When the state’s advocacy organization for people with disabilities couldn’t get the Department of Mental Health to turn over records that could show abuse or neglect at state-run psychiatric facilities, it sued. This week, the two parties reached a settlement that will allow the advocacy group to access reports of serious incidents involving staff and residents through an online system.
“The Department of Mental Health is going to allow us to see what we need to see,” said Polly Tribble, executive director of the nonprofit Disability Rights Mississippi, the group that sued the mental health department. “We can do our job.”
Department spokesperson Adam Moore said in an email to Mississippi Today that the settlement will provide extra transparency.
“Though the incident reports included in this agreement were already being reported to the Attorney General’s Office and all other required licensure entities, Disability Rights will now be able to access these reports at any time and request additional documentation if needed,” he said.
Last year, Disability Rights began hearing about how staffing shortages were leading to neglect at the state hospitals. The group is Mississippi’s “protection and advocacy (P&A) system,” charged by the U.S. Congress with advocating for people with disabilities and investigating abuse and neglect at programs that serve them. Each state has a P&A.
The advocacy group sought incident reports from 10 mental and behavioral health facilities around the state, a broad request intended to identify potential patterns and trends. But the state refused to turn over the reports, arguing that the group hadn’t shown “probable cause” to launch a systemic investigation and was undertaking “a fishing expedition.”
The Department of Justice sued the state of Mississippi over its failure to provide adequate community-based mental health services in 2016. U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves sided with the federal government and last year ordered the state to comply with a reform plan overseen by a special monitor.
Disability Rights sued the agency in November after months of negotiations over the records.
Tribble was surprised the lawsuit was necessary; her organization has always had a good relationship with the Department of Mental Health, she said.
On Wednesday morning, Disability Rights staff used the new system to access incident reports for the first time, though there are still some technical kinks to work out.
“Our intention all along has been to look at the reports and see if there’s any patterns of abuse by a particular staff person, but also to see if the staffing shortage is having an effect on incidents,” she said. “Which I suspect it is. But we don’t know.”
The Justice Department filed an amicus brief siding with the advocacy organization in March. The brief asked the court to order the department to turn over the incident reports from its facilities.
“During its routine monitoring activities, DRMS advocates observed troubling issues, including understaffing, unreported incidents, patient neglect, nonuse of COVID protocol and precautions by onsite staff, and staff-on-resident injuries and incidents,” the brief said. “Most importantly, the existence of incident reports regarding specific individuals inherently indicates that unusual events involving those individuals, such as harm or an error or omission in care, have occurred.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Justice declined to comment for this story.
Lawyers at the attorney general’s office represented the Department of Mental Healthin the suit.
“The State remains committed to serving Mississippians in need of mental health and substance use services and we were pleased to be able to reach a resolution in this case,” Michelle Williams, chief of staff for Attorney General Lynn Fitch, said in a statement.
Earlier this year, the advocacy group settled another lawsuit with the department after it denied a request for records relating to the Mississippi State Hospital’s forensic unit, which serves people who have been diverted from jail or prison, usually because they have a mental illness that makes them unfit to stand trial. The organization wanted to investigate after getting reports of mistreatment.
Tribble said that settlement, too, allowed her organization to get the records it had initially sought.
Even as the Department of Mental Health says it is trying to comply with the court-ordered settlement agreement and expand community mental health services, the state attorney general is still fighting the ruling. Last year, the office appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, where it is arguing that the department is already providing needed services and that Reeves has unconstitutionally installed “perpetual federal oversight” of the state agency.
Oral arguments have been tentatively scheduled for the week of Oct. 3.
The Mississippi Department of Human Services hired an accounting firm, using welfare dollars, to ostensibly get to the bottom of who stole or misspent millions in federal grant funds and try to recoup them.
But never-before-published emails Mississippi Today obtained through a records request show Gov. Tate Reeves’ appointed MDHS director pushed to limit who and what the hired forensic audit could examine. And he tried to keep the state auditor and other law enforcement agencies out of the mix.
“This is nothing but a whitewash to show that MDHS was not complicit in this problem, except for (former MDHS Director) John Davis,” a deputy in state Auditor Shad White’s office wrote to White in April of 2020 after reviewing the proposal MDHS drafted to solicit an auditing firm.
White’s office was to be a “third party” to a contract with a forensic auditor. But MDHS pushed to limit the Office of the State Auditor’s involvement and even at one point omitted language requiring the independent auditor to contact OSA or other law enforcement if it spotted potential crimes — a standard practice in audit contracts.
Gov. Reeves said he appointed MDHS Director Bob Anderson, a former prosecutor, in March of 2020 to clean up the welfare agency. Weeks into Anderson’s administration, he clashed with White over the forensic audit proposal, records show. White pushed to expand the breadth of the review and provide more OSA involvement.
