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Ryan Burns, a Madison County attorney and former assistant district attorney, told a House judiciary committee any person convicted of a felony in Mississippi has the right to petition the court for restoration of gun rights.

But the same option does not exist for Mississippians who lose another constitutional right: the right to vote.

Dennis Hopkins, a 46-year-old Potts Camp resident who lost his right to vote as a teenager when he was convicted of grand larceny, says he does not care whether he gets his right to own a gun restored, but wants to be able to vote.

“If I want to go hunting, I can use a bow and arrow,” Hopkins told the committee Thursday.

“Voting to me is everything,” Hopkins said. “I tell my kids how important the vote is… it shames me to tell them I can’t vote and here is why.”

Grand larceny is one of 23 crimes that disenfranchises Mississippians unless their right to vote is restored through legislative action, through judicial expungement in some instances, or through a gubernatorial pardon. The crimes where people lose their right to vote include the serious crimes of murder and rape, but also several lesser crimes such as felony shoplifting and timber theft.

The House Judiciary B Committee, led by Republican Rep. Nick Bain of Corinth, held a hearing on Thursday about the lifetime felony voting ban and what, if anything, lawmakers could do to reform the law.

Bain on Thursday said he always thought it was unfair a person faces a lifetime ban on voting for a felony bad check writing conviction, but could vote while in prison if convicted of child pornography or of being a major drug dealer.

“I make a commitment to do our best to make it more consistent and fairer. I think it’s past time to do that,” Bain said on Thursday.

The Republican chairman said he hopes to try to pass legislation in the 2022 session, which begins in January, to address the litany of issues surrounding Mississippi’s lifetime voting ban for people convicted of certain felonies. Bain, though, would not offer specifics Thursday on any bill other than to say, “We are committed to do what we can.”

In the 1890s, the Mississippi Supreme Court wrote the disfranchisement of people of specific felonies was placed in the Constitution “to obstruct the exercise of the franchise by the negro race” by targeting “the offenses to which its weaker members were prone.” The crimes selected by lawmakers to go into the provision were thought by the white political leaders at the time as more likely to be committed by African Americans.

That provision is currently being challenged on constitutional grounds in the federal courts with two cases pending before the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. Attorneys have argued that the provision’s intent is the same as the poll tax, the literacy test and other Jim Crow-era provisions that sought to prevent African Americans from voting.

READ MORE: Attorney general argues in federal court that Jim Crow-era voting ban should be upheld

The 1890 Mississippi Constitution says people convicted of certain crimes lose their right to vote unless restored by a two-thirds vote of both chambers of the Mississippi Legislature. In Mississippi, rights also have been restored through gubernatorial pardons and through expungements of criminal records granted through the judiciary.

But lawmakers typically pass few, if any, suffrage bills granting restoring the right to vote, and current Gov. Tate Reeves and his predecessor, Phil Bryant, have not granted pardons.

In the hearing on Thursday, Gayle Carpenter-Sanders, executive director of the Mississippi Volunteer Lawyers Project, told the Judiciary B Committee it is difficult for a person to navigate the cumbersome state expungement process that is available to some — not all — people convicted of felonies.

In addition, Bain said there are counties where circuit clerks do not recognize expungements and gubernatorial pardons as restoring voting rights.

Bain has said he is not engaged right now in a debate about whether people convicted of felonies should lose their right to vote, but has said that the Legislature “should not be in the business” of restoring suffrage. He has advocated that the process could be done through the judiciary much like for gun rights.

But changing the Constitution to restore voting rights and taking it out of the hands of the Legislature could prove difficult. It takes a two-thirds vote of both chambers of the Legislature, and then the approval of a majority of Mississippi voters to amend the Constitution.

There were discussions during the Thursday hearing of whether a whole group of people — such as all people convicted of certain crimes — could have their rights restored via a two-thirds vote instead of restoring the rights one by one with individual bills. And there were questions about whether the rights could be restored just for those already convicted or also for those who would be convicted in the future.

The Legislature normally only restores voting rights to a few each session — typically less than five per year. In the 2021 session, the Senate killed 19 of the suffrage bills passed by the House. Just two people had their voting rights restored via the Legislature in 2021.

