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Mississippi Today’s “Unfettered Power: Mississippi Sheriffs” investigation has been named a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting.

The 2023 investigation from the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting at Mississippi Today and The New York Times’ Local Investigations Fellowship revealed how Mississippi sheriffs rule like kings, wielding vast power, exploiting and abusing the very people they are called to protect with no one stopping them.

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The seven-part 2023 series, which has continued into 2024, included new details about the Rankin County “Goon Squad.”

Click the links below to read the Pulitzer Prize-recognized series.

Sex Abuse, Beatings and an Untouchable Mississippi Sheriff

Where the Sheriff is King, These Women Say He Coerced Them Into Sex

New Evidence Raises Questions in Controversial Mississippi Law Enforcement Killing

The Sheriff, His Girlfriend and His Illegal Subpoenas

How a ‘Goon Squad’ of Deputies Got Away With Years of Brutality

Days After Rankin’s ‘Goon Squad’ Tortured Two Men, Supervisors Gave the Sheriff a Pay Boost

Who Investigates the Sheriff? In Mississippi, Often No One.

READ MORE: The complete “Unfettered Power: Mississippi Sheriffs” series

The post Read Mississippi Today’s Pulitzer Prize finalist series ‘’Unfettered Power: Mississippi Sheriffs” appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Mississippi Today’s “Unfettered Power: Mississippi Sheriffs” investigation has been named a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting.

The 2023 investigation from the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting at Mississippi Today and The New York Times revealed how Mississippi sheriffs rule like kings, wielding vast power, exploiting and abusing the very people they are called to protect with no one stopping them.

The series included new details about the Rankin County “Goon Squad.”

“I feel so blessed to see our work investigating sheriffs in Mississippi recognized by the Pulitzer Prize Board,” investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell said. “This honor doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to the people who dared to stand up and share their stories — victims of violence, sexual assault and many other abuses.”

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This is Mississippi Today’s second consecutive honor from the Pulitzer Prizes. The newsroom won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for its “The Backchannel” investigation into key players in the welfare scandal, making it the seventh Mississippi news outlet to win in the history of the prizes.

“This series shocked the conscience of Mississippi, and the impact this group of incredible journalists had is enormous,” said Adam Ganucheau, Mississippi Today’s editor-in-chief. “Anyone who has read the stories can see how much time and energy they put into serving the state, and they are so deserving of this recognition.”

READ MORE: The complete “Unfettered Power: Mississippi Sheriffs” series

The seven-part “Unfettered Power” series documented in vivid detail the stunning abuse of residents by officers across Mississippi for more than two decades. Officers spied on and tortured suspects and used their power to jail and punish political enemies.

The reporting was based on difficult-to-get interviews and a deep examination of records, including thousands of pages of Taser logs. Using other department records, the reporting team determined which device was assigned to each deputy, allowing reporters to substantiate allegations of torture by victims and witnesses.

“None of this would have happened without the hard work of our three tremendously talented investigative reporters, Ilyssa Daly, Brian Howey and Nate Rosenfield,” Mitchell said. “They are a model for what dedication, determination and perseverance can accomplish. Because of them, we know that the future of investigative reporting is in great hands.”

The impact of the series was profound. The reporting prompted federal investigations and the drafting of several pieces of Mississippi legislation to limit the power of sheriffs.

“In a short time Mississippi Today has built a prize-winning newsroom that has produced a string of accountability stories,” said Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times’ Local Investigations Fellowship. “Our combined coverage of horrific abuses by sheriffs in the state is an example of the power and importance of local investigative reporting. It has yielded results, and the work continues.”

The Pulitzer Prize is the most prominent award earned by Mississippi Today, the state’s flagship nonprofit newsroom that was founded in 2016. The newsroom and its journalists have won several national awards in recent years, including: two Goldsmith Prizes for Investigative Reporting; a Sidney Award for thorough coverage of the Jackson water crisis; a Collier Prize for State Government Accountability; and the John Jay/Harry Frank Guggenheim Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting Award.