“We should be on the same side – the side of the taxpayers, trying to find the misspending that happened at DHS and all the people responsible,” White wrote to Anderson in April of 2020 during heated negotiations about the forensic audit proposal. “In my view, you are either for an audit that will reveal those things, like the audit we have proposed, or you are not. Your proposal as it stands would waste taxpayer money and not reach the issues that need to be reached.”
Neither Reeves nor Anderson would agree to an interview about the forensic audit issues or provide comment in response to Mississippi Today’s findings.
White, who is involved in separate state and federal criminal investigations into the welfare scandal, appeared to win some concessions on the final forensic audit contract. At the same time, he objected to MDHS having access to the auditor’s office’s workpapers.
But in the end, the prominent national accounting firm Clifton Larson Allen hired for the audit noted it was limited — and in some cases “severely limited” — in what and whom it could examine in its probe and said it could likely have found more misspending if allowed freer rein.
“If I were you, I would want to know where the misspending happened and who is responsible, not spend my time negotiating downward an audit with OSA,” White wrote to Anderson. “If you want to spend DHS money on this audit so that the current staff can avoid looking bad, without you discovering who was involved with the misspending, then you will bear the responsibility for that and any additional misspending that happens going forward. I will not participate.”
Gov. Reeves, who oversees MDHS and appointed Anderson, recently said the CLA forensic audit is the lodestar for the state’s lawsuit against numerous people and businesses to try to recover some of the at least $77 million in misspent welfare money. He also made clear he’s calling the major shots at MDHS when it comes to the lawsuit.
Reeves fired the attorney MDHS had hired to recover the money after the attorney went beyond the scope of the forensic audit. The attorney tried to subpoena records about possible involvement of former Gov. Phil Bryant and his wife, former NFL football star Brett Favre and the USM Athletic Foundation — many of whose board members are large campaign donors and political supporters of Reeves. Reeves said attorney Brad Pigott should have stuck to the metes and bounds of the forensic audit, and accused him of having a political agenda and seeking the media spotlight when he went beyond it.
White has criticized Pigott’s firing and said the state should seek to recover all the misspent money it can. He said he will make sure state and federal criminal investigators have the records Pigott attempted to subpoena.
At the time MDHS was preparing the forensic audit proposal request, White was already gearing up to release a report in May of 2020 that questioned $94 million in MDHS spending and illustrated systemic failures of the welfare department.
White’s audit found that the welfare department continually violated the law by spending funds from a federal program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, a federal block grant notorious for being used as a slush fund in some states on projects that did not fulfill the purposes of the grant or did not serve the needy.
But the forensic audit by an independent firm, not White’s report, would be the document the state would use to determine who to bring civil litigation against to recoup misspent funds.
The news you need direct to your inbox.
Processing…
Success! You’re on the list.
Whoops! There was an error and we couldn’t process your subscription. Please reload the page and try again.
Some people, including at least one criminal defendant arrested in February of 2020, expected a forensic audit to significantly contradict White’s narrative about widespread misuse. An email White sent his deputies alludes to the perception some had that the auditor’s office had an agenda in going after MDHS.
“I’m also tempted to tell them this is a great way to determine if we’re auditing to ‘frame’ a ‘narrative’ or not: just let a private CPA have broad leeway to confirm or disprove our findings,” White wrote.
Emails Mississippi Today obtained now reveal that MDHS’s current leadership may have attempted to place its thumb on the scale to mitigate exposure for the agency as a whole, including dozens of employees who reviewed expenditures and contracts.
“To be completely honest — this is a half-hearted attempt to complete a forensic audit that has completely erased our input,” wrote Stephanie Palmertree, financial and compliance audit director for the state auditor’s office who headed up much of its MDHS probe. “And seeing how MDHS is defending the clearly fabricated contract procurements that they have completed, I’m not sure I would trust the current staff to choose an independent auditor. This is a PR attempt at making MDHS look like they did all they could.”
As part of the discovery process in the civil case, Mississippi Community Education Center, the nonprofit founded by criminal defendants Nancy New and her son Zach New, has asked for communication from MDHS related to the forensic audit to examine how it may have artificially targeted select vendors.
In his email response to a missive from White in April 2020, Anderson said, “My objective is and has been since I arrived here at MDHS to ferret out the misspending and the responsible parties … We’re trying to fashion an RFI (Request for Information) that captures the agreement between both the agencies and that defines the parameters of what will be an expensive and lengthy audit undertaking.”
The contract with CLA was for up to $2.1 million. But according to a review of expenditures on the state’s transparency website, MDHS has only paid the firm less than $800,000, one of few times the agency has appeared frugal with spending federal welfare dollars on things other than poor people.
