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U.S. District Judge Sharion Aycock on Tuesday ruled that Mississippi’s state Supreme Court districts dilute Black voting rights and that the state cannot use the same maps in future elections. 

In a sweeping 105-page ruling, Aycock, a President George W. Bush appointee, found that the three Supreme Court districts were drawn in violation of the federal Voting Rights Act. Aycock asked the Legislature to redraw those districts in the future to give Black voters a fair shot at electing candidates of their choice.   

Out of the 100-plus justices who have served on the Mississippi Supreme Court, only four have been Black.

Mississippi law establishes three distinct Supreme Court districts, commonly referred to as the Northern, Central and Southern districts. Voters elect three judges from each of these districts to make up the nine-member court. These districts have not been redrawn since 1987. 

The main district at issue in the case is the Central District, which comprises many parts of the majority-Black Delta and the majority-Black Jackson Metro area. Currently, two white justices, Kenny Griffis and Jenifer Branning, and one Black justice, Leslie King, represent the district. 

Last year, Branning, a white candidate who described herself as a “constitutional conservative” and was backed by the Republican Party, defeated longtime Justice Jim Kitchens, a white man widely viewed as a candidate supported by Black voters. 

No Black person has ever been elected to the Mississippi Supreme Court without first obtaining an interim appointment from the governor, and no Black person from either of the two other districts has ever served on the state’s high court. 

“In short, the evidence illustrates that Black candidates who desire to run for the Mississippi Supreme Court face a grim likelihood of success,” Aycock wrote in her ruling. 

The lawsuit was filed in April 2022 by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Mississippi, the Southern Poverty Law Center and private law firms on behalf of a group of Black Mississippians, including state Sen. Derrick Simmons of Greenville, and Ty Pinkins, a previous Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate.

Aycock wrote that the parties will convene a status conference soon to discuss an appropriate deadline for the Legislature to address the districts. The Legislature earlier this year adjourned its regular session, and Gov. Tate Reeves is the only person with the power to call lawmakers into a special session.

The state could appeal Aycock’s ruling to the conservative U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

If it weren’t for Drake, a row of abandoned homes next to Jackson State University might still just be sitting there, slipping into disrepair.

About a month ago, two real estate investors from California bought them up – a deal facilitated by the city’s former planning and development director Jhai Keeton, who met the pair through connections he had made working on tour logistics for the Canadian rapper. 

Keeton did this off the clock in part because he wanted to prove that something, anything, could happen in the economically stagnant city. 

But if another developer tried to rehab the properties through a more traditional route – that is, by securing a bank loan – Keeton said they might be out of luck. In recent years, so few homes have sold in this area of Jackson, it’s impossible to get what’s called a “comparable,” a measurement of a property’s value that without, banks won’t issue a loan. 

“It ain’t no comp because a bank ain’t financing any new thing to be built for somebody to buy,” said Keeton, who headed up the crucial city department for just a year.

In a city that struggles with poverty, low educational attainment and suburban competition, the lack of development justifies the lack of development, a paradox that has faced nearly every leader of the city of Jackson’s planning and development department in recent years.  

“The rule of money often is that money goes where it can grow,” said Mukesh Kumar, a former professor of urban planning who led the city department from 2017 to 2019. 

This problem isn’t going away any time soon, even as Jackson’s newly elected Mayor John Horhn had pledged to make the city more business friendly. His search for a new planning and development director has gone national, but with low salaries at City Hall, it might be hard to entice the leader Jackson needs to come work in the fastest shrinking large city in America. 

When that’s the case, what can any one head of the city’s planning and development department even do to turn the tide? Former department heads agree – it takes gumption, social capital and a good deal of finagling to bring development to a city as statistically challenged as Jackson: High poverty rates, low property values and poor economic mobility.

“People are always like why don’t we have this, why don’t we have that,” said Jordan Hillman, who served as director from 2019 to 2022 and is now the chief data officer at JXN Water. “Well, it’s math.” 

Historically, Jackson’s planning and development department has focused more on the process, pushing through zoning and permitting documents and writing comprehensive plans. That’s because most development in a city is led by the private market, not the government. 

“Rarely do cities drive economic development,” said Chloe Dotson, who led the department from 2022 to 2024. “It’s questionable to even look at a city, and say, ‘well why isn’t a city pushing economic development?’ That’s not its job.” 

The department’s goal, then, is to work to make a city’s conditions favorable for private development. When Kumar led the department, he said he tried to change its mindset from regulating to enabling, even as much of its work was purely administrative: issuing grants, conducting code enforcement or overseeing the bus system. 

For big businesses that want to come to Jackson, Kumar said the planning and development’s role was to “get out of the way” or offer an incentive, like tax-increment financing, that could help them locate in the city while turning a profit. 

But Kumar felt the department needed to do a better job of fostering the city’s small businesses. 