Paloma Wu, deputy director of impact legislation at the Mississippi Center for Justice, told the committee that the felony disenfranchisement language was placed in the Constitution in the 1890s, like other provisions, to keep African Americans from voting.

Only a few states impose a lifetime ban on voting for those convicted of felonies.

Roy Harness, a Hinds County resident who was convicted of forgery and lost his voting rights, told the committee how he turned his life around. The military veteran now has a master’s degree and works as a counselor.

“I am not here today to beg,” Harness said. “But as an American, as a veteran, as a man I am saying I would like to be able to vote.”

READ MORE: Not all ex-felons are barred from voting in Mississippi, but no one is telling them that.

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Hundreds of thousands of Mississippians are now eligible to get a COVID-19 booster shot if they want one and can choose which one to get, the Mississippi State Department of Health announced on Thursday.

The department aligned its guidance on COVID-19 vaccine booster shots with the new policies approved last week by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration.

County health departments will begin offering booster shots of the Moderna vaccine on Nov. 1. Pfizer boosters have already been available since late September. Johnson & Johnson boosters will not be available at county health departments, but are available through many of MSDH’s vaccine partners and pharmacies across the state. 

Anyone who meets the eligibility criteria for a booster can request one of a different type than the one used for their primary vaccine regimen. For example, studies have shown that people who receive a mRNA booster after receiving the one-dose J&J vaccine see a much higher increase in their antibody levels than those who received a J&J booster. 

Though people can mix and match their booster if they so choose, the qualifiers and time frame for getting them are different depending on which booster you choose. 

“If you think that you fall into one of those categories, we encourage you to get a booster… We encourage you to discuss it with your physician if you’re not sure that you meet one of those criteria,” said State Epidemiologist Dr. Paul Byers. 

Anyone age 18 years and older who received the J&J vaccine is eligible for a booster two months after their one-dose regimen. 

Those who have received their second dose of a Pfizer or Moderna vaccine at least six months ago, and fall into one of the categories below, are eligible for a booster dose.

• Adults aged 65 years and older
• Long-term care facility residents
• Adults aged 18 and older with certain underlying medical conditions. These include:
  • Chronic kidney disease
  • Chronic lung diseases (COPD, asthma, etc.)
  • Dementia or other neurological conditions
  • Diabetes (type 1 or 2)
  • Down syndrome
  • Heart conditions (such as heart failure, coronary artery disease, or cardiomyopathies)
  • Hypertension
  • Liver disease
  • Overweight, obesity or severe obesity (body mass index (BMI) over 25 kg/m²)
  • Pregnancy
  • Sickle cell disease or thalassemia
  • Smoking (current or former)
  • Stroke
  • Substance abuse disorders
  • Other medical conditions determined by a medical provider
• Adults aged 18 and older that work in high risk settings that increase their risk of exposure. This includes:
  • First responders (healthcare workers, firefighters, police, congregate care staff)
  • Education staff (teachers, support staff, daycare workers)
  • Food and agriculture workers
  • Manufacturing workers
  • Corrections workers
  • U.S. Postal Service workers
  • Public transit workers
  • Grocery store workers

READ MORE: Just 15.6% of all Mississippi nursing homes have staff vaccination rates of 75% or more

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Other than to joke about people thinking he might have smoked marijuana before his speech, Gov. Tate Reeves on Thursday never mentioned the issue that has had patients, lawmakers and voters on pins and needles for months: If or when he will call a special legislative session on medical marijuana as he promised.

He didn’t want to talk about it afterward, either, as he beat a hasty retreat from the Mississippi Coliseum with reporters jogging along trying to ask.

“It’s definitely a realistic possibility … We’re continuing to talk about it, as recently as yesterday,” Reeves told reporters without breaking stride before hopping in his state SUV with his security detail and leaving minutes after his speech ended.

Likewise, neither Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann nor House Speaker Philip Gunn mentioned the issue to the crowd at the Mississippi Economic Council’s annual Hobnob event on Thursday. After their speeches, they both told reporters they’ve heard squat from Reeves about it.