At one point, in response to White’s office suggesting changes to the audit proposal, Anderson said, “Much of what we took out relates to the criminal investigation … which is not the purpose for this forensic audit since the criminal case is already indicted …”
White took umbrage with this and responded: “You are aware that the statement ‘the criminal case is already indicted’ is incorrect; I’ve told you and the public that the case is still being investigated. More indictments are possible. Even if the investigation were not still ongoing, one would want criminal activity reported to law enforcement.
“… I’m not sure why you removed both your previous language and OSA’s language on reporting criminal activity,” White wrote to Anderson. “… Also, there is some confusion about what a ‘forensic’ audit is. The AICPA (American Institute of Certified Public Accountants) notes that the term forensic means to be suitable for use in a court of law. Removing the language that says this audit may serve as evidence in a legal proceeding is to remove part of the audit’s very purpose.
“The same could be said for removing the language about how auditors may be called to testify in court,” White wrote. “And the same could be said for removing language requiring misappropriations to be ‘listed by individual, as could be proven in a legal proceeding.’ This audit should trace expenditures to completion and show, with findings that could stand up as evidence in court, who directed that spending, whether those people are inside or outside DHS.”
Asked for comment about limitations on CLA’s forensic audit, a spokesman for White’s office said, “We will let CLA’s audit speak for itself on areas where CLA believed they had adequate information to conduct the audit and where CLA was limited.”
In its audit reports delivered in September of 2021, CLA noted that it was not given access to former DHS Director John Davis’ computer hard drive and it was initially limited in whose emails it could examine.
“CLA was unable to obtain a copy of John Davis’ MDHS hard drive, as it was in the possession of the (Office of State Auditor) investigative division. Additionally, the scope of work limited CLA’s review of emails to include only John Davis’ MDHS emails. If other electronic evidence had been made available to CLA, additional information not currently known to CLA could impact the findings communicated in this report.”
White’s spokesman said: “As we have explained previously, the hard drive (it was actually his computer) was obtained through our criminal investigation. We do not make evidence obtained in a criminal investigation available to anyone outside of law enforcement. That includes private CPA firms. Of course, we obtained that computer from DHS. If DHS backed up any files on the computer to their network, that could be made available per a public records request. We would also remind you that, while we will not provide the computer to a private CPA firm, we have made all of our evidence, including the hard drive, available to the FBI.”
CLA also noted that the New nonprofit, Mississippi Community Education Center, did not provide records to the auditors and did not cooperate with its probe. Much of the theft and misspending in the scandal occurred through MCEC, which was helping run a statewide anti-poverty program called Families First for Mississippi.
White’s spokesman said: “Despite pledging to assist auditors, the News failed to provide MCEC’s original documentation of spending to CLA, as CLA noted. CLA was given access to copies of all the MCEC documents (contracts, invoices, general ledger reports, etc.) that the auditor’s office had. Unfortunately, copies are not considered original documentation. Only MCEC could provide original documentation. Without original documentation, CLA had to note that their audit was limited. DHS ultimately decided to not pursue obtaining original documents from MCEC after MCEC failed to cooperate. OSA was asked to use our subpoena power to obtain documents from Heart of David, and we did.”
But in a supplemental forensic audit report released in April, Clifton Larson Allen noted that they didn’t even have access to a lease agreement that the State Auditor possessed, and were forced to retrieve it from a news article.
Another deputy in White’s office who reviewed MDHS’ drafts for a forensic audit proposal, at the time noted, “Very limited scope outside of TANF (federal welfare dollars). We know SSBG, CCDF and SNAP funds were also misused. They’ve even limited the scope to contracts directed by Davis to only TANF contracts … Firm is only required to alert MDHS of potential criminal activity, not us, the federal government or law enforcement.”
White, at the time, wrote to Anderson: “Obviously criminal activity should be reported to us, not just DHS, as we are the state’s chief law enforcement agency for crimes involving public funds. DHS’s failure to report criminal activity to the Auditor’s office has been a problem in the past.”
White’s spokesman this week explained that OSA auditors, as routine, repeatedly asked DHS staff over several years if they knew of fraud at the agency, and “… Staffers repeatedly failed to report any fraud in these meetings.”
We continue to report to you, bringing new information and answers. We can’t do this without your help, though. Support this work with a recurring donation today!
With high school football season about two weeks away, Tyler takes questions from Rick about the upcoming season. Who’s hot? Who’s not? And which players could contend for Player of the Year in Mississippi?
Mississippi is now the world’s leader in putting people behind bars — more inmates per capita than any state or nation, including China, Russia and Iran, according to the World Population Review.
