Background: Senatobia Mississippi Police squad car (YouTube screengrab/WREG). Inset: Quantavious Eason, 10, appears outside of the Tate County Youth Court (YouTube screengrab/WREG). A judge in Mississippi sentenced the child to three months probation for relieving himself behind his mother’s car.
Terms of a probation agreement ordered by a judge in Mississippi for Quantavious Eason, a 10-year-old Black child arrested this summer for urinating near his mother’s parked car, are too extreme and the boy’s mother has refused to sign the document, according to her attorney.
The third grader was arrested on Aug. 10 by police in Senatobia, Mississippi, a small town of less than 10,000 people. According to Eason’s mother, Latonya Eason, she told NBC News that she was inside a lawyer’s office while her young son was outside. He had been relieving himself next to her car but tucked behind a door so he was not exposing himself to anyone.
A passing officer spotted the boy and arrested him.
Senatobia police have said the child was not handcuffed. Eason’s mother says he was placed into a jail cell. Days after Eason’s arrest, one of the officers involved was no longer working for the department, according to a statement posted on Facebook on Aug. 21 by the Senatobia Police Department.
When Eason was sentenced, the judge ordered him to three months of probation plus an assigned two-page book report on late NBA legend Kobe Bryant.
A lawyer for the Eason family, Carlos Moore, announced this week that the boy’s mother had fully intended to sign the ordered probation agreement at first, noting she feared threats by state prosecutors to upgrade her son’s original charge — a “youth in need of supervision” charge — if she didn’t.
But then, as she carefully read through its terms, Moore said she realized they were the same as terms used for criminal adult defendants on probation: the third grader would be subject to drug testing at a probation officer’s discretion and he would have weapons prohibitions enforced on him.
“It’s just a regular probation. I thought it was something informed for a juvenile. But it’s the same terms an adult criminal would have,” Moore told reporters.
The sentence was handed down by Judge Rusty Harlow Jr.
According to the Clarion Ledger, after Harlow handed down the sentence, Eason’s lawyer slammed it as “asinine” and said “any sensible judge” would have dropped the charge completely.
Moore has said he thinks racism underlies the child’s arrest as well as the ruling from the court and the overzealous terms of his probation agreement. Eason’s mother told NBC last week she didn’t know if racism was a component but she knew her son had been terribly mistreated.
“My son is going through enough getting arrested, and then for him having to see a probation officer and then write an essay, I don’t think it’s right or it’s fair. The average child would use the bathroom outside … and probably some grown men that would do the same thing,” she said.
Latonya Eason also expressed her frustration that an officer nearly let her son off the day he was arrested, telling her merely not to let it happen again, but then, “several more officers showed up, including a lieutenant” and that lieutenant, she alleges, made the call to arrest her child.
Moore did not immediately return a request for comment to Law&Crime on Friday.
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