This silence is odd given the time and effort legislative leaders have put into medical marijuana legislation. And it’s odd given that residents have rallied for months for lawmakers to replace a medical marijuana program overwhelmingly passed by voters last November but shot down by the state Supreme Court on a constitutional technicality.

Reeves, who has sole authority to call lawmakers into special session, has said for months he would do so if lawmakers reached agreement on a bill. They did so, and informed Reeves of this on Sept. 24.

But Reeves, who as governor has no control over what lawmakers pass other than the power to veto it afterward, gave lawmakers a last-minute laundry list of things he didn’t like in the bill. Lawmakers said they conceded on many of Reeves’ issues, but called some “unreasonable.”

Since then, legislative leaders said, it’s been mostly crickets from Reeves on whether he would call the promised special session.

READ MORE: No communication, last-minute gotcha: Gov. Tate Reeves is at it again with medical marijuana

“We’re ready to go,” Speaker Gunn said Thursday after his Hobnob speech. “The last communication I had with (Reeves) was about two weeks ago — or, I guess about three weeks ago now. We called him and said, ‘Hey, we’re ready to go on this.’ He said he’d think about it. That’s all I’ve heard.”

Lt. Gov. Hosemann was also asked after his speech whether he’d heard anything from the governor on a special session.

“No,” Hosemann said, then looked at his watch. “No, as of 11:36 today, no.”

Reeves also appears to be dodging the public on the issue. Medical marijuana advocates on the “We Are the 74” Facebook page on Wednesday posted video of parents with a child in a wheelchair trying to question Reeves about a special session, as Reeves did some political meet-and-greeting at the 10th Inning Bar and Grill in Southaven. Reeves appears hesitant to address them as they follow him around pushing the child’s wheelchair. Reluctantly, Reeves accepts a photo from the boy that shows him with a black eye from seizures and his mom tells Reeves, “We need his medicine and we need it soon.”

Reeves in the video says, “Yes, ma’am, I’m working really hard on that” when the woman questions Reeves about calling a special session.

“He said that, ‘We’re working on it,’” the woman says later outside the restaurant. “… He ran away from us in the restaurant as I tried to push Brian around in his wheelchair … We handed him a photo of Brian with a black eye from his seizures, and he tried not to take it but I forced his hand and he just kept saying, thank you, thank you and tried to walk off.

“He wouldn’t give me an answer,” she said. “We told him we know that both sides have agreed to something, and they’re waiting on him to call a session. He would not answer us as to when the session would be … pretty much, he treated Brian like he had the plague, barely even looked at him.”

Besides patients with debilitating illness wanting medical cannabis and voters calling for their will to be reinstated after the Supreme Court decision, legislative leaders have said there is another pragmatic reason to deal with medical marijuana in special session instead of waiting for the January regular session. The Legislature has numerous, monumental issues before it, such as decennial redistricting, appropriating billions in pandemic relief and tax reform. Dealing with medical marijuana before the regular session would help clear the decks for work on the other issues.

One state leader did address medical marijuana at Hobnob on Thursday. Agriculture Commissioner Andy Gipson thanked lawmakers about addressing his concerns and having the Health Department, not his agency, license cultivators. Then he showed large photos on an easel of bags of California medical marijuana, brownies and edibles that “look like Fruity Pebbles” confiscated in Mississippi. He said he’s worried a state medical marijuana program will increase black market dealing and said law enforcement needs to be more involved in the Legislature’s plan.

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Mississippi has enacted a policy that will allow low-income single parents to keep more money in their pockets.

To qualify for most public assistance programs in Mississippi, single parents, usually women, must sue their kids’ non-custodial parent for child support payments.

But if they have received cash assistance through a federal program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the state seizes those child support dollars to pay itself back for providing welfare.

That means some moms never see the child support money. And the fathers are simply paying into state coffers.

But in November, Mississippi will start allowing a child support “pass-through” of $100, according to a report by the Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review released Wednesday. It’s a policy the agency was able to enact itself without legislative approval.