“Is there a political price to be paid for foolishly sticking with a failed system that’s made us the world capital of mass incarceration?” asked Cliff Johnson, director of the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Mississippi School of Law. “What’s it going to take for Mississippians to realize that the mass incarceration we have carried out for decades has made us less safe, rather than safer?”
Across the U.S., the number of those in prison in the U.S. is 16% lower today than before the pandemic, according to the Vera Institute of Justice, but Mississippi’s rate is skyrocketing, rising more than 1,500 in less than six months. That population now exceeds 18,000 — the highest rate since April 2020.
“We have perfected throwing people away for long periods of time,” Johnson said, “and yet after decades and decades of this approach, Mississippians are more fearful about violent crime than any time I remember.”
In September 2013, Mississippi had as many as 22,490 inmates behind bars. In the years since, reforms and an aggressive Parole Board, headed by a veteran law enforcement officer, reduced the number of inmates to the lowest level in two decades. On Feb. 7, that population fell to 16,499, according to MDOC.
But with Gov. Tate Reeves’ new board chairman, a former Chevron executive he put in charge in January, that trend has reversed itself.
On Aug. 1, the prison population hit a high of 18,080.
If this current trend continues, Mississippi would top 19,000 inmates before the end of the year and would surpass 22,000 inmates before the end of 2023.
That additional prison population would cost taxpayers more than $100 million a year, based on the $53.72 per-day cost computed by the state’s legislative watchdog.
“We’re stuck in this futile cycle of throwing more money at prisons,” Johnson said. “Even with the Department of Justice breathing down our necks, we can’t handle the people we have.”
The Justice Department began investigating the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman in 2020 after MCIR and ProPublica reported on the increases in grisly violence, gang control and subhuman living conditions. In April, the department reported that the prison’s conditions violate the Constitution.
The department is investigating other prisons as well.
Promises, Promises in Prison Reform
When Gov. Phil Bryant, a Republican, signed House Bill 585 into law in 2014, the measure drew widespread praise from conservatives and liberals alike because it promised to reduce the prison population, save millions — $266 million, to be exact — and reinvest some of the money into programs for offenders.
Instead, all of those savings went back into the state’s coffers, helping to pay for huge phased-in corporate tax cuts enacted in 2016, because the state was struggling to meet revenue estimates.
Last year, Reeves signed legislation aimed at expanding parole eligibility to 3,000 more inmates, believing it could be a “net positive for Mississippi.” He later bragged about the significant reduction in inmates at Parchman.
“I believe in second chances,” he said in an April 22, 2022, tweet. “I trust my Parole Board appointees to make wise decisions.”
But since his appointment of a new chairman in 2022, the numbers of paroles have declined.
When Steven Pickett chaired the board between 2013 and 2021, he said about six of every 10 inmates who appeared before the Parole Board earned their release. The board typically saw about 5,000 inmates a year.
Now the board is rejecting far more requests. So far this year, about three-fourths of inmates who have appeared before the board have been rejected for parole.
At the same time Mississippi is filling up its prisons, the state is lagging in programs that would help ensure that inmates don’t return.
“The Mississippi Department of Corrections can’t have a rodeo or enough GED classes, because we don’t have the staffing,” Johnson said. “We probably can’t support more than about 12,000 incarcerated, but we’ve got 18,000.”
Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain convinced state lawmakers to raise salaries of correctional officers in the 2022 legislative session.
While hiring officers has proved a struggle, he said Tuesday, “We’re gaining ground. We’re going to show the Justice Department we’re moving along.”
By fall, he hopes to have 80 schools for inmates to gain certification in engine repair, plumbing, welding, carpentry and other fields.
By doing this, “we’ll reduce recidivism, and we’ll reduce violence,” he said. “About half of the 4,400 inmates we release each year will have a skill or trade.”
He ran a similar program at the Louisiana State Penitentiary and saw the recidivism rate drop to less than 10%.
He called Mississippi’s program “way more intense. We’re meeting a need.”
Rather than hiring teachers on the outside, he’s using inmates certified in these fields to teach, he said.
He praised the Parole Board. “We don’t want gangsters getting out,” he said.
With this new training program for inmates, “we’re going to turn the curve,” he said. “We already have people from Alabama coming to see how we do things.”
Alternatives to Prison Part of the Solution
Cain has also started an alcohol and drug program at the once-shuttered Walnut Grove Correctional Facility that houses 32 inmates in a 90-day addiction program.
Pickett said such programs play an important role in treatment for Mississippi inmates, three-fourths of whom are battling alcohol or drug problems or both.
For example, he said, if a parolee is caught with meth and has failed to report to his parole officer for two months, what should the Parole Board do?
