Former Marks city clerk gets 12 years for embezzling $150,000

Nearly $150,000 that should have helped Marks pay for water, sewage, court fines and license revenue was siphoned away over four years, a loss that hit especially hard in a city of just 1,444 people and 1.3 square miles.

Pamela Latrice McNutt, the former city clerk of Marks in Quitman County, was sentenced to 12 years in the custody of the Mississippi Department of Corrections after a judge found her responsible for embezzling public money from November 2017 through April 2021. The sentence, handed down March 2, 2026, requires three years on the Intensive Supervision Program, followed by nine years suspended, along with five years of supervised probation and four years of unsupervised probation.

State officials said McNutt pocketed cash payments made to the city’s water and sewage system, court fines and privileged license payments while falsifying records. She was arrested Jan. 25, 2024, and served with a demand letter for $282,714.58 at the time of her arrest. The Mississippi State Auditor’s Office said a $50,000 surety bond covered her employment.

The court also ordered McNutt to pay a $1,000 fine, a $500 Crime Victim Compensation Fund assessment and $98,428.68 in restitution. Her $50,000 security bond was forfeited. Even after the criminal case, the auditor’s office said she remained liable for the full amount demanded in addition to any other proceedings.

The case exposed how vulnerable small-town government can be when one employee controls cash handling and recordkeeping. In a community the size of Marks, where basic city functions depend on steady collections from utility bills and fines, losses of this size can ripple through daily operations and erode public trust. The Auditor’s Office said it works with prosecutors to stop public corruption and said suspected fraud can be reported to the office, a reminder that oversight in small municipalities often depends on outside scrutiny when internal controls fail.

For Marks, the sentence closes one chapter but leaves a larger question in place: how to keep a single clerk from putting public money, and the services it supports, at risk again.