The new pass-through means a separated parent who has been on welfare will receive the first $100 in child support that comes in each month before the state takes the rest. Additionally, the state will not count the $100 as income, so it shouldn’t affect the parent’s eligibility for public assistance.

Mississippi will join 28 other states that allow a pass-through, according to a 2020 analysis by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

This policy change was one of eight expert suggestions Mississippi Today published in its investigative series on the state’s child support system last January.

This is also the state’s second major policy change related to the TANF program after the State Auditor found in 2020 that the state welfare agency had misspent tens of millions of these federal funds.

The alleged corruption occurred under the leadership of agency director John Davis, who took his orders from Gov. Phil Bryant. Davis is awaiting trial in what officials are calling the largest public embezzlement scheme in state history and officials have not accused Bryant of wrongdoing.

Mississippi public and nonprofit officials used the money on purchases such as a new volleyball stadium, a horse ranch for a famous athlete, multi-million dollar celebrity speaking engagements, high-tech virtual reality equipment, luxury vehicles, steakhouse dinners and even a speeding ticket, to name a few.

The state is allowed to choose how much of the federal block grant to spend on cash payments to poor families or on other social programs. And it was under virtually no requirement to report this detailed spending to the federal government.

The state has offered cash assistance to fewer and fewer Mississippians over the last decade. That, coupled with the low monthly benefit amount of $170 for a family of three, meant that the state was spending just a fraction of its funding, as low as 5%, on cash assistance.

In the 2021 session, lawmakers passed a bill to increase the cash benefit by $90, which closely reflects two decades of inflation. It was the first time the state raised the benefit in over 20 years.

For over 50 years, Mississippi had offered the lowest benefit of any state. At the new rate of $260-a-month for a family of three, the state no longer ranks last in this metric. It ranks fourth to last. Only Alabama, Arkansas and Louisiana have lower benefits.

Last year, Mississippi Today spoke with eight safety net policy or government administration experts and compiled a list of policy changes Mississippi could make to improve the child support system for its citizens. In addition to creating a “pass-through,” they recommended the state:

• Remove the requirement that separated moms to legally pursue their child’s father for support in order to qualify for public assistance. Mississippi is one of only seven states that impose this requirement within the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps.
• Strengthen “ability to pay” measurements to ensure Mississippi is not punishing non-custodial parents for being poor.
• Halt child support debts from accruing while a non-custodial parent is incarcerated.
• Make the process of modifying child support orders easier, so the amount a non-custodial parent must pay can reflect their changing work circumstances.
• Improve parent access to information about their case by creating an online portal.
• Instead of assuming a minimum wage when calculating child support for a parent who does not have a job, take into account their realistic employability.
• Make the process of applying easier, such as allowing electronic signatures.

Another piece of piece of legislation the welfare agency requested during the 2021 session would have eased the state’s eligibility determination process for public assistance recipients, reducing the agency manpower needed to process applications. Records previously obtained by Mississippi Today show that nearly 75% of people denied TANF were turned away not because they failed to meet a specific eligibility requirement, but because their applications were either incomplete or withdrawn, an indicator of the cumbersome process.

The legislation passed the Senate but died in committee in the House.

The post New Mississippi policy lets poor parents keep child support payments appeared first on Mississippi Today.

GULFPORT — Jessica Moore has become accustomed to the constant ping of her email inbox as recruiters offer to double her salary the same way she’s grown used to crying spells behind bathroom stall doors.

It’s part of a hospital nurse’s daily rhythm. 

Moore, a nurse and manager at Singing River’s hospital in Gulfport, has chosen to stay put in her role. Mississippi is her home, she says. And so is Singing River. 

But every day, the promise of more flexibility and more money is just an email or phone call away. Nursing staffing agencies, often called travel nurse companies, are constantly recruiting Mississippi nurses away from their bedside hospital jobs with offers of dramatic wage increases and $10,000 bonuses.

An increasing number of Mississippi’s nurses are taking these offers for the temporary gigs, as Mississippi hospitals struggle to fund meaningful pay raises for full-time staff. Moore has seen dozens of her coworkers and friends make the switch since the pandemic began. 