Send him back to prison? Or to treatment?
Locking him up in prison for a year won’t cure his addiction, Pickett said. “All we are doing is putting him in a place that’s dangerous. Meth is just as prolific in prison as it is on the streets. It’s very, very sad.”
The other option would be the Technical Violation Center.
State Public Defender Andre de Gruy said the state needs to do a better job of utilizing this center.
“Now that we’re number one in mass incarceration,” Johnson said, “we ought to stop and take a collective timeout and have a long conversation about whether we’re satisfied and whether we’ve had a good return on the billions we’ve invested.
“Are we locking up more people because there’s something about Mississippians that make them morally deficient or more likely to commit crime? Or is there something more to this story?”
Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting is a nonprofit news organization that is exposing wrongdoing, educating and empowering Mississippians, and raising up the next generation of investigative reporters. Sign up for our newsletter.
Imani Perry Credit: Imani Perry/Mississippi Book Festival
Imani Perry’s argument in “South to America” will feel familiar to any Southerner, or to anyone at all, who has ever been startled by the cheerful dismissals of the region you sometimes encounter elsewhere in the United States. “I’d never want to go to the South,” people up north have said when I told them where I’m from, as if it is a singular place uniformly deserving of disinterest or contempt. Perry, a native of Birmingham, Ala., argues that this tendency to treat the South – and especially its brutal history of racist exploitation and violence – as excisable from the rest of the country is a convenient fantasy.
The argument will also be familiar to anyone who has read much about the modern history of “the South” — a label that can sometimes feel more theoretical than lived, given the diversity of the place. As Perry writes, “The South is so varying it can seem endless. And yet you will still know ‘Southern’ means something over and against other regions.”
Writers’ journeys here are often a quest to understand our under-examined, intentionally obscured or distorted history, from Tony Horowitz’s “Confederates in the Attic” (a book Perry criticizes for its softness on white Confederate re-enactors and their devotion to Lost Cause mythology) to Clint Smith’s recent “How the Word is Passed.” Perry is a professor of African American studies at Princeton University and author of books on Lorraine Hansberry and the Black National Anthem, and she is very clear about the tradition she follows: “South to America” was directly inspired by Albert Murray’s book “South to A Very Old Place,” first published in 1971.
Murray was born and raised in Mobile and educated at Tuskegee University before moving to New York and making a career as an essayist, novelist and critic. During and after the civil rights movement, as Black writers and intellectuals debated whether the path forward was separatism or integration, Murray argued for the centrality of Black culture to American culture, and the unworkability of Black nationalism.
When “South to A Very Old Place” was published, the civil rights movement had wrought massive changes across the country, but their full significance was unclear. And though civil rights leaders had long highlighted the segregation and economic marginalization that characterized Black life in northern cities, the boundaries of the South were perhaps not as blurry as they are today.
Perry’s view of the South as synecdoche-of-sorts for America feels salient in 2022. We remember the Confederate flag hoisted in the U.S. Capitol – a scene never witnessed during the Civil War – on Jan. 6. The man who carried it was from Delaware, a slave state that remained in the Union, though that fact is perhaps unimportant in an era when the Confederate flag flies across the country, no longer always or even often purporting to represent “southern pride.”
Lawmakers in Wisconsin and Arizona join Georgians and Texans in plotting new ways to limit suffrage. The religious right, rooted in Southern evangelicalism, is ascendant. In the days after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the battle-worn and exhausted clinic escorts, helping the final patients make it to their appointments before the clock ran out on legal abortion in the state, repeated some version of a bitter line: “Welcome to Mississippi, America.”
The southernization of American political life may also help explain why parts of Perry’s journey, 50 years after Murray’s, trigger similar reflections. In Atlanta, Murray visits a restaurant and is served uneventfully by a young white waitress. He thinks about what she would say if, say, Newsweek interviewed her about desegregation. He wouldn’t be surprised if she told them how “a white girl shouldn’t have to serve Negroes, and all that crap.” But then he asks: “Is what she says when interviewed on desegregation as a specific issue really more significant than the way she is acting right now with me sitting here?”
At the Nashville airport, Perry approaches a vending machine and realizes a white man is waiting to restock it. “You can g’on and get you something,” he tells her, smiling. Perry thinks that based on his demographics, “the odds are he wouldn’t feel so warmly about me,” and that she would likely be “irked by the things he thinks about the world.” And yet there is still “the softness with which we could speak to one another.” “Whatever it is that I’m saying about the South as America includes that too.” A point that was optimistic in 1971 now feels nearly tragic.