“The businesses that are not making the market-driven decisions, they’re making the personal decisions,” he said. “They may not even know they need a business license.” 

Dotson had a similar philosophy: “We can’t create demand, but we can shape it,” she said. 

Keeton, whose background is in economic development, not planning, took somewhat of a different course. Starting at the city in 2020 as a deputy director in the department, Keeton said he wanted to fly the plane, not set the runway. 

“I’m trying to get out of the abandoned group,” he said. “I’m at the bottom. I might make more money than my peers, but I’m trying to engage in power.” 

He found his taste for big-picture ideas aligned with former Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba’s. The former mayor, who lost reelection last spring, found in Keeton a staffer who would prioritize a pair of long-held dreams: bringing a Top Golf and a Dave and Busters to Jackson.

“He was looking for some family-type of entertainment,” Keeton said. 

Keeton quickly realized that Jackson’s math didn’t compute for attracting Dave and Busters. But Top Golf seemed more promising — especially if the city could make it happen at a site on Lakeland Drive, one of the busiest corridors in the state, in a part of Jackson where residents have more disposable income. 

Though Keeton said the demographic data supported the project, state-owned institutions in the area opposed it. Top Golf ultimately went the way of other developments pitched for this particular site — to Madison County. 

“There’s not really much you can do when the institution shuts you out,” Keeton said. 

The day the news hit social media two years ago, Keeton was leaving Atlantic City. He said he texted Lumumba, “Mayor, I need you to help me to determine how to feel about this. He said ‘I feel just like you, I’m deflated, it sucks that we didn’t even get an attempt to play the game.’” 

It seemed that everywhere Keeton turned in his department, something was out of his control. After a stint at the Mississippi Development Authority, Keeton returned to the city as director in 2024.

Could he bring a shopping center to downtown Jackson? “We don’t have an after five population in downtown Jackson,” he said. 

Could he work with small businesses to help them meet Jackson’s regulations for storefronts in downtown Jackson? “We only have four, five inspectors for the whole city.” 

Then there was “the famous RFQ,” he said. 

The vacant lot across from the downtown Jackson Convention Center, the site of decades of failed development, was another task on Keeton’s plate.

But after the prospective hotel development became the center of an FBI corruption probe that led to federal indictments against Lumumba, the county prosecutor and two council members, Keeton said he couldn’t talk about the project because “it was political.” 

He decided to do something different. Keeton said he asked himself, “What do we have the resources to do right now without waiting for a $100 million deal?”

A project known as “The Pulse at Farish Street” was born. The goal was to turn the lot into an outdoor space with a skate park and pickleball courts that would attract more people to downtown Jackson, to provide a justification for building another hotel in the future. 

Then Lumumba lost reelection. Keeton got a text that Horhn would not be keeping him on as director. The new administration quickly announced it was abandoning The Pulse and turning the vacant lot into a “functional, upgraded parking area,” the Clarion Ledger reported.

Keeton has returned to his consulting firm, including working with One Voice, a civic engagement nonprofit born out of the state’s NAACP and headed up by Lumumba’s reelection campaign manager. 

Keeton considers breaking ground at The Pulse to be one of his biggest accomplishments in his year leading the office. His other was working with the 1% Sales Tax Commission to unlock funds to repave the roads around the Northwest Industrial Park in northeast Jackson. 

“That is a huge win,” Keeton said. “Site development is the name of the game.”                                                                          

Creative solutions exist to combat Jackson’s data doldrums. In areas of the city that lack “comps”, Dotson said investors who are shut out from traditional lending could turn to programs like the low-income housing tax credit to help them build rental properties tenants can eventually own. 

“I am not as pessimistic,” said Dotson, who is now the chief program officer at the HOPE Enterprise Corporation. “I believe that Jackson can do whatever it wants to do. It just has to have the correct leaders and it has to have the correct partnerships and the right people that know what they’re doing.” 

The secret to overcoming a city’s bad math, Kumar said, is twofold: A mindset shift that can lead to “momentum.”

“It is real,” he said. 

But a city’s priorities change when leadership turns over.

Recently, Kumar, who now works in planning in Waco, Texas, said he was looking at satellite images of Congress street in downtown Jackson, where he’d deployed a small grant the city received to build wooden benches, tables and an archway that became a popular destination for graduation pictures.

It looked like someone had already removed several of the pieces he’d built.

Editor’s note: This Mississippi Today Ideas essay is published as part of our Brain Drain project, which seeks answers to why Mississippians move out of state. To read more about the project, click here.

Though I imagine I’ll never return, more often than not, my brain drains back to Mississippi. My whole adult life has been a journey up and down the Hudson River, from New York City to the Adirondacks, but inevitably, I find my thoughts leaking toward another river.

