Mississippi Today

‘So medieval’: Man with mental illness jailed for 20 days without charges

Published

7 months ago

April 12, 2024

In January, the head of Mississippi’s Department of Mental Health told lawmakers that people who aren’t charged with a crime are spending less time in jail than they used to: The average wait time for a state hospital bed was down to three days after a court hearing.

At that moment, a young man was on his 16th day locked in the DeSoto County Jail with no criminal charges. He was waiting for mental health treatment.

His mother, Sarah, was still trying to understand why he was there at all.

David, 29, was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder about a decade ago. Since then, he has cycled through hospital stays and group homes. Sarah can rattle off the low points. There was the time her son was walking in the street and got hit by a car and broke his neck. And the time he called her from a Megabus in Texas, nearly at the border with Mexico.

But this was something new: a three-week detention that began after he called 911 seeking treatment and eventually wound up jailed at the request of his providers.

Her son’s treatment in DeSoto County – where a county website still uses the phrase “lunacy” hearings to refer to the proceedings where judges order people like David to receive psychiatric treatment – reminded Sarah of a different era.

“When they, you know, lock them in the dungeon or whatever and put chains on them and just let them live the rest of their lives there,” she said. “This is so medieval, what they’re doing.”

In the end, David was jailed for a total of three weeks before being transported to North Mississippi State Hospital at the end of January. Mississippi Today is not using his or his family’s real names to protect his privacy.

It is far from unusual in Mississippi and particularly in DeSoto County for people to be jailed solely because they are awaiting treatment through the state’s involuntary commitment process. No other state jails so many people for such lengths of time, solely on the basis of mental illness. Mississippi Today and ProPublica previously reported that hundreds of people are jailed without criminal charges every year while they await evaluations and treatment through the involuntary commitment process.

From 2019 through 2022, DeSoto County jailed people without criminal charges just under 500 times, more than any other county in the news organizations’ analysis.

As lawmakers debate changing Mississippi’s commitment laws to reduce jail detentions, David’s path through the state’s mental health system shows how it can funnel a sick person into jail, and how long it can take for them to get out once locked up.

A publicly funded facility established to treat people in crisis sent David to jail. Though the Department of Mental Health says commitment hearings should take place within 10 days, county officials instead kept him locked up for 14 days before he saw a judge, as winter weather shut down the county court system. The state hospital where the judge ordered him to receive treatment would not admit him for six more days – all of which he spent in jail.

The county is working on opening a crisis center to treat people suffering mental health crises – and keep them out of jail during the commitment process – and supervisors recently voted to hire an architect to draw up renovation plans for the county building that will house the center. The county is currently the largest in the state without one.

County administrator Vanessa Lynchard noted that reforming the commitment process is a priority for the Legislature this year, and that could hopefully bring some relief.

“Nobody likes mental commitments in the jail,” she said.

But officials involved in the process say jail is sometimes the only place they have to detain people during the commitment process, and that jailing people is safer than sending them home. And so every year, the county jails well over 100 people solely because they may be mentally ill – including people like David.

‘He really wants to live a normal life’

In early January, David walked away from his mother’s home in a tidy subdivision in DeSoto County. He knocked on a neighbor’s door and used the phone to call 911 for an ambulance to take him to the hospital.

When Sarah found out he was at Baptist Memorial Hospital-DeSoto, she decided to let him stay there and get treatment. That he had been able to get himself there was a sign of progress. When his mental illness became severe about 10 years ago, “he used to just let himself spin out of control,” Sarah said.

When David was a teenager, he developed phobias that his mother found strange. He stopped wanting to go to school, claiming his breath smelled bad. After he ran away from home, he was hospitalized at Lakeside, a psychiatric hospital in Memphis.

He graduated from high school and got a job working at a warehouse, riding his bicycle more than an hour each way to arrive by 5 or 6 o’clock in the morning.

Then, when he was about 19, “stuff went totally to the left with him,” his mother said. He would disappear from home for days at a time. If he wound up at a hospital, staff wouldn’t tell her he was there, citing patient privacy protections. At home, he would refuse to take medications.

A few years ago, Sarah spent $2,500 to go through the legal process to gain conservatorship over her son so that she would always be included in conversations about his treatment.

“When the dust settles and the smoke clears, he always comes back to me,” she said. “If you’ve got him and put him on the wrong medication and overmedicated him, then I’ve got to help him get back on track.”