Murray beautifully rendered the speech of southerners, especially Black southerners in his hometown and from his university days at Tuskegee. Entire pages are filled with lengthy quotes from people he just let talk and talk. He compares the voices taking turns during a living room chat to a jazz ensemble. Perry seems to have spoken to fewer people, and her conversations with people she meets for the first time on her journey – as opposed to people she has long known as family friends or fellow writers – are often short. Their significance is sometimes derived from a heavy dose of speculation, like when a Lyft driver in Virginia becomes a symbol of toxic white evangelicalism after a strange but apparently brief exchange.
Perry notes that her politics are quite different from those of Murray, who believed in an American identity built through all of its constitutive parts: a “nation of multi-colored people.” (When Toni Morrison reviewed “South to a Very Old Place” for the New York Times in 1972, she criticized his disinterest in “the Afro part of Afro-Americans:” “The history of black Americans neither begins nor ends in Mobile, Ala.; its true meaning will stay hidden from any black who does not know that there is another place even Souther and much, much older.”)
Perry instead draws connections between the Black South and the larger Black diaspora. In addition to 12 states and the District of Columbia, she travels to the Bahamas and Havana to show the historical and cultural linkages between the South and the Caribbean, and to gain perspective through distance. “We say the only difference between Black folks in various parts of the diaspora is where the boat stopped, but we don’t say that the boats, and the marches through land, didn’t ever stop…. There are rhythms that would be found here and there, though a different blend. This is, I think, the thing that Albert Murray got wrong about the South, even as he described those rhythms with a seriousness and a precision unlike anyone before and likely since.”
In Mississippi, Perry focuses on the city of Jackson, highlighting the historical ironies that surround those of us who live here to such a degree that we sometimes become inured to them. Jackson, Perry writes, “is part Chicago and mostly Mississippi, a place where, like the first Chokwe Lumumba, people reverse-migrate, either to start a revolution or because life in the North was too cold.”
She describes the history of the New Afrikan People’s Organization, for which Lumumba was vice president, with “the goals of self-determination, land ownership, and an independent nation-state for New Afrikans” in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. Though the Black Power movement is often conceptualized as non-Southern, she points out that it is a Deep South capital that is led by a “scion of Black nationalism,” the younger Chokwe Lumumba. And Jackson, “unapologetically Black,” is the capital of the state with the country’s largest Black population and largest number of Black elected officials, and home to two Historically Black Colleges and Universities (Perry vividly describes the Sonic Boom of the South marching through the city streets). All this in the American state most synonymous with violence and murder in the name of white supremacy.
Yet today the life expectancy for Black men in Mississippi is less than 67 years. Perry mentions, too, the Central American and Mexican poultry factory workers detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the largest raids in history.
“We haven’t outrun or outlived the plantation, although it looks a little bit different… There’s an honesty to Mississippi about all of this. The triumph is not in ends, it is in the fact that we are still here.”
Perry is a featured panelist at the Mississippi Book Festival on Aug. 20.
A Lafayette County Circuit Court judge on Tuesday found police had probable cause to arrest Sheldon Timothy Herrington Jr., a 22-year-old University of Mississippi graduate, for the murder of Jimmie “Jay” Lee.
Judge Gray Tollison then denied bond to Herrington as Lee, a 20-year-old Black student who was well known in Oxford’s LGBTQ community, has been missing since July 8.
As sheriff’s deputies led Herrington down the front steps of the courthouse and into a squad car,nearly a dozen protesters – many of them students who were friends with Lee – shouted in unison: “Where is Jay?”
Lee was well-known on campus for his involvement in the LGBTQ community. Credit: Courtesy Oxford Police Department
Over the course of nearly six hours, the prosecution laid out a theory that Herrington and Lee had a casual relationship. Lafayette County Assistant District Attorney Tiffany Kilpatrick argued that following an argument in the morning of July 8, Herrington “lured” Lee to his apartment, strangled him, and then “staged a cover up” by driving Lee’s car to Molly Barr Trails and disposing his body somewhere in Lafayette or Grenada counties.
“In 2022 you do not need a body,” Kilpatrick said in her closing statement. “It’s not the 1870s.”
The preliminary hearing occurred on Tuesday as part of the bond hearing because Herrington was entitled to hear the evidence that Oxford police used to obtain an arrest warrant.
The prosecution argued that Herrington should be denied bond because his charge – first-degree murder – will likely be elevated to capital murder as police uncover more evidence; some of which is still being processed at a private crime lab. Kilpatrick also argued Herrington was a flight risk, noting that a forensic search of his MacBook showed he had searched for flights from Dallas to Singapore.
Herrington’s defense attorney, state Rep. Kevin Horan, disputed that Herrington, who has $1,910 in his bank account, could afford to flee the state. In his closing statement, Horan said the prosecution’s case amounted to “suspicion, conjecture and speculation.”