I grew up fearing being left behind in the Rapture, but in earnest, it feels like I’m the one who left everyone behind. I’m not proud of this, but I’m certainly not ashamed. I have roots in the Northeast now, and a life that isn’t easily transplanted elsewhere, especially to the Red Clay Hills of Neshoba County. Life took me from Mississippi, and life keeps me away.

I left Mississippi for New York in 2015, and I estimate that I’ve returned only 11 times. My sporadic trips home have been mostly because I’m consistently broke, but now it’s a combination of that and concerns for my safety.

My mother, also limited by finances and Mississippi’s minimum wage, has visited me twice in 10 years, once in the spring of 2016 and then when I graduated from Yale Divinity School in 2023.

I haven’t been back since I came out as a trans woman and began medically transitioning in the winter of 2024. I try not to be overwhelmed with guilt or grief for the imagined, shared life I don’t experience with my mother. Rather, I’ve learned to cherish what we do have.

It’s strange to be who I am, mostly for her but also for me. She has learned to love me regardless of whether or not she understands what I’m doing. In her mind, if you go to college, you become a nurse or a lawyer. You settle down, probably in Jackson, maybe Oxford, most likely in my hometown of Philadelphia, and commute by car more than an hour to work. You probably see your mom weekly. She sees her grandkids as often as possible.

That is not how life turned out. We do talk on the phone. Sometimes we get into once-a-week phone call sprees, other times, I drop off for weeks, maybe a month, when I’m depressed.

When I come home, she picks me up from the airport and drives me back a few weeks later. We crack the windows, smoke cheap Mississippi cigarettes and try to cram 10 years of a strange-to-us mother-daughter relationship into a 90-minute ride to the airport in Jackson. Usually, we talk about suffering, death, sin, God, the end of the world, and what the hell I am doing with my life.

You go to college to get a job, to make more money than your parents and to buy a strange suburban-but-rural McMansion just beyond city limits where you start a family around the age of 25 at the latest.

According to my mother, I went to the University of Mississippi and got brainwashed. She tells me often that it’s like she doesn’t know who I am, and she’s mostly right. She hasn’t met anyone I’ve dated in person since high school. She hasn’t seen me in person since transitioning, and I changed my name to Romy. I explain my relationship with my family to friends, peers, new partners and congregations, always with an articulate sense of heartbreak that I’ve learned to intellectualize and package up in a story of “working-class origins,” single motherhood, a white Christian nationalist rural community and my stumbling through adulthood “refusing not to live by my values.”

I originally left Mississippi to be an AmeriCorps Vista volunteer in the Capital Region of New York. I’d never been there. I took a Greyhound from Memphis to New York City to Albany, New York  with two large suitcases and a backpack. Several of my friends from college had moved to New York City, and their couches and shared beds provided a safe launching pad for more of us. I had also fallen in love with a fashion student turned designer that I met on a trip to the city the year prior. Though that romance flamed and flickered for many years and ultimately flamed out, my reason for staying in the North was the life I was increasingly stumbling into.

I went there because, at the time, I had an insatiable desire to live out my values and politics. After all, I was maybe one of two socialist public policy majors at the Trent Lott Leadership Institute at the University of Mississippi, and I didn’t want to be a lawyer, a lobbyist or a policy wonk.

I wanted to be poor and engage in building sustainable autonomous communities. I wanted to learn how to be a person who had no work/life distinction, but a vocation and calling.

Through AmeriCorps, I luckily found a small group of activists, urban homestead types, organizers and ex-social workers living together helping others at the margins and themselves start businesses and worker-cooperatives while struggling through mental health crises, and taking on an impossible but seemingly always plausible dream of a directly democratic community owned, operated and governed only by those who live there.

This was my first “job” out of college. It was my dream come true, and the most difficult thing I’d ever done. I burnt out pretty hard after two years, and probably made somewhere between $25,000  and $30,000 during that whole time. Since then, the most I’ve made in a year is my current PhD stipend of about $34,000.

I was, however, helped along by friends, colleagues and the activist communities that I was stumbling into. Through them, I was encouraged to go to Union Theological Seminary, land a job at a prestigious artist residency in the mountains, go to Yale Divinity School, discern that I was called to be a priest and come to know myself as a trans woman.

My life outside of Mississippi has been sustained solely by relationships that transgress the boundaries between work and life, co-workers and friends. I regularly reflect on and often worry about how fragile this all is, and if my own vocational and intellectual pursuits have been worth what I’ve left behind or never had.

I’m not sure I’ll ever know. However, I’ve managed to find profound meaning in it all so far, and it keeps me digging myself into this hole in which I will hopefully find what I am  looking for, or dig my own damn grave.

Originally from Philadelphia, Romy Felder (she/her) is currently a PhD student at Union Theological Seminary. She is also pursuing the priesthood in the Episcopal Diocese of New York. She has a background in worker-cooperative development, community organizing, popular education and arts management. Romy lives cavalierly but contentedly in Brooklyn, New York. 