David belongs to a tight-knit family: He has siblings, a doting grandfather, aunts and uncles. Sarah’s phone is full of pictures of her son. There’s a shot of him getting his face painted at a family party and another of him wearing a Mickey Mouse t-shirt at Disneyland. A video shows him chasing his sister’s kids around his mother’s backyard.

His family tries to help him manage his symptoms. When he lived with his older sister Beth recently, he would go into the backyard to pace and talk to himself.

“I’d go out there like every 15 minutes, like, ‘Hey, you’re too loud, you need to calm down,’ but I don’t interrupt,” she said. “That’s his way of calming himself down.”

David has told his sister that he doesn’t like depending on her and their mom, that he feels bad he doesn’t drive or hold a job – something that has been a goal for years.

“He’ll tell you that he really wants to live a normal life,” Beth said.

From the crisis unit to a jail cell

One day in January, after a few days at Baptist Memorial Hospital-DeSoto, David was transported to a crisis stabilization unit in Corinth, where he had agreed to get treatment. Operated by the community mental health center Region IV, which serves residents of DeSoto and four other counties, the facility is one of more than a dozen around the state designed to serve people closer to their homes, ideally keeping them out of the state hospitals – and out of jail.

For David, the crisis unit did the opposite.

Sarah sent over her conservatorship paperwork so she could be updated about his treatment. She expected to hear from her son not long after he arrived there, because he always calls her once he feels more like himself. When that didn’t happen, she called the crisis unit.

“He’s in the DeSoto County Jail,” staff told her.

Documents filed with the DeSoto County Chancery Court and reviewed by Mississippi Today show that after refusing medications twice, David had taken them and said he thought it was helping. There were no indications of violence or physical aggression. But not long after he arrived, staff requested a writ – a document allowing the sheriff’s department to take custody of a patient – because of his “agitation and inappropriate sexual conduct.”

Staff reported that he was experiencing “Psychosis including delusions, irritability. He is continually masterbating (sic).” They wrote that he had masturbated in front of other patients and a staff member.

It’s not clear from the documents exactly how long David was at the crisis unit before staff requested the writ, and Sarah said she was not contacted when he arrived there. It may have been as little as a day or two: The court order committing him says he arrived at Corinth “on or about 01/08/24.”

On Jan. 8, Catherine Davis, crisis coordinator at Region IV, which runs the crisis center, wrote: “At Corinth Crisis they are requesting he go to DeSoto County Jail.”

The next afternoon, deputies arrived to take David into custody and drive him 90 minutes back to DeSoto County. He was booked into the county jail with his charge listed as “Writ to take custody.”

Psychiatrists told Mississippi Today that people with David’s condition may exhibit sexually inappropriate behavior like public masturbation, stepping from hypersexuality and impulsivity that can be symptoms of mania.

“All they want to focus on is what he was doing wrong there,” Sarah said. “I understand that. But that’s because he needs psychiatric treatment. He’s mentally unstable. You’re a crisis center. Isn’t that what you do? But instead you ship him off to jail.”

Jason Ramey, executive director of Region IV, the community mental health center that runs the crisis unit, said he can’t discuss a specific client, citing HIPAA.

“At no point in time is it our goal to have somebody sitting in jail, but we also have to think about the wellbeing of the whole CSU, whether it’s the other clients there and things like that,” he said.

Ramey said that in 2023, the crisis unit staff initiated commitment proceedings on only three patients. The facility treated nearly 300 people in the most recent fiscal year.

“We want them to continue to receive treatment,” he said of patients awaiting transfer to a different facility. “If we’re not able to provide that, we want to get them to the state hospital as quickly as possible. It’s not like we file a writ just to have them go sit in jail.”

But in David’s case, that’s exactly what happened.

Dr. Paul Appelbaum, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia and former president of the American Psychiatric Association, reviewed the commitment paperwork and initial evaluation filed with the chancery court in David’s case. He said sending David to jail was wrong.

“The sexually inappropriate behavior is a function of his current acute psychosis, and so the proper response to it is to treat the psychosis, which doesn’t happen overnight,” he said.

Dr. Marvin Swartz, a professor of psychiatry at Duke University, said it may have been appropriate to transfer David to another facility, but that elsewhere in the United States, such a transfer would not involve waiting in jail.

