Supreme Court of Mississippi Reverses Drug Convictions Based on Unsupported Testimony About Edibles Being Designed For Children & Dangerous to Them

It's a simple principle of evidence law: Any testimony must be supported by an evidentiary basis. When a witness for the prosecution shoots from the hip with testimony untethered to any evidentiary basis, there's error. When that error inflames the passions of the jury, it's grounds for a new trial. A good example of this can be found in the recent opinion of the Supreme Court of Mississippi in Minor v. State, 2025 WL 634311 (Miss. 2025).

In Minor, Zachary Minor was prosecuted for possession of marijuana and trafficking of Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), specifically THC edibles. At trial, Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics (MBN) Agents Jerry Stewart testified as follows:

[THE STATE]: Agent Stewart, in your experience as an MBN agent, have you seen drugs disguised as candy in the past?

[AGENT STEWART]: Yes, sir.

[THE STATE]: What is the specific danger of those type items?

[AGENT STEWART]: A lot of times they will be marketed to young children to be honest with you.

[THE STATE]: Do grown folks need their drugs disguised for them?

[AGENT STEWART]: No, sir.

[THE STATE]: Have you in your experience ever seen a child that has gotten ahold of some of these drugs that were marketed for them?

[AGENT STEWART]: Yes, sir. I have seen children go to the hospital due to what looked to be candy –

[THE DEFENSE]: Your Honor, object to relevance.

[THE STATE]: Your Honor, it's relevant because these products are marketed in that way, and this is the evidence that the -- they retrieved from the defendant. It's relevant.

[THE DEFENSE]: More prejudicial than probative.

[THE COURT]: The Court is going to sustain the objection.

The Supreme Court of Mississippi characterized this "testimony regarding the effect of edibles on children" to be "without an evidentiary basis" because there was no evidence that Minor was selling the edibles to minors. On appeal, this led to the reversal of Minor's convictions. According to the court,

the State elicited inflammatory testimony regarding the effect of edibles on children with no evidentiary basis for doing so, which violated Minor's right not to have the jury unjustly prejudiced against him....Here, the State's eliciting the effect of edibles on children could have had only one purpose: to suggest to the jury that Minor was affirmatively endangering children. That suggestion is without question a vilification of Minor that ventured well beyond the evidentiary confines of the charges against him....Accordingly, the State committed prosecutorial misconduct by eliciting the testimony.

-CM