“We’re not supposed to be sensational in these cases – we’re supposed to come in and treat everyone the same … no matter how many cameras are up there or how many people are outside,” Horan said, gesturing to the windows of the second-floor courtroom. The protesters’ chants could be heard throughout the proceeding.
The hearing began with Kilpatrick calling Lee’s mother and Oxford Police Department Detective Ryan Baker to testify.
Stephanie Lee recounted all the signs that led her to realize Jay was missing on July 8. The first sign, she said, came around 7 a.m. when Jay, who had texted her, “Mom, it’s your birthday,” did not respond to the smiley-face emoji she sent in reply.
Baker testified he arrested Herrington on July 22based on the“totality of the evidence.” This included Snapchat messages, Google searches on Herrington’s computer, and DeSoto County Sheriff’s Department K-9s who he said identified the smell of a dead body in Herrington’s apartment, car and moving truck which belongs to his company, T&T Moving. Other evidence included video surveillance on July 8 of a man that Baker identified as Herrington running from Molly Barr Trail, where police believe he parked Lee’s car that morning, then retrieving a shovel and wheelbarrow from his parent’s house in Grenada.
The most damning evidence in Baker’s testimony was a Google search that Herrington made on July 8, minutes after Lee sent a Snapchat message saying he was coming over. At 5:56 a.m., Herrington searched, “how long does it take to strangle someone gabby petito.”
Gabby Petito was a 22-year-old who gained national attention last summer when she went missing; it was later determined she was killed by strangulation.
After Baker read the Google search, multiple people gasped in the courtroom, prompting Kilpatrick to ask him to repeat the line.
Baker then testified that 156 seconds later, Herrington made another Google search: “does pre-work boost testosterone.” Kilpatrick argued in her closing statement that Herrington “probably” took pre-work — a type of energy booster typically taken before exercise — prior to killing Lee.
During Baker’s cross examination, Horan argued that the K-9 evidence – without accompanying DNA evidence or bodily fluids – is not admissible in court in Mississippi and that OPD could not prove the dogs utilized by DeSoto County had ever successfully identified the smell of a dead body.
Horan then called four witnesses who testified, in an effort to obtain bail for Herrington, to his connections to the community in Grenada. Herrington’s mother, Tina Herrington, read several pages listing Herrington’s religious and academic accomplishments, including that Herrington was voted “most likely to be president” when he graduated high school in 2018.
Emily Tindell, the principal of Grenada High School, testified that Herrington and his family have “the best of character in Grenada County.”
During the hearing, Tayla Carey, Lee’s sister, sat in the front row next to her mother. The hearing was a “rollercoaster,” she said.
“I’m mad, I’m sad, I’m irritated,” she said. “I’m all over the place, honestly. I just want justice, I just want peace.”
Spectators steadily left the courtroom as the hearing continued. Before the hearing started, dozens of people were protesting outside the courthouse, including LGBTQ rights activists fron across Mississippi.
The next step in the case is the grand jury hearing; the date has not yet been set.
A Leflore County grand jury has found insufficient evidence to indict Carolyn Bryant Donham for her role in the kidnapping and lynching death of Emmett Till.
District Attorney Dewayne Richardson said the jury considered charges of kidnapping and manslaughter, but returned a “no bill” indicating they would not indict Donham, according to a news release from his office.
“The murder of Emmett Till remains an unforgettable tragedy in this country and the thoughts and prayers of this nation continue to be with the family of Emmett Till,” Richardson said in a statement.
Donham is in her late 80s and had a last known address in North Carolina, the Associated Press reported.
Till, who was from Chicago, was murdered at the age of 14 while visiting his family in the Delta in 1955.
The Emmett Till Legacy Foundation, founded by members of Till’s family, has been demanding justice by charging Donham as an accomplice in his death.
Family members from the foundation were not immediately available for comment Tuesday. On Twitter, the foundation wrote justice for Till will continue.
The grand jury met last week and heard more than seven hours of testimony from witnesses who detailed the case investigation since 2004, according to the district attorney’s office.
Last month, the original unserved arrest warrantfor Donham was found in the basement of the Leflore County courthouse in Greenwood. The FBI was notified about the discovery and there were discussions between Richardson’s office and federal partners, according to the district attorney’s office.
“Although prosecutors do not arrest people nor do prosecutors serve arrest warrants, the existence of the 1955 warrant along with additional information confirmed the decision to present this matter to the next regularly scheduled Leflore County Grand Jury,” Richardson said in a statement.
In July, an unpublished memoir of Donham was shared with and reported on by The Associated Press. In it, Donham said she didn’t know what would happen to Till after she accused him of whistling at and grabbing her in 1955.