“I’ve been through Katrina, I’ve been through storms, recessions, and you’ll have one or two nurses who leave for traveling jobs,” Moore said. “But with this pandemic, they’re leaving in droves.” 

Hospital leaders aren’t just calling the current predicament a nurses shortage; they’re calling it an exodus. 

It’s an untenable cycle that’s showing no signs of slowing. Singing River has lost a third of its nurses — about 290 — since March 2020.

In a few days, 900 nurses the state funded to help during the worst of the delta wave of the COVID-19 pandemic are leaving dozens of hospitals across the state. Their contracts end Oct. 31.

Without the extra nurses on hand, Moore will once again stretch her staff to its limits to fill intensive care unit shifts. The nurse-to-patient ratio could creep back up 1:8 — double what it should be. 

Worse, Moore said, the added stress could continue to push more hospital nurses out the door.

Of Mississippi’s 114 hospital and speciality facilities, just 30 run as for-profit businesses, according to the Mississippi Hospital Association. That means the bulk of Mississippi’s hospitals are community owned or nonprofits. 

By design, those hospitals don’t have large business margins. It leaves them without the ability to dole out the massive across-the-board raises to nurses, their largest employee group, needed to stay competitive in the market. 

As a result, they rely on a patchwork of positions filled by travel companies — as they can afford them — to keep hospital beds open. 

A Clarksdale hospital using staffing agency Adex, for example, is seeking an ICU nurse to start in as little as two weeks. The contract covers 13 weeks, 48 hours per week. The weekly salary, the post says, is about $4,800.

Meanwhile, Mississippi’s average hospital nurse is taking home $29 an hour, according to the state employment security office. That’s just under $1,400 for a 48-hour work week.

The Adex posting is not special. Dozens are just like it. Usually, the staffing companies also offer cash incentives for nurses who recruit others to join them.

Vivian, an online job board for health care work, has seen a massive uptick in the demand for nurses in Mississippi over the last couple months, a spokesman said. By mid-October, Vivian’s website had more than 350 postings seeking nurses to fill in at hospitals across the state. 

Moore can’t blame nurses for leaving to better their finances. It has crossed her mind, too. 

It’s a thought that steals a moment during a seven-day work week or sneaks in the minutes before catching a few hours of sleep ahead of back-to-back 12-hour shifts. When time with her two boys is little and the time she spends with her husband — also a nurse — nears nonexistent, it lingers.

But she can’t do it. She said the current cycle is ruining the hospital system, making it so nurses aren’t working together like the family she’s used to. 

“It’s extremely difficult for a loyal nurse who stayed here to protect and save their community, that has roots here, and can’t travel, to work beside a contracted nurse that makes a lot more money than them,” said Singing River’s CEO Lee Bond. 

Gov. Tate Reeves’ executive order spread 920 temporary nurses across 61 Mississippi hospitals in September. It was never intended to solve the state’s staffing shortages, but it was a bandaid on a knife wound. For a moment, it helped slow the bleeding. 

It gave hospitals the bandwidth to better handle the influx of patients being hospitalized with COVID-19 and crowding the ICU while the delta variant contributed to a record number of pandemic-related deaths across the state. 

It also brought the nursing crisis within Mississippi’s hospital workforce to center stage.

The very staffing agencies winning over Mississippi nurses with higher pay are also the staffing agencies that filled Mississippi’s Emergency Management Agency contracts to bring in the hundreds of temporary, but desperately needed, nurses. 

Nursing staffing agencies, which work similarly to temp agencies in the business world, have traditionally paid more than hospital jobs. But the pandemic and nursing shortage nationwide has caused the pay differentiation to skyrocket.

Early in the pandemic, travel nurses largely went to help in New York City’s hospitals. Now, they’re everywhere. 

Before the state-funded travel nurses came into Singing River, Moore was often working seven days a week, covering the tasks of three jobs.

When the order to fund workers helping with COVID-19 patients ends this week, Singing River will instantly lose 70 high-paid temporary nurses it cannot afford to rehire. It could mean closing 95 beds across three hospitals.