Mississippi Today and its staff have also won dozens of regional and statewide prizes, including dozens of Society of Professional Journalists Green Eyeshade Awards; several Mississippi Press Association awards for excellence, including a Bill Minor Prizes for Investigative Reporting; and the 2023 Silver Em Award at University of Mississippi.

“We as Mississippians are so fortunate to have strong investigative journalism in our state,” said Mary Margaret White, Mississippi Today CEO and Executive Director. “This level of reporting takes a great deal of focus, determination and grit. The journalists being honored today are public servants in the truest sense, catalyzing accountability and change and standing up for, and with, those whose voices are otherwise ignored.”

This is Mitchell’s second time to be named a Pulitzer finalist. He was previously named a finalist in 2006 for his relentless reporting on the successful conviction of Edgar Ray Killen, who orchestrated the killing of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia in 1964. 

The ongoing work on the sheriffs series is far from done, he said.

“We’ve just begun to shine a light into the darkness in Mississippi, and we can already see the roaches scattering,” Mitchell said.

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The Mississippi Legislature completed its work for the 2024 session on Friday with the passage of a $7 billion state budget – 5.8% larger than the budget it passed last year.

The $7 billion reflects the amount spent on recurring expenses. The budget last year, including one-time funds, COVID-19 federal relief funds and other one-time money for specific projects, actually was more than the budget passed this year.

The completion of the budget late Friday ended the bulk of lawmakers’ work for the 2024 session, but legislators will return briefly Saturday to take care of procedural issues. Plus, the Legislature might reconvene on May 14 to deal with any veto from Gov. Tate Reeves.

One of the final actions on Friday was approving a massive bill that provides state money for projects throughout the state. The legislation funds tourism projects, work on local governmental office buildings and other projects for individual legislators.

Th total amount of the projects was $227.4 million.

In the past, projects were often funded by borrowing. But in recent years, thanks in large part to an infusion of federal COVID-19 funds and other federal funds, Mississippi, like most other states, has been flush with cash, allowing those projects to be funded with cash instead of long-term debt.

Senate Finance Chair Josh Harkins, R-Flowood, told senators paying for the projects with cash will not continue in future years. State revenue has begun to slow.

Harkins told senators there were more than $1 billion in requests on the local level for projects.

Sen. Angela Turner Ford, D-West Point, asked Harkins how it was decided which projects to fund.

Harkins said the focus was on infrastructure projects and other projects where it was viewed the greatest need was.

 In addition to the pet projects for lawmakers, other capital spending included:

• $110 million for university projects.
• $45 million for community college projects.
• $160 million for work on improving state Highway 7 in Lafayette County.
• $90 million for work on U.S. I-55 in DeSoto County.
• $50 million for work on state office buildings throughout the state.

In total, $820 million was committed in surplus funds for building projects throughout the state. Plus, $110 million in surplus funds was pumped into the Public Employees Retirement System to help shore up the government pension plan.

In terms of the budget to operate agencies, House Appropriations Chair John Read, R-Gautier, said state agencies are receiving an average 5% year-over-year increase in funding.

That increase includes money to pay for increases in the premiums for the state employee health plan and to pay for a .5% increase for each state agency in the contribution to the state retirement plan.

Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann said before the session began that dealing with financial issues facing PERS was one of the top priorities.

“We tackled the PERS issue,” Hosemann said, though, some argued that the legislative solution did not resolve all the financial issues facing the system.

Senate Appropriations Chair Briggs Hopson, R-Vicksburg, said the state budget provides funds to allow state agencies to deal with inflation.

“The budget is reflective of the times,” Hopson said. “State agencies are not immune to inflation. In order to provide services at the same level, we have to spend additional funds.”

The budget includes an additional $240 million in funding for K-12 schools.

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May 3, 1850

Shadrach Minkins, already separated from his family, escaped from the Norfolk, Virginia, home, where he was enslaved. He made his way to Boston, where he did odd jobs until he began working as a waiter at Taft’s Cornhill Coffee House. 