The state law that bans diversity, equity and inclusion programs in Mississippi public schools and universities has been blocked for the foreseeable future. 

U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate granted a preliminary injunction in the case on Monday, which prevents the law from being enforced until there’s a final ruling. Wingate previously granted a temporary restraining order in late June, which expired Monday.

“(The law), if it lives down to the fears it has generated, has a mouthful of sharp teeth which could inflict deep bites,” Wingate wrote in his order.

Joshua Tom, legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi and one of the lawyers in the case, said in a statement that he was “pleased” with Wingate’s ruling.

“The State’s attempt to impose its preferred views — and ban opposing views — on Mississippi’s public education system is not only bad policy, it’s illegal, as the court has preliminarily found today,” he said. 

Lawyers for the plaintiffs, including professors, parents and students, and lawyers from the state attorney general’s office met in court in early August to make their cases for and against the preliminary injunction. 

The plaintiffs’ attorneys argued that House Bill 1193 violates the First and Fourteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution by prohibiting discussions about race, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation in classrooms, and that the law was dangerously vague, potentially opening the gates to a flood of complaints against educators and students. 

They said the law would ban discussions and books about the Civil War, women’s rights and slavery, and other topics that are essential to understanding the country’s history. 

Witnesses called to the stand testified that the law was having a “chilling” effect, just weeks before classes were set to start at colleges across the state. Professors from the University of Mississippi said the policy was preventing them from finalizing their syllabi. 

A Jackson Public Schools parent said the law made her scared for her children, worried that if they shared too much about their home life, they would be punished in some way — the process for “curing” violations was unclear to witnesses.

Attorneys from the state attorney general’s office, whose argument centered around the plaintiffs’ “overwrought” reading of the statute and public employees’ lack of First Amendment rights, did not present enough evidence to counteract the plaintiffs’ claims, Wingate said. He wrote in his order that the witnesses’ testimonies were enough to justify a preliminary injunction.

“It is an enormous relief that the court has sided with academic freedom, free speech, and due process in its recent decision,” said Deanna Kreisel in a statement. Kreisel is an associate English professor at the University of Mississippi and a member of the United Campus Workers, one of the plaintiffs in this case. 

“The fight is not over, but at least for the time being, the students of Mississippi can continue to learn in an environment free of ideological constraints and partisan censorship,” Kreisel said.

Wingate’s ruling preventing state officials from enforcing the law will be in effect until the overall litigation is concluded. Attorneys for the plaintiffs and the state defendants will now move to discovery, where they collect evidence before a bench trial. 

After Wingate conducts the trial, he will issue a final ruling. An aggrieved party can appeal Wingate’s ruling to the conservative U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Mississippi Today reporter Taylor Vance contributed to this article.

Mississippi will send about 200 Mississippi National Guard soldiers to Washington, D.C., to support President Donald Trump’s push to federalize law enforcement in the nation’s capital.

Following the governors of at least three other Republican-led states, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said on social media on Monday that he deployed the troops to bolster Trump’s “effort to return law and order to our nation’s capital.”

“Crime is out of control there, and it’s clear something must be done to combat it,” Reeves said. “Americans deserve a safe capital city that we can all be proud of. I know the brave men and women of our National Guard will do an excellent job enhancing public safety and supporting law enforcement.”

The move comes after Trump signed an executive order federalizing local police forces and activating about 800 District of Columbia National Guard members. He did so after claiming the nation’s capital was gripped by “lawlessness.”

Washington’s elected officials have disputed these claims, noting that violent crime is lower than it was during Trump’s first term in office. Hundreds of residents of the city marched in protest of the federal crackdown on Saturday.

Reeves, a staunch ally of President Trump, opted to participate in the federal takeover after at least three other Republican-led states had already done so.

West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey said he was deploying 300 to 400 guard troops. South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster said he deployed 200 at the Pentagon’s request. And Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said he sent 150 guard military police at Army Secretary Dan Driscoll’s request.

Reeves’ announcement on social media did not say who requested support from Mississippi’s National Guard.

The activations from Republican-led states suggest the Trump administration sees the need for additional manpower after the president personally played down the need for Washington to hire more police officers, according to The Associated Press.

Trump declared an emergency due to the “city government’s failure to maintain public order.” He said that impeded the “federal government’s ability to operate efficiently to address the nation’s broader interests without fear of our workers being subjected to rampant violence.”

Monday was not the first time Reeves followed other Republican governors in sending National Guard troops outside the state.

In 2023, Reeves mobilized a National Guard unit to help with security at the U.S. border with Mexico. That came a day after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sent officers to Texas to assist with border security.

In a letter to city residents following Trump’s executive order, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, wrote that “our limited self-government has never faced the type of test we are facing right now.”