Before the pandemic began, nurses were already abandoning hospitals. They opted for less stressful jobs at gastrointestinal clinics or surgery centers. They moved out of state to bigger cities with higher wages. The state was already projecting it would need 2,100 more nurses each year before the virus spread.

COVID-19 exacerbated the need. 

“Our hospitals have a lot of uncompensated care,” said Kim Hoover, a registered nurse and leader at the Mississippi Hospital Association. “They’re not always in the best financial position to begin with. It’s difficult to weather a storm if you haven’t been able to bolster what you need to bolster.” 

Hoover said only about 41% of the state’s registered nurses are reporting working for hospitals at all. About 2,000 fewer nurses are registered in the state at all compared to a year ago, according to nursing board data. 

“It’s difficult to recruit and retain nurses in economically depressed areas, and Mississippi has quite a bit of that,” said Hoover, who heads the association’s education foundation. “But in this case, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the Delta or on the Coast, the nurses are just not here.”

Out of options, Mississippi health care leaders are asking the Legislature to create a new program that uses federal coronavirus aid to cover bonus checks to incentivise nurses to stay at the state’s struggling hospitals.

“Mississippi being less healthy, less wealthy, and not having the federal Medicaid dollars leaves it disproportionately affected,” said Bond, the hospital CEO.

The long-term consequences could be deadly. 

“The one thing that could keep you from having your life saved is not having an RN,” Bond said. 

Bond has put himself at the center of the nursing crisis. He and his team at Singing Rivers are leading the push for the state to use 25% of its $1.8 billion in American Rescue Plan funds to pay for health care workers incentive checks. 

Bond’s plan calls for $20,000 — or about $833 each month — to go directly to each nurse or other in-demand bedside worker who signs a contract pledging to stay at a Mississippi hospital for at least two years. 

Unless a special session is called, lawmakers won’t be able to take up the issue until the new year. 

“Everybody is trying to compete when they don’t really have the resources they need to be truly competitive,” said Sondra Collins, senior economist with the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning. 

Collins said one-time bonuses wouldn’t be nearly as effective as long-term raises. But having a $20,000 bonus spread across a two-year period could act similarly to a wage increase. 

The reliance on staffing agencies is too pricey to serve as an indefinite solution. 

Before the pandemic, Bond said Singing River didn’t use any contracted nurses. In order to keep beds open, the hospital system now has about 8% of its 1,200 nurses through staffing agencies. 

At the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, associate vice chancellor for clinical affairs Dr. Alan Jones said the hospital has done some base wage raises for its workers but it still can’t compete with what travel companies are offering.

On a recent Wednesday morning, Jones said that about 26 patients were stuck in the emergency room, even though they were admitted to the hospital. 

There weren’t enough staffed beds opened for the patients to be transferred to the appropriate care units. 

Moore’s days are marathons that begin the moment she wakes up at 5:30 a.m.

She spends workdays explaining care to patients in 10 minutes when she’d rather have twice that time — or at least enough time to ensure they understand what she’s saying.

She regularly reminds young nurses not to blame themselves for the staggering number of patient deaths they’ve encountered through the pandemic between teaching them to place difficult intravenous lines, or IVs.  

She handles phone calls, apologizing to loved ones frustrated that their elderly parents were left on bedpans for 15 minutes, even though there is nothing she can do to remedy their concerns. 

“What they don’t realize,” she said, “is while their mother was on the bedpan, we were in the room across the hall because a patient could not breathe. We were attempting to save their life. Unfortunately, there’s three of us on the floor, and it took all three hands to do that.” 

She is relieved that the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations are dwindling. But last winter, a wave of infections of the virus pushed the hospital to its limits. She worries the same thing could happen this season and lead to even more burnout. 

And if it does, she will manage the mounting stress the way she has over the last two years. 

“You go to the bathroom,” she said. “You cry. You get over it.”

Then you go back to work. 

Editor’s note: This story has been updated because since publishing, Singing River says it will be losing about 20 more state-funded nurses than it had previously anticipated.

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Make no mistake, Southern Miss has made the correct — and probably long overdue — decision to exit Conference USA and enter the Sun Belt Conference. The move was made official at a press conference in Hattiesburg on Tuesday.