Months later, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which gave authorities the power to go into free states and arrest Black Americans who had escaped slavery. 

A slave catcher named John Caphart arrived in Boston, with papers for Minkins. While serving breakfast at the coffee house, federal authorities arrested Minkins. 

Several local lawyers, including Robert Morris, volunteered to represent him. Three days later, a group of abolitionists, led by African-American abolitionist Lewis Hayden, broke into the Boston courthouse and rescued a surprised Minkins. 

“The rescuers headed north along Court Street, 200 or more following like the tail of a comet,” author Gary Collison wrote. They guided him across the Charles River to the Cambridge home of the Rev. Joseph C. Lovejoy, whose brother, Elijah, had been lynched by a pro-slavery mob in Illinois in 1837. 

Another Black leader, John J. Smith, helped Minkins get a wagon with horses, and from Cambridge, Hayden, Smith and Minkins traveled to Concord, where Minkins stayed with the Bigelow family, which guided him to the Underground Railroad, making his way to Montreal, spending the rest of his life in Canada as a free man. 

Abolitionists cheered his escape, and President Millard Fillmore fumed. Morris, Hayden and others were charged, but sympathetic juries acquitted them. Meanwhile in Montreal, Minkins met fellow fugitives, married, had four children and continued to work as a waiter before operating his own restaurants. 

He ended his career running a barbershop before dying in 1875. A play performed in Boston in 2016 told the dramatic story of his escape.

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At her husband’s funeral in 1963, Myrlie Evers heard NAACP Executive Director Roy Wilkins declare, “Medgar Evers believed in his country. It remains to be seen if his country believes in him.”

Later today, his country will declare its belief in him when the family of the slain Mississippi NAACP leader receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor.

But Medgar Evers was more than a civilian. He fought the Nazis in World War II, only to return home and fight racism, this time in the form of Jim Crow, which barred Black Mississippians from the ballot box.

On his 21st birthday, he and other Black veterans of the war went to vote at the courthouse in Decatur, where they were met by white men with guns.

Afterward, he vowed he would never be defeated again and that he would keep fighting by joining others dedicated to the cause of the civil rights movement.

“The movement for equality was always on his mind, and whites’ denial of his right to vote in his hometown served as one cog of many in the overall wheel of injustice, a wheel of which he was bound and determined to break,” said Michael Vinson Williams, author of “Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr.” 

Myrlie Beasley met Medgar Evers on the first day of her freshman year at Alcorn A&M College in fall 1950. As she leaned against a light pole, she said he told her to be careful, “you might get shocked.”

And shocked she was when she fell in love and married him a year later. He was one of those military veterans that her family had warned her about. And he was involved in the movement that her family had avoided.

She joined him in the fight, and they moved to Mississippi’s only all-Black town, Mound Bayou, where he helped Dr. T.R.M. Howard lead a boycott. They distributed thousands of fluorescent bumper stickers that read, “Don’t Buy Gas Where You Can’t Use the Restroom.”

In January 1954, the University of Mississippi School of Law turned Medgar Evers away because of the color of his skin. NAACP officials considered taking his case to court, but they were so impressed with him they hired him instead as the first field secretary for the Mississippi NAACP. 

Myrlie Evers worked as his secretary. She said he insisted they call each other “Mr. Evers” and “Mrs. Evers” in the office.

He spent much of his time on the road, putting 40,000 miles a year on his car, recruiting new members, reviving branches and inspiring young people to participate in the movement, including Joyce Ladner, who invited him to speak to the NAACP Youth Council in Hattiesburg.

“He had a quiet courage,” she recalled. “I was always amazed that he drove up and down Mississippi’s two-lane highways alone at night. He was a marked man, but he kept on going.”

In 1961, Joan Trumpaeur Mulholland was one of more than 400 Freedom Riders, half of them white, who challenged segregation laws in the South. She and other Riders were arrested and sent to serve their time at the State Penitentiary at Parchman.

