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Report: Ex-officer set to take plea deal in woman's killing

OXFORD, Miss. (AP) — A white former police officer in Mississippi will accept a life sentence in the 2019 shooting death of a Black woman with whom he was allegedly having a romantic relationship, a newspaper report said Monday.

Assistant district attorney Mickey Mallette in Lafayette County and attorney Carlos Moore, representing the family of Dominique Clayton, confirmed the plea agreement with former Oxford police officer Matthew Kinne, the Oxford Eagle reported.

Kinne is set to be sentenced Friday at the Union County Courthouse in New Albany, the newspaper said. It said that a circuit court clerk also confirmed the plea deal but Kinney's attorney, Tony Farse, couldn't be immediately reached.

Kinne was indicted in Augus 2019 on a capital murder charge, which has only two possible penalties: death or life without parole.

Authorities said Kinne broke into Clayton’s home and shot the 32-year-old woman in the back of the head as she slept. Her 8-year-old son found her body on May 19, 2019. Kinne was arrested the day after the body was found, and fired three days later.

Clayton's family has sued the city of Oxford and the Oxford Police Department for $5 million. Family members said the woman and Kinne were in a relationship.

Moore said at the time that Clayton had told her family she was afraid Kinne might harm her because she had told him she might be pregnant. Oxford police caused the family undue stress by first saying that she might have killed herself even though no gun was found, the attorney said.