—Vanessa Edwards, B1Daily

Jordan Hill is gone, and the community is being told—again—to accept a version of justice that feels hollow, rushed, and disturbingly familiar. The circumstances surrounding his killing demand a retrial, not because of emotional outrage alone, but because the original process was steeped in racial bias, prosecutorial leniency, and a legal culture that has long devalued Black life in that region.

From the moment Jordan Hill was killed by a drunken white supremacist named Cody Rollins. The narrative hardened around protecting the killer rather than interrogating the act. Law enforcement statements, media framing, and prosecutorial decisions all worked in concert to humanize the killer while subtly criminalizing the victim. This pattern is not incidental. It is the product of an area where whiteness is treated as innocence by default and Blackness is treated as a threat that must be justified even in death.

Key evidentiary gaps and contradictions were brushed aside during the original proceedings. Witness testimony that raised questions about intent and escalation was minimized. Forensic interpretations favorable to the defense were elevated without serious challenge. Most damning is how the standard of “reasonable fear” was stretched beyond recognition—transformed into a catch-all excuse that allows lethal violence against Black people so long as the killer claims fear afterward. In any fair system, that standard would be interrogated rigorously. Here, it was accepted almost reflexively.

The jury selection process alone should trigger alarms. In a region with a documented history of racial exclusion—both formal and informal—the likelihood of a jury that genuinely reflected the community was slim. Prosecutors failed to aggressively challenge racial bias during voir dire, allowing stereotypes and preconceived notions about Black men to silently shape deliberations. When juries are not representative, verdicts cease to be neutral; they become reflections of local prejudice.

This area’s history cannot be ignored. It is a place where law enforcement agencies have repeatedly been accused of disproportionate stops, harsher charging decisions, and unequal sentencing along racial lines. It is a place where Black residents are over-policed in daily life but under-protected when violence is committed against them. Jordan Hill’s case did not occur in a vacuum—it followed a well-worn path where accountability dissolves once a Black victim can be framed as “suspicious” or “threatening.”

The failure to pursue a retrial sends a dangerous message: that the killing of a Black person does not require the same level of scrutiny, care, or moral urgency as any other homicide. It tells future jurors, prosecutors, and police officers that the bar for lethal force against Black bodies is lower—and that the system will bend to accommodate that violence after the fact.

A retrial is not about vengeance. It is about restoring credibility to a justice system that has forfeited public trust. It is about reexamining evidence without racial blinders, applying the law evenly, and acknowledging that bias—both implicit and explicit—corrupted the original outcome. Anything less is an admission that the system values convenience over truth and order over justice.

Jordan Hill deserved to live. His family deserves more than procedural finality and empty assurances. And the public deserves a legal system brave enough to confront its own racism instead of burying it beneath a flawed verdict. A retrial is not just necessary—it is the bare minimum required to begin repairing the damage done.

—Vanessa Edwards, B1Daily