The legend of 19-year-old Mississippi baseball phenom Konnor Griffin continues to grow and grow with each home run blast, each stolen base, each fielding gem, each promotion. Who knows where he will be when he reaches the legal age of 21?

My guess would be Pittsburgh. And his Major League debut may come sooner than that.

Sunday afternoon, the Jackson Prep star, the No. 1 prospect in all of baseball, was promoted by the Pittsburgh Pirates from high-Class A Greensboro, North Carolina, to Class AA Altoona, Pennsylvania. On Tuesday night, he will be youngest player ever to play for the Altoona Curve  in the Eastern League. He doesn’t turn 20 until April 24, 2026.

“It’s a pretty awesome feeling,” Griffin said in a phone call Monday morning while en route from Greensboro to Altoona, a six-hour drive. “I got the news after the game Sunday when they called a team meeting and the manager told us.”

Making the news all the more exciting for Griffin was the promotion of of one of his best friends, catcher Derek Berg, from Greensboro to Altoona.  The 23-year-old Bird is on a much more traditional baseball career path, having played college baseball (at Army) for four seasons before being drafted in the 10th round of the 2024 Major League draft. In contrast, Griffin was playing for Jackson Prep in May, 2024.

“Derek’s a good friend. We were taken in the same draft together and have been together at Bradenton (low Class A) and Greensboro,” Griffin said. “It’s really neat we are taking this next step together.”

Even though the Pirates drafted Griffin with the ninth overall pick (first high school player chosen) of the 2024 draft, his rapid rise this spring and summer has been nothing short of astonishing, as have his statistics. In 50 games at Bradenton, he hit .338 with plenty of power. In 51 games at Greensboro, he hit .325. Combined, he has hit 16 home runs, 21 doubles and four triples. In the process, he has become a more disciplined hitter. His on-base percentage rose from .396 at low-A to .434 at high-A.

Add to all that Griffin’s combined 59 stolen bases and far above average fielding ability at both shortstop and centerfielder positions. Little wonder the 6-foot-4, 225-pounder last month was named the top MLB prospect in all of baseball.

“It’s been a heckuva year; the hard work is paying off,” Griffin said. 

Has his meteoric rise affected his timeline for making to the Major Leagues?

“I am just trying to live in the moment, not think about all that,” Griffin said. “My goal is to remain humble and continue the hard work that has gotten me to where I am. I just thank God for where he has taken me.”

The last Pittsburgh Pirate to make it to the Class AA level at 19 is Andrew McCutchen, who has since become a five-time All-Star and the National League MVP. In 2013, McCutchen, the 11th pick of the 2005 draft, made it to Altoona in 2006 at 19. He did not make his Big League debut until 2009 at age 22. He has since hit 330 home runs.

Griffin would appear to be advancing at faster rate. Nothing has seemed to faze him, including his ascension to No. 1 MLB prospect not quite a month ago. Even his father, Belhaven softball coach Kevin Griffin, expressed concern at the time that the No. 1 prospect designation would heap more pressure on his son, who only last year was playing high school baseball.

“I have tried not to let it add pressure, but there’s no doubt you have more eyes on you with something like that,” Konnor Griffin said. “I try to take it one step at a time, continue to work hard and give it everything I have.”

Altoona has an off day today before playing a home game Tuesday night against the Reading (Pennsylvania) Fighting Phils.

Griffin expects to remain primarily a shortstop, but also play centerfield on occasion. He was to learn more later Monday upon arrival in Altoona where he will meet with Curve manager Andy Fox, a former Major Leaguer who played for two World Series championship teams.

Said Griffin, who remains as grounded and mature as any 19-year-old I’ve encountered, “I just see it as another challenge and another chance to learn. I can’t wait.”

•••

Following Konnor Griffin:

• At Jackson Prep in February of 2024.

• LSU or professional baseball?

• The ninth pick of the MLB Draft in July 2024.

FOREST – Cheryl Baier pushed her car key into the ignition when her boyfriend approached her passenger window in a Walmart parking lot in Forest. Bilbo Faulkner then pushed the passenger door open, sat down beside her and began to punch. 

Baier saw red and black. Blood dripped from where her vision grew blurry. She screamed but only choked. He pried the car keys from her grasp and strangled her with her seatbelt. She cried for help as he hit. She reached for the horn. No honk. She felt one of her eyes come loose after what seemed like 20 blows.

“I was hoping he’d just knock me out and put me out of my misery. So I didn’t feel it no more,” Baier remembers.

It was dark outside at 9 p.m. The car was parked yards from the main entrance underneath a lamp. She had agreed to meet her boyfriend in the lot because it was a public space. Few shoppers stopped to see his fist against her face or hear her cries, though. She saw a couple pull their child away before she lost vision in her right eye. That’s when she says Faulkner threatened to burn down her house before speeding off in his car. A witness eventually called the police, who instructed the fire department to rush to her home.

