In August  of 1997 Officer Cameron Todd of the Houston, Mississippi Police Department found himself suddenly on the other side of the law; arrested and charged with Capital Rape. He was devastated. He had never before been arrested for anything. He was sure it had to be a mistake and that it would soon be cleared up. That did not happen; instead he was formally arraigned and his bail was set at one hundred thousand dollars. This was soon reduced to fifty thousand but was still a staggering amount for his family to post. After the money was raised and he was released on bail he began to meet with his family, his friends and his Attorney to try to understand what had happened to him.

What he learned was puzzling.  A group of people had been arrested for setting fire to a neighbor's home. The group included three adults and several teens.

After the arrests, one of the teens, a thirteen year old girl, claimed to have had sex several times  with him, and with  a Deputy Jailor from the county jail.

She eventually named others in the charges; four adults and several teens. One of the adults was a woman who shared the same residence as the girl. One of the really puzzling aspects of the nightmare was that he and the jailor were being linked in the headline stories of area newspapers and television news reports as ring-leaders of a major "Child Prostitution, Drug and Pornography" operation. The burned out trailer was said to have been headquarters for the group. He was not well acquainted with the jailor or with any of the others named in the indictment but Mike Doss, the Chief Investigator for the Chickasaw County Sheriff's Department, was being quoted as having said that there was plenty of "hard evidence" behind the charges and that they were the results of a 90 day investigation. The trailer fire was said to have been started by "some kind of altercation" between the adult members of the "Ring". What he learned was that he had just become the latest victim of what is, perhaps, the most ominous undercurrent in modern law enforcement. He was being prosecuted, not only for a crime he had not committed, but for a crime in which the Constitutional presumption of  "Innocent until proven guilty" is replaced by "Guilty until proven innocent".

In the weeks following his release on bail Cameron and his supporters became more hopeful. The obvious flaws in the case were coming to light almost on a daily basis. First, the crime scene had to be moved. The investigators had indicated that the alleged "ring" operated from the site of the arson fire but the residents of that trailer were not suspects in any investigations. The only crime which could be said to have occurred there being the arson. The primary suspects all lived in a frame house some distance away; except for the two police officers who, it was developed, had no connection whatever to the trailer or to it's destruction in the fire. Next, the "Prostitution, Drugs, and Pornography Ring" disappeared. No evidence could be found to support allegations of any sort of conspiracy to engage in prostitution, drug trafficking, or pornography. Soon the allegation that the whole thing was masterminded by the two officers acting in concert also was withdrawn when it became impossible to establish even the most tenuous of connections between them. They worked in different departments and did not move in the same social circles. The sheriff's department quietly dropped their assertion that "Cameron Todd had transported the deputy to a private residence, in his patrol car, for the purpose of engaging in illicit sex with a minor child, and then had stayed to watch". This was replaced with the allegation that each officer, acting on his own and without the knowledge of the other, had approached the child and engaged in acts of a sexual nature with her. The child's state appointed guardian, who was also one of her aunts, was said to have encouraged the wrongdoing and to have participated in the sexual encounters, along with another adult female. This new "group sex" angle grabbed the headlines for a while but later would be revealed to have been as much a fabrication as the previous stories. In a matter of weeks after the sensational headlines had begun it became apparent that no evidence had been found and that it was not likely that any more would turn up in the future. What the prosecution had was what they had started with; the statement of one troubled young woman alleging that she had been involved in sexual situations with several people including the two officers.

The prosecutor, District Attorney Jim Hood, and a local Department of Human Services Social Worker, Pammy Davidson, had proceeded on the assumption that "Children don't lie about this kind of thing", and possibly expected, at least in the beginning, to uncover corroborating evidence of a more substantial nature. Neither the District Attorney's office, The Department of Human Services, nor the Sheriff's Office seemed inclined to investigate the possibility that the girl's testimony was unreliable. After having stated, for the cameras, that there was "plenty of hard evidence" and learning that they had been too hasty in making that declaration, they apparently set out to either find or fabricate the evidence using whatever resources were available to them without regard for the principles of Truth or Justice. They decided to do "whatever it takes" to convict several people of crimes which none had committed .

The young woman who made the initial charges has since retracted them. She has, in fact, a long history of making and retracting such charges---  which should have made investigators leery of accepting her story at face value at the beginning. She apparently wanted to focus attention away from her part in the arson and made these allegations within hours of being picked for questioning on those charges. It worked. She avoided responsibility for her part in the arson but found herself caught in a web from which there seemed to be no escape. She found herself in the hands of half-trained, poorly educated investigators and social workers, and a publicity hungry prosecutor who would stop at nothing to gain a headline-grabbing conviction. She was cut off from family and friends and not allowed contact with them.

To her credit, she has tried, in various ways to get the truth out more than once in the intervening years, but has not been successful.

Cameron Todd has spent more than four years of his life in a sort of legal limbo fighting to prove his innocence in a case where he knows he is considered  "Guilty until proven innocent", and his accuser has spent the same time in her own legal limbo as a ward of the state, held in "protective custody" and cut off from family and friends. The accuser lost her childhood to the exploitation of the adults who held the power in her life in those years, and she has lost her teen years to the exploitation of those placed in power in her life by the state of Mississippi. Accuser and accused are both victims of official corruption and incompetence run amuck!

Todd has had two trials and one Supreme Court (Mississippi) appeal and is waiting for the results of another appeal. Time will tell. The truth is out there and eventually will be revealed.

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Cameron Todd Vs. Mississippi

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UPDATE

16 March 2003

Cameron is in remarkably good spirits, considering his circumstances and is keeping busy with his studies and other activities.

With some other inmates (also students at MCCF Bible College) he recently formed a Contemporary Gospel band and they are working to raise funds to build a chapel at the facility.

For a recent update in his own words, go to the "Message Page".

This page was last updated on: October 13, 2007