When she and other Riders needed a lawyer, Medgar Evers “was the one who took care of it,” she said.

He became a model for her and others in character and courage, talking often to Tougaloo College students, she recalled. “He wasn’t intimidated.”

In 1962, Evers installed Leslie McLemore as president of the Rust College chapter of the Mississippi NAACP. “Medgar Evers was really a brilliant man,” he said. “He had an incisive mind and personality that drew people to him. In another era, he could have been a U.S. senator from Mississippi or maybe even President.”

Evers investigated countless cases of intimidation and violence against Black Americans, including the 1955 murder of Emmett Till. Evers often dressed as a sharecropper in those investigations.

No matter where he went, threats of violence followed. He bought an Oldsmobile 88 with a V-8 engine so powerful it would leave most cars behind. On some dark nights across the Mississippi Delta, he floored it to escape those hell-bent on harming him.

His name appeared on Ku Klux Klan “death lists,” and his home telephone rang at all hours with threats to him and his family.

When his daughter, Reena, answered the phone one time, she heard a man saying he planned to torture and kill her father.

In spite of these threats, he stayed. He told Ebony magazine, “The state is beautiful, it is home, I love it here. A man’s state is like his house. If it has defects, he tries to remedy them. That’s what my job is here.”

On May 20, 1963, Evers talked on television about the mistreatment of Black Mississippians. “If I die, it will be a good cause,” he told The New York Times. “I’m fighting for America just as much as the soldiers in Vietnam.”

Weeks later, President Kennedy delivered his first and only civil rights speech, telling the millions watching on television, “If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who will represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?”

Evers smiled. He and other Black leaders had urged Kennedy to push Congress for a civil rights bill, and now that seemed certain to happen.

Hours later, returning home from a late civil rights meeting, Evers was shot in the back in the driveway of his Jackson home.

Myrlie Evers and their three children dashed outside, saw the blood and screamed. “Daddy!” Reena yelled. “Please get up, Daddy.”

He never did.

“He had the courage to hold an impossible job at a crucial turning point in American history,” said Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a trilogy on the civil rights movement.

For the first time, members of the mainstream press didn’t call such a killing “a lynching,” he said. “They called it an assassination.”

In his book, “Parting the Waters,” he wrote, “White people who had never heard of Medgar Evers spoke his name over and over, as though the words themselves had the ring of legend. It seemed fitting that the casket was placed on a slow train through the South, bound for Washington so that the body could lie in state.”

After the casket arrived, Medgar Evers was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

“The tragedy of his martyrdom is eloquent testimony to the courage and dedication of a leader who — in his lifetime — deserved the respect and support of the powerful people who later publicly identified with this man and his cause,” said John Dittmer, author of “Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi.” “Though long overdue, this award is a fitting tribute to Medgar Evers and his family.”

A year after Evers’ assassination, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act on his birthday, and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the bill into law hours later. 

“Medgar Wiley Evers boldly stood against injustice, against oppression, against this country’s determination to keep Black people as second-class citizens,” Williams said, “and he was murdered because of his commitment to truth, justice and the struggle for civil and human rights.”

Before leaving office as governor in 1984, William Winter hosted Myrlie Evers and her family at the mansion, where he remarked that Medgar Evers did more than just free Black Mississippians, he freed white Mississippians as well from the bonds of racial segregation, oppression and hate, he said. “We were all prisoners of that system.”

It took three decades before Evers’ killer was finally brought to justice in 1994, and that verdict helped to inspire the reopenings of other cases. There have been 24 convictions in civil rights cold cases.

Myrlie Evers’ courage to press for justice in her husband’s case started all of this, said Leslie McLemore, who helped found the Fannie Lou Hamer National Institute on Citizenship and Democracy. “It would not have happened without her persistence.”

When she learned last week about the Presidential Medal of Freedom honoring her late husband, she exclaimed to her daughter, Reena Evers-Everette, “Oh, my God!”

Then Myrlie Evers grew silent.

“I’m just utterly speechless,” she said, “and frozen with gratitude.”