Dr. Lauren Stossel, a forensic psychiatrist and former chief of mental health for New York City jails, said that mental health providers have a responsibility to transfer patients to a higher level of care if they can’t provide safe and effective treatment.

Mississippi’s practice of routinely jailing people without criminal charges while they await psychiatric treatment demands systemic change, she said. But in the meantime, crisis center staff shouldn’t avoid commitment at all costs.

“Clinicians need to consider all their patients and staff and make a decision about what they can manage in their facility,” she said. “The fact that jail is a possible alternative is appalling and needs to be factored in, but they also have to be careful about getting in over their heads trying to manage patients they have no way of treating safely or effectively.”

When reviewing the information crisis center staff provided to the chancery court to justify their decision to initiate commitment proceedings, however, Stossel didn’t see a clear explanation of what staff believed the patient needed that they weren’t equipped to provide.

“It’s not clear to me based on this information: what symptoms or behaviors is this patient exhibiting that you can’t manage? What interventions have you already tried? How long did you allow him to respond to treatment before determining a higher level of care was necessary? It’s crucial to require a clear justification to protect the patient from an unnecessarily restrictive outcome.”

Adam Moore, spokesman for the Department of Mental Health, which funds the crisis units, did not answer specific questions about what happened to David. He said in an email statement that a crisis unit may initiate commitment proceedings when their clinical staff feels that someone served there meets commitment criteria or is in need of a higher level of care.

‘I didn’t know I was gonna get sent to jail’

While her son was in jail, Sarah wondered what medications he was taking, concerned that any disruption could worsen his symptoms. She and her daughter, Beth, worried about what he might experience as a young Black man locked up – with no criminal charges – in a Mississippi county jail. They prayed for God to keep him safe.

Sarah called the jail every day to find out how David was doing. During one of those calls, on Jan. 22, a staffer at the jail told her David would have a hearing in court the next day.

It had been 14 days since he was jailed, and 15 since the affidavit requesting his commitment was filed. The Department of Mental Health publishes guidelines saying that the entire process should wrap up within 10 days, but it doesn’t track whether that actually happens.

Special master Adam Emerson, the attorney appointed by a chancellor to preside over commitment hearings, said the county normally holds commitment hearings every Thursday, and sometimes on Tuesdays as well to meet the statutory deadline. Most hearings take place within a week of the writ being served, he said.

He would not comment on David’s case because it is his policy not to discuss specific commitment proceedings, but said that the week of Jan. 15, the entire county court system was shut down due to winter weather, postponing all hearings to the following week.

Emerson said he serves as special master as a way to serve the community where he has lived for nearly his entire life. During a decade as a public defender in the county, he realized many of his clients had mental health or addiction issues that led to criminal charges.

“I continue to believe that early intervention in situations where mental health issues are involved will lead to better outcomes to the individuals and society at large,” he wrote in an email to Mississippi Today.

To make it to the hearing, Sarah had to take the day off of work. At the courthouse in Hernando, she sat in the hallway with three other families of people going through the commitment process.

Eventually, she was called into the courtroom and took a seat in the front row. Deputies escorted her son into the room. He was shackled, with his hands chained to his waist and another chain running down to his feet.

Sarah noticed that almost everyone else in the courtroom was white. She suspected that racism had played a role in her son’s treatment. He is 6-foot-7, and though she knows him as “a gentle giant” who acts like one of her grandchildren, she worries other people are scared of him.

“It’s three strikes against you right there,” she said. “You’re African-American– strike one. African-American male– strike two. Then you’re an African-American male with a mental health disease. You just struck out.”

Emerson said he could not speak to David’s treatment outside of his courtroom, but that race had not played a role in his decision.

“I can only tell you that everyone who comes before my court is treated equally and with dignity and respect,” he said. “A person’s race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual preference, etc. is never a factor in our decisions.”

Mississippi Today reviewed the recording of the hearing after filing a motion to unseal it, with a letter of support from Sarah.

At the beginning of the 10-minute hearing, Catherine Davis, the Region IV crisis coordinator who had filed the affidavit against David, explained why she believed commitment was necessary.

Davis said that David had been masturbating at the crisis center, and that he was “hostile,” without saying what that meant exactly.

“When he was redirected he was becoming hostile,” Davis said. “He was pacing, responding to internal stimuli. So they felt at that point he wasn’t safe with the staff and the other clients. So they asked us to do a court commitment.”

When it was his turn to speak, David offered a different account of how he reacted to instructions from staff.

“After they told me the first time, I stopped,” he said, forming his sentences slowly and softly. “I really didn’t know it was a problem. I didn’t know I was gonna get sent to jail. I was just trying to get to the hospital.”

He told the judge he didn’t need more treatment.

Emerson called on Sarah to speak as well. She described the frustration and stress of sending her conservatorship paperwork to the crisis center only to learn days later her son had been taken to jail with no one informing her.

“I have been left out of this the entire time, and I don’t understand why,” she said.

On the recommendation of Davis and two physicians, Emerson ordered David into treatment at a state hospital.

“I’m doing that for your own good, to try to get you stabilized and get you back out,” he said to David.

To Sarah, he added: “Certainly based on where he’s sent, if I were you I’d try to get those records down to them so maybe they can keep you in the loop, OK?”

Before she could talk to or hug her son, Sarah was ushered out of the courtroom. David went back to jail for six more days.

‘How does being incarcerated support one’s mental health?’

On Jan. 29, 20 days after he was first jailed, David was transported to North Mississippi State Hospital.

Moore, the Department of Mental Health spokesman, said that the wait time information the agency had shared with lawmakers was an average and that it does not include any time a person is jailed before their hearing.

“Any individual’s wait time may be more or less than the average wait time for all admissions from a given period of time,” he wrote.

By early April, David was still at the state hospital in Tupelo. When Sarah visited him, she was disturbed that he had little energy, which she attributes to his long list of medications prescribed by the hospital staff. He told her he’s ready to come home, and he talked about trying to get a job.

His mother filed a complaint with the Mississippi Department of Health and with the Attorney General’s Public Integrity Division, which is responsible for prosecuting cases involving the exploitation of vulnerable adults.

She also emailed Wendy Bailey, head of the Department of Mental Health.

“As I deal with DeSoto County, which happens to be one of the fastest growing counties in the state, I am appalled at their antiquated systems of mental health support,” she wrote.
“How does being incarcerated support one’s mental health? What immediate changes can be made to improve upon this system?”

Bailey connected Sarah with Falisha Stewart, director of the Office of Consumer Supports. Stewart said there had been a communication “breakdown” when the Corinth crisis stabilization unit failed to contact Sarah about her son’s transfer to jail. She said the agency had enacted a plan to prevent communication lapses from happening in the future.

“It is unfortunate individuals who deal with mental health issues have to wait in jails for an available bed while being committed,” Stewart wrote. “These laws can only change through the process of speaking with your state representatives.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Up Next

On this day in 1864

Don't Miss

Q&A: Why Arkansas could be a model for Mississippi Medicaid expansion

Mississippi Today

Crystal Springs commercial painter says police damaged his eyesight

Published

3 hours ago

November 22, 2024

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – Mina Corpuz – 2024-11-22 12:21:00

CRYSTAL SPRINGS – Roger Horton has worked decades as a commercial painter, a skill he’s kept up with even with the challenge of having what his wife has called “one good eye.”

It hasn’t stopped him from being able to complete detailed paint jobs and create straight lines without the help of tape. But last year following a head injury, he and others said people have been pointing out a change in his work. Horton says the sight in his right eye is clouded, like he is looking underwater.

Affected vision, short term memory and periods of irritability – potential symptoms of concussion – followed after he was arrested last September. During an encounter with several police officers, Horton alleges more than one slammed his head into a cruiser and placed handcuffs on so tight that he started to bleed.

“(The officer) was kind of rough with me and all, and he takes my head and I said, ‘What’d I do?’” he recalled recently.

Horton ended up being convicted of two misdemeanor charges and has paid off the fines, but a year later he still has questions about the arrest and treatment by the police.

To date, he has not seen a doctor to evaluate his eye and check for vision or cognitive issues. Horton and his wife Rhonda don’t have a car, and transportation to doctor’s appointments in the Jackson area remains a challenge.

The Hortons have lived in Crystal Springs all their lives, and they have lived in the home the past five years that belonged to Rhonda’s mother.

More than a quarter of all people in Crystal Springs live below the poverty line, and that includes the couple. Rhonda Horton said it’s hard to make a living because there aren’t a lot of jobs, but they support themselves as painters.

That’s how they met Yvonne Florczak-Seeman, who lived in Illinois and purchased her first historical property in Crystal Springs in 2019. She splits her time between the two