When she arrived at the hospital, she wasn’t sure if she was alive.

Victimized by crime, Baier later found herself victimized by a justice system that denied her critical aid because she had a more than decade-old drug conviction, even while the system gave her abuser one of the lightest sentences possible for an attack that left her temporarily homeless and with failing sight. Even though Mississippi has long boasted long sentences and high incarceration rates, domestic abuse cases still rarely rise to felony status – and offenders in those cases receive lighter sentences than other protected classes.

Unable to cover the over $12,000 in medical bills, Baier, a convenience store clerk, filed a claim for crime victims’ compensation through the attorney general’s office. The maximum payout to cover medical bills is $15,000. After her night stay at the hospital and 10 days of recovery, she was able to return to work. Paid $10 per hour at 45 hours a week, she knew it’d be several years before she could pay off her medical debt.

Weeks out from her surgery, she pulled a letter from the mailbox and squinted to make out the writing. The attorney general’s office denied her claim because of her felony drug conviction from 13 years ago. Victims, she learned, must be five years out from the last day of their probation to qualify for the program. Baier was weeks away.

“My pain is just the same. My loss is just the same,” Baier said in an interview with Mississippi Today. “What happened to me had nothing to do with what I did over a decade ago.”

While five other states deny victims’ compensation for prior felony convictions, Mississippi and Louisiana count all felonies, including victimless and nonviolent ones. Mississippi is also unique in counting probation, post-release supervision and court-ordered drug treatments, among other programs sponsored by the Department of Corrections, as part of their incarceration time.

Nearly a quarter of denied applications between 2021 and 2023 were based on prior felony convictions. The amount the AG’s office paid out to cover medical costs for assaulted crime victims decreased by half each year from 2021 to 2023, from a total of $1,424,475 in 2021 to $534,026 in 2023.

READ MORE: Saving for a future, paying for a funeral: Why are many families of young crime victims shut out of state compensation?

“The rules can unintentionally create barriers, and we must stay mindful of the fund’s original purpose,” said Stacey Riley, who provides shelter to 25 children and 30 adults through the Gulf Coast Center for Nonviolence in Biloxi. “Administrators should approach this work with an understanding of survivors’ trauma, their specific needs, and the often challenging environments in which they live.”

Some justice

In the months after her assault and the arson at her home, Baier lived out of a camper parked in her front yard. She wore a purse around her neck with a deer-skinning knife inside. Some nights she wet herself, too afraid to push open the RV door and use the restroom in her burnt home. She stayed up most nights with a pain in her mouth and eyes, unable to rest after working double shifts at the convenience store.

She lived for her day in court when restitution would be set and she could deliver her statement. She wrote out the facts on a piece of loose-leaf paper for the judge, jury and court officers to hear. She had June 2 marked on the calendar on her phone and in her kitchen. She called the district attorney’s office and the victim service coordinator each week, checking to make sure she had the date of the hearing correct.

She missed 15 days of work for court, many of them earlier trial dates that were bumped. She missed close to a month from surgery that eased her right eye back into its socket. In total, she estimates that she lost about $5,800 in wages.

When the hearing date arrived, Baier waited in a room in the courthouse with a printout of her victim impact statement. She was told to come back the next day when Faulkner would only plead. Restitution was set the next day, too. The victim service coordinator promised to let her know when she’d get a chance to tell her story in court and impress upon the judge the need for a substantial restitution payment. Baier waited for hours.

During the hearing, District Attorney Chris Posey remarked, “This does come with the approval of the victim in this case who I’ve spoken with many times and believe is actually in the courthouse today although not in the room at the moment.” But Baier said Posey never spoke to her about the plea deal.

The Victims’ Bill of Rights entitles victims to be present for all hearings before a judge. Baier wasn’t present to dispute the characterization of the attack she experienced. Posey attributed the attack to “some type of argument” between Faulkner and Baier.

Faulkner pleaded guilty to three years for aggravated domestic violence with time served for the 767 days spent in the Scott County jail for assaulting a jail guard. Restitution was set at $14,000 shy of the amount Baier asked for. She would get $2,000 at the end of the month – with the rest paid in $150 monthly installments once Faulkner’s court fines and fees were paid. The clerk then let her know she could leave.

Faulkner was also assigned an anger management course that he already took for a prior assault.

In an interview with Mississippi Today, Posey said that because the hearing took place in the courthouse while jury selection was happening for a separate trial, it would’ve been impossible for Baier to give her statement. The hearing was in the judge’s chambers, not the courtroom.

The victim service coordinator in the case refused a request for comment by Mississippi Today.

“What was said was further from the truth because that just makes it seem like he’s responding instead of the psychopathic behavior it truly was,” Baier said. “There was no foundation.”