Any businessman would understand the logic: cut expenses, increase revenue and deal with partners — in this case, universities — that are more like-minded.

Conference USA made sense for Southern Miss back when the Golden Eagles were competing and winning against conference mates such as Memphis, Tulane, Houston, Louisville and others. It makes no sense now when the competition is as far flung as El Paso, Miami and Coral Gables, Fla.

Southern Miss already has a history with Sun Belt teams such as South Alabama, Troy, Arkansas State, Louisiana-Lafayette and Louisiana-Monroe. Those rivalries are something to nurture and built upon.

Don’t take it from me. Listen to Wright Waters, who has a history with both Southern Miss and with the Sun Belt. Early in his career, in the late 1970s, Waters worked in athletics at USM when Bobby Collins and M.K. Turk were building strong programs that competed at a high level as an independent. Later on, from 1999 until 2012, Waters was the commissioner of the Sun Belt. He knows both entities well enough to know they are fit.

Southern Miss, Waters says, brings a rich history of winning and a historically strong fan base to the Sun Belt. In return, the Sun Belt provides a much more comfortable and sensible home for Southern Miss.

“I’ll put it to you this way,” Waters said, “Southern Miss can use all that money they’ve been spending on jet fuel and spend it on things that make you better. I’m talking about things such as facilities, coaches’ salaries and recruiting budgets. Good coaches and good players are what make you better. The Sun Belt, in my opinion, gives them a better chance to have both.”

Conference USA has become a jet league. The Sun Belt will be more of a bus league. Jeremy McClain, the Southern Miss athletic director, believes the annual travel expenses for all athletic programs will be reduced between $500,000 and a million dollars.

That might sound like chump change to Southeastern Conference fans, but it is a huge deal to athletic programs that don’t collect millions upon millions of dollars from their league’s TV and bowl revenue.

To be sure, TV revenue won’t be that much higher in the Sun Belt than it was in CUSA, but TV exposure will be much more broad. The Sun Belt is an ESPN league with national exposure. CUSA’s main TV partners are CBSSports Network — not to be confused with CBS — and Stadium.

No matter what conference Southern Miss plays in, it must do better at the gate. That is, sell more tickets. Again, the Sun Belt gives them a better opportunity to do that. 

“Division games will be drive-able,” Waters said. “Mobile, Lafayette, Monroe and Troy are easy drives from Hattiesburg. Jonesboro (Ark.) is doable. Build those rivalries and fans will travel.”

Again, a game against, say, Louisiana-Lafayette or South Alabama is far more interesting for Southern Miss fans than, say, a game against UTEP or FIU.

McClain is well aware of all that. He came back to Southern Miss from Troy where he served as athletic director for nearly four years. He knows what life is like in both leagues. Clearly, he prefers the Sun Belt where the leadership, under commissioner Keith Gill, a rising star in college athletics, appears more sharply focused.

For years now, Conference USA, which Southern Miss joined in 1995, has seemed almost like a bicycle without handle bars: unsteady at best, direction-less at worst. When Memphis, Houston, Tulane and others left, CUSA went after other large-market schools in belief they would give the league more TV appeal.

The truth, however: North Texas does not really give you the Dallas-Fort Worth TV market, any more than Florida Atlantic and Florida International give you the south Florida market. In Dallas, fans still tune in to watch Texas and Texas A&M. In Miami, they still turn the dial to watch the Gators, Seminoles and Hurricanes.

TV market-size is how Southern Miss got left behind in CUSA in the first place. Despite beating Memphis, Tulane and Houston consistently on the field, the Golden Eagles got passed by during conference re-alignment because of the relatively small amount of TV viewers in south Mississippi.

Competition will be stiff. Just last season, on one September Saturday, three Sun Belt teams played three Big 12 teams (two of those ranked) on the road. All three Sun Belt teams — Arkansas State, Louisiana-Lafayette and Coastal Carolina — collected huge checks for playing on the road. All three Sun Belt teams won. Both Louisiana-Lafayette and Coastal finished in the top 15 of the Associated Press’s final 2020 Top 25 poll.