Evers-Everette still misses the man she knows as “Daddy,” but she perseveres as the executive director for the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute, because his spirit inspires her. 

“I feel him around me all the time,” she said. “I marvel at his courage, stamina, vision, and commitment for equality and justice for his people and all of humanity. I pray for his love and wisdom as I pursue this work, because I don’t want him to have died in vain.”

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An effort in the Mississippi Legislature to accept billions of dollars in federal money to expand Medicaid coverage to the working poor – a policy which medical experts, clergy and business leaders advocated – was expected to die on a Thursday night deadline, according to House leaders.  

House Medicaid Chair Missy McGee, R-Hattiesburg, told reporters that she delivered a proposal to Senate negotiators on Thursday morning that would have allowed voters to have the final say on a statewide referendum in November whether the state should expand Medicaid. 

But the Forrest County lawmaker said she had not heard a response from the Senate at all on Thursday, leading her to believe expansion is certain to die by an 8 p.m. Thursday deadline. 

“It’s disappointing,” McGee said. “We worked really hard on it, and we fought to the bitter end.” 

The bill’s death would mark an end to months of intense debate at the Capitol and scores of rallies urging legislators to adopt expansion under the federal Affordable Care Act. 

For a brief moment on Wednesday, it appeared both chambers at the Capitol might adopt a compromise, but expansion under that proposal contained stipulations the federal government is not likely to approve and could have held expansion here in limbo for years.

House and Senate negotiators on Tuesday night agreed on a compromise that would have expanded Medicaid coverage to individuals who make roughly $20,000 but only if the federal government signed off on a work proposal for recipients – something the federal government was almost certain to reject. 

But the deal fell apart after rumors circulated in the Capitol that the Senate did not have enough votes to support the plan and after a large portion of Democrats in the House objected to the work requirement. 

House Speaker Jason White, R-West, said he would have had the votes Wednesday in the House to pass the compromise, even with the loss of a significant number of Democratic votes.

But the speaker opted to send the proposal back to negotiations after being told by Senate leaders that the Senate only had 28 votes – not enough to pass it by a needed three-fifths majority. 

White said his negotiators offered the referendum option as a compromise that he hoped more Senate Republicans could support. He said he knew it was a long shot that the Senate would accept the proposal, but he thought it was worth a try.

“I am not casting blame,” White said when asked about what he said was the lack of votes in the Senate. “… But I had to act on that information.”

White said he was disappointed that Medicaid expansion did not pass this session, but he said he is glad it was debated and discussed during the session.

“It was a good first step,” he said. “Whether we will look at it next year or the next, I don’t know. We will have to reassess.”

White, in his first year as speaker, was the first Republican legislative leader to bring up legislation to enact Medicaid expansion. That original proposal passed by an overwhelming bipartisan vote in the House.

When asked about whether the Senate had the votes to pass the compromise on Wednesday, a spokesperson for Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann said, “The Senate was working to secure the votes, but that effort stalled when House Democrats indicated they did not support the bill.”

Democratic leaders in a statement said they have been “crystal clear” about what they were willing to accept in a Medicaid expansion compromise, but whether House Republicans wanted to listen to is “beyond our control.”

“Unfortunately, neither House nor Senate leadership chose to act on the language we proposed,” the statement read. “Instead, we will leave Jackson without a plan to solve our state’s increasingly dangerous healthcare crisis.”

If the expansion legislation dies as expected, lawmakers will have to wait until next year during the 2025 session to reconsider the policy that 40 other states have adopted. 

Bishop Ronnie Crudup, Sr., the Mid-South Diocese of the Fellowship of International Church who has been advocating for expansion for months at the Capitol, told Mississippi Today he was still hoping the two chambers could reach a “dramatic” last minute compromise. 

“But we will continue to advocate for Medicaid expansion,” Cruddup said. “If something dramatic doesn’t happen, we will be looking for other routes to make this happen.”

Lawmakers on Thursday said they expect to end the 2024 legislative session early Saturday.

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