Six percent of domestic violence cases were prosecuted as felony domestic aggravated assault in 2024, according to data from the Mississippi Administrative Office of Courts compiled by the Center for Violence Prevention.

“Too often, the gravity of domestic violence is misunderstood,” Riley said. “These are not simply individuals who ‘can’t get along’ with their partners — they are perpetrators of violence, many of whom will go on to commit even more serious crimes.”

On the street where she lives

Baier was pulling out of her driveway in Pulaski in Smith County when she saw a familiar face picking up a neighbor’s trash bin – and dumping the contents into the compactor. It was Faulkner. He was wearing the county jail striped orange pants. They locked eyes as she passed him on the gravel road by her house.

“There was no guard,” Baier said. “The way he beat me in the Walmart parking lot in front of God and everybody – you think he would hesitate in front of that trucker or another inmate?”

Mississippi Today was able to confirm that Faulkner, convicted of aggravated domestic violence along with two other prior violent felonies, was made a trusty at the Smith County jail — and was on work detail as a garbage collector on her street.

When Mississippi Today brought this to the Smith County Sheriff’s Department’s attention, the sheriff relayed that Faulkner was no longer in the program. He didn’t know Faulkner had been convicted, he was only going off the man’s criminal record in his county. 

Mississippi Department of Corrections policies prohibit inmates convicted of violent felonies, including aggravated domestic violence, from serving as trusties.

“Much of the problem comes down to communication,” said Riley, whose organization operates in 24 municipal justice courts in the lower six counties in Mississippi. “The issue isn’t that our justice system fails to act — it’s that it has long operated in silos. This entrenched way of functioning must change if we are to respond more effectively to interpersonal violence.”

In 2022, Attorney General Lynn Fitch established the Mississippi Domestic Violence Registry, which gives law enforcement access to information helpful for keeping law enforcement, victims and bystanders safe when answering domestic violence calls. It has been “a little slow” to get cooperation from agencies, said Michelle Williams, a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office, as officers have a lot of competing paperwork requirements. In an attempt to reduce this, Fitch’s office incorporated the registry into existing law enforcement reporting platforms.

Luke Thompson, former Byram police chief, said it was hard to convince his deputies to investigate domestic violence cases. He advocated for the attorney general’s office’s registry to be incorporated into the National Incident Based Reporting System, administered by the FBI.

Domestic violence cases require dual reporting and more paperwork than other cases. Officers are expected to determine a primary aggressor, which requires more discretion. Since 1992, just over a third of shootings of officers happened during domestic violence calls, Thompson found in his agency’s data.

Since retiring as chief, Thompson has been helping Mississippi agencies implement the Lethality Assessment Program, a questionnaire that helps law enforcement identify victims and serial abusers in their communities. The program helped his department connect victims with services faster and provide prosecutors with a more thorough history of abuse.

“It’s one of the hardest types of cases to sort through,” Thompson said. “Cops focus on ‘bad guys.’ We’re empathetic to victims. But sometimes we don’t always take that extra step to get a victim’s help.”

‘There was nothing in his eyes’

While the father of Baier’s children was incarcerated, he had sent Faulkner to be her protector. She felt taken care of by Faulkner, with his wide back and a muscular frame. She remembers the first day he arrived at the convenience store where she worked. She was drawn to the kindness he showed to another single mother. He provided money to her when she fell behind on car payments.

They were friends before they began dating. She enjoyed going on evening drives listening to “Good Ol’ Girl” by Frank Foster around Smith County when they were both off work. She knew he had been to prison, was first put off by his many tattoos, but was taken by his “big heart.”

For one month, he had been living with Baier, who was surprised when he announced he would be moving out. He had recently begun accusing her of cheating, which she thought was a joke. A relative of Faulkner’s attributes his behavior to untreated bipolar disorder. Baier said that he had been drinking alcohol. 

Before that day at Walmart, when he assaulted her, Baier had never seen his violent side. He asked to meet up while she was still working at the convenience store that night. She chose a public space because “there was nothing in his eyes.” He just looked different, she said.

“It was premeditated,” Baier said, clutching a charred family photo in her Smith County home. “That’s part of what’s gotten me all this time.”

Although she was able to clean her house, the smell of smoke persists. The fire damaged a photograph of four generations of her family. It was the last picture she had with her grandfather before he died from cancer.

Baier is well known in her community. She meets most locals as a clerk at a popular store in Forest where checks are cashed. She knows the farmhands who buy equipment and the waitresses at the local restaurants. Young and old, from out of town and native, they all chat with her at the store.

Lately, she’s been acting as her own investigator. She collected a list of witnesses from her assault as well as to the arson to hand to authorities. She helped the boss at her place of work transfer security footage onto a flash drive to capture the moment Faulkner entered the convenience store earlier in the night of her assault when he allegedly bought alcohol. The arson at her home has not gone to trial. No witnesses have been interviewed.