Her former husband Roy Bryant and his half brother J.W. Milam kidnapped Till from his family’s home and brought the 14-year-old to her in the middle of the night to identify. In the memoir, Donham said she denied it was him and claimed Till identified himself.
The FBI investigated Till’s case from 2004 to 2007, and in 2007 the case was presented to a different Leflore County grand jury by former District Attorney Joyce Chiles. The jury declined to indict Donham for manslaughter.
In 2017, a state and federal investigation was reopened based on information that Donham may have recanted previous statements given during the 1955 trial of her former husband or during the first FBI investigation.
The recent investigation, which ended in December 2021, did not result in new charges.
An independent arbitrator has sided with the first Black woman union president at a Yazoo City federal prison who faced gender discrimination, retaliation and violation of her union contract.
Cyndee Price, president of Local 1013 of the American Federation of Government Employees, was awarded $300,000 in compensatory damages, over 1,000 hours worth of overtime back wages and additional legal fees, arbitrator Ed W. Bankston ordered July 14.
“It’s been like hell for the past two years,” she said about her experience as union president.
Price became president in June 2020 and is the first Black woman to serve as union president at any federal prison in the country, according to the national branch of AFGE.
In her role at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Price said she called out prison management at Federal Correctional Complex Yazoo City for not providing staff and inmates with masks and following federal guidance to minimize the virus’ spread. She also reported management for misconduct to multiple agencies.
The former Michigan resident grew up around unions and to her, unions have a purpose. She became a union steward in 2013 and wanted to be someone who can speak for others in the workplace.
“What made me want to step up is I hate bullies,” Price told Mississippi Today.
Duties of a union officer can be like a full time job, which is why Price applied for 100% official time. Official time is paid time off for federal employees to perform union duties, such as negotiating contracts, meeting with administration and helping staff with complaints.
“Everything that we’re responsible for doing as a president, you can’t do that while overseeing 700 people and dual responsibilities,” she said.
Official time is part offederal law and the union’s contract.
As president, Price said she faced retaliation and gender-based discrimination by prison management.
In her grievance, Price said former prison Warden Shannon Withers and Assistant Walter Vereen did not grant her official time, saying it was no longer Bureau of Prisons policy.
She said the decision was gender-based because her predecessor, a man, had been granted official time and male union presidents at other federal prisons had been granted official time.
“It continues to be the practice of management under the direction of the Complex Warden, Shannon Withers, to allow management under his disciplinary authority and directions to engage in patterns of unethical behavior, and practices, unilaterally circumventing and repudiating the parties’ (collective bargaining agreement),” her Sept. 25, 2020 grievance states.
FormerBOP Southeast Regional Director J.A. Keller said he denied Price’s grievance because it was improperly filed, according to arbitration records. He also reiterated what the warden had told her: it was no longer policy to grant official time.
Because she wasn’t granted official time, Price said she took the work home with her. She worked on union matters on top of caring for two young children and a sick husband.
Price will receive back pay for 1,080 hours of overtime work. Bankston, the arbitrator, ordered the BOP to grant 100% official time for as long as Price is a union official.
In his decision, Bankston said Withers unilaterally chose to end the use of official time and he didn’t have the authority to do so. The union argued denial of official time is an unfair labor practice and violation of its agreement.
In her grievance, she also alleged the wardens and regional director directed other staff to retaliate against her by writing her up, following her and subjecting her to eight investigations and potential removal from her job as a case manager. Price has worked for the prison for 11 years and she said she had a clear work record until she became union president.
Price said these actions created a hostile work environment that filled her with anxiety.
“These managers here believe they are beyond reproach. And that’s what I was trying to report,” she said.
In the decision, the arbitrator agreed Price faced “adverse and unwarranted personnel actions with changed privileges, conditions, and terms of employment.”
A spokesperson from the Bureau of Prisons declined to comment, saying the agency does not comment on settlement offers, negotiations or terms. Keller, Vereen and Withers were not made available for interviews.
Price said Withers and Vereen no longer work at FCC Yazoo City. Withers is a warden at the Federal Correctional Complex Coleman in Florida and Vereen and Keller retired from the agency, a BOP spokesperson confirmed.
Since new leaders have come to the prison, Price said hasn’t experienced harassment and retaliation.
Despite the arbitration, Price expects the BOP to appeal the decision to potentially get out of granting her official time and paying her for the overtime hours.
She hopes newer prison and agency leaders will hold the people named in her grievance accountable. Price would also like the investigations the previous management launched against her to be removed.
Price said the new management is trying to turn things at the prison around, but she wants them to form a better working relationship with the union.
“I just want to do my elected duties in peace,” she said. “At the end of the day, it’s about what is best for the employees.”
