentucky judge
At the time of his murder, Mullins had been named as part of a lawsuit alleging that one of Stines’ deputies who worked in the courthouse had sexually assaulted a woman in the judge’s chambers. Stines was deposed as part of that lawsuit, though he was not named as a defendant.
Jeremy Bartley, Shawn ‘Mickey’ Stines’ attorney, appears during an interview with Vinnie Politan on March 11, 2025. (Court TV)
“In the week prior to and the week of the deposition, lots of people noticed that Mickey had become more increasingly paranoid, that he became sleepless, had gone nights without sleep and there was an overwhelming amount of pressure on him,” Bartley said. Bartley suggested that others besides Mullins had been threatening Stines, alluding to them as “a number of people who were very interested in the outcome of the civil deposition.”
“When I heard of the shooting … I admit the first thought I had was, ‘Maybe the litigation I’m involved in had something to do with this,'” Ned Pillersdorf, who represents the plaintiff in the civil suit, told Politan on Monday. While Pillersdorf maintained he didn’t recall anything strange being said in the deposition, he did note the sheriff’s demeanor as “odd.” “It wasn’t your typical deposition of a sheriff in a civil rights case. But having said that, I have no idea why his defense attorney keeps saying that my litigation, the litigation me and my co-counsel are involved in, was somehow a motive in all this. But he keeps saying that.”
Bartley said that at the time of the shooting, Stines believed that he and his family were in “imminent danger.” While he concedes that the threat may not have been as immediate and dire as Stines perceived, Bartley said he believed there was, in fact, an “objective threat to his family.”
Earlier this month, Bartley filed paperwork indicating that Stines intends to use an insanity defense at trial. While Kentucky law does not mandate the defense to reveal their strategy this early, Bartley said he wanted to do so in order to get Stines on the calendar for an evaluation. According to Bartley, evaluations from the state are running on a 12-18 month waiting list.