Her first eye surgery wasn’t considered a success because the muscles and tissues were damaged, pushing her right eye forward and causing pressure and migraines.

In a handwritten letter to the crime victim compensation director, Baier wrote, “After the fire, all I had was the torn, blood stained clothes on my back. My home was not habitable for four months. I’m telling you all this so you can understand the great financial strain, not to mention the physical and emotional damage that I will probably always suffer.”

Over half of completed victim compensation claims were denied in Scott County between 2021 and 2023, according to records obtained by Mississippi Today. Thirteen were denied and 11 were approved with an award. 

“When I got your denial and read the explanation, I felt abused and victimized all over again in a different way but just as damaging. Does a mistake from 13 years ago make me any less of a victim? Does it make what happened to me any less painful? Did it make me deserve what he did to me?”

Nora Miller, the president of the Mississippi University for Women, is pushing back on a recommendation from the state Board of Education to relocate the Mississippi School for Math and Science off the campus of MUW to another of the state universities. MSMS, a gifted program for high school juniors and seniors, has been located on the Mississippi University for Women’s campus since its inception. Miller tells Mississippi Today’s Taylor Vance and Candice Wilder why the program is crucial to the city of Columbus and why taxpayers across the state should be concerned with the estimated $80 million cost for relocating the school.

Don’t look for Mississippi to get involved in what appears to be an escalating redistricting war where states redraw their U.S. House districts to aid Republicans or Democrats ahead of a hotly contested 2026 national election.

Mississippi most likely will not engage in the redistricting battle because Republicans already have been helped about as much as possible in the Magnolia State. Here, there are three safe Republican U.S. House districts and one safe Democratic district.

In theory, the Mississippi Legislature could draw the congressional districts in such a manner as to make all four districts favor Republicans. But to do so, Black voters, who generally are more prone to vote Democratic, would have to be diluted to such an extent that the redraw would conflict with long-held federal court rulings.

From a legal standpoint and even from an ethical and moral standpoint, it would be difficult to justify no Black-majority districts in Mississippi, where the non-white population is nearing 40%.

Unsurprisingly, Texas fired the first shot in what is shaping up as a nationwide redistricting battle. The Texas Legislature, at the behest of President Donald Trump, who fears his Republican Party will lose the U.S. House in the 2026 midterm election, is trying to redraw the Longhorn State’s 38 congressional districts to give the Republicans five more seats. They currently have 25.

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom is threatening to retaliate by creating more Democratic districts. California currently has 43 Democratic districts and nine Republican districts.

There have been rumblings of blue New York and red Florida also going back to the redistricting drawing board to create more seats to help their respective party.

Normally, redistricting is conducted every 10 years after the release of the U.S. Census. The last redistricting occurred after the 2020 U.S. Census. But it should be no surprise that Trump, fearing that Republicans will lose the House in 2026, asked Texas to eschew the norms and conduct a mid-decade redistricting.

Both Democrats and Republicans are guilty of gerrymandering or of drawing districts to benefit their political party. The courts, generally, have said that is OK.

But the courts — at least in the past — have also said their minority populations must be given opportunities to elect candidates of their choice.

While the courts have said gerrymandering is allowed, a recent Economist/YouGov poll found an overwhelming 69% oppose the partisan drawing of districts, compared to only 9% who support it and 22% of respondents who are unsure. A plurality of 35% support states retaliating if another state draws districts to support one particular party. The retaliation is opposed by 30%, while 36% of respondents are unsure.

A plurality also opposes Trump’s call for the FBI to hunt down Texas Democratic lawmakers who have fled the state to prevent the Legislature from having the quorum needed to draw new congressional districts.

For what it’s worth, a study by the Princeton Gerrymandering Project found 15 states with failing grades in terms of non-partisan redistricting. Nine of those states failed because of their strong Republican tilt, while five failed because of strong Democratic leanings. Two — Tennessee and Louisiana — failed because of racial unfairness. Through court rulings, a new Black-majority district has been created in Louisiana since the Princeton study was conducted.

Texas and Florida were among the states receiving failing grades. New York and California were not. Another large Democratic stronghold, Illinois, did get a failing grade.

Mississippi is unique because of its racial makeup and voting patterns. Most white Mississippians vote Republican, but the large Black minority — the largest percentage of Black voters in the nation — tends to vote Democratic.

While Republicans have won all statewide elections since 2016, the elections often are relatively close.

In the latest redistricting, Democrats argued that because of the strong pro-Democratic minority population, one of the three heavily Republican congressional districts should be drawn in a manner to make it more competitive.

But the majority-Republican Legislature rejected that argument. Hence, there is no need for the Republicans in the Mississippi Legislature to undertake redistricting now.