It’s not just football either. The Sun Belt is intensely competitive in the spring sports of baseball and softball. Coastal Carolina baseball, which won the 2016 College World Series, finished last in its own division last season. South Alabama, Louisiana-Lafayette and Georgia Southern are all traditionally strong programs. Southern Miss will add much to the league. Four Sun Belt softball teams earned NCAA Tournament berths last season. Only the SEC and Pac 12 had more. 

Basketball? My take is that the Sun Belt and Conference USA are quite similar as far as competition. Says McClain, “Sun Belt basketball is under-rated. I’ve seen it up close. It’s a grind.”

For Southern Miss, one potential stumbling block in switching leagues has been the exit fee, long reported to be $5 million.

On Tuesday, McClain said his school and others who leave CUSA are contracted over two years to pay the equivalent of what a share of CUSA distribution would be for those two years.

“We believe that it will be in the neighborhood of $3 million,” McClain said. “We have a plan for that.”

In the long term, the move should be worth far more than $3 million to Southern Miss. Said McClain, “This move just makes sense geographically, for our fan base and, most of all for our student-athletes.”

Gill nodded as McClain spoke, and later added, “The Sun Belt has gotten a lot better in recent years. Today, we got better.”

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A federal judge has ruled in favor of the University of Mississippi Medical Center over litigation against three former employees who stole patient medical records for their own use and then lied about possessing them for years. 

U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves on Oct. 8 issued a default judgment in the federal trade secrets lawsuit, saying the defendants’ “clear, persistent pattern of perjury, evidence destruction, and concealment” warranted the default judgment. 

The case centers around Dr. Spencer Sullivan, who UMMC hired in July 2014 to head its Hemophilia Treatment Center. As part of his employment, Sullivan agreed to refrain from taking or using patient information for his own benefit, including soliciting patients for his own independent practice. However, in January 2016, Sullivan began arranging to start his own for-profit hemophilia clinic and pharmacy.

Over the course of the next few months, Sullivan coordinated with other UMMC staff —namely co-defendants Linnea McMillan and Kathryn Sue Stevens — to prepare for the new clinic’s opening. This included compiling UMMC patient records into a spreadsheet they called “the List.” This spreadsheet included patients’ birthdate, diagnosis, prescriptions, dose and frequency, insurance, pharmacy and home and mobile telephone numbers. 

Sullivan resigned from his position at UMMC in June 2016, and then used the records stolen from UMMC to solicit these patents to continue their treatment at Sullivan’s new clinic in Madison called Mississippi Center for Advanced Medicine. Sullivan recruited at least 20 UMMC employees to work for him at his new clinic, and the majority of UMMC’s hemophilia patients followed their physicians to his clinic. 

During the course of both state and federal lawsuits brought on by UMMC, Sullivan, McMillan and Stevens lied multiple times under oath, denying they had ever taken the patient records from UMMC. The existence of “the List” came out following a 2018 Clarion-Ledger article. After reading the article, defendant Linnea McMillan’s ex-husband, Aubrey McMillan, provided UMMC’s legal council with a copy of “the List” he found in his ex-wife’s car.

All three defendants continued to deny taking or possessing “the List” until March 2020, when Harris admitted to lying in her deposition and produced 1,469 pages of text messages sent by herself and fellow defendants that revealed they had conspired to shred the stolen documents, violating the clinic’s policy against destroying patient information. 

Sullivan also committed perjury multiple times, and as recently as April 2021, by denying he possessed a hard drive containing files and emails from UMMC. He only admitted possessing the files on a hard drive and a thumb drive after a Magistrate Judge forced him to choose between producing the hard drives or his computer.

“Defendants’ lies and evasions, particularly Dr. Sullivan’s recent conduct in relation to the long-sought hard drives, suggest that nothing less than the full exercise of this court’s inherent power will command the defendants’ respect for the judicial process, or secure their commitment to telling this court the truth,” Reeves wrote. 

With a default judgment issued, a trial on damages will now take place on the date previously set for jury trial on Feb. 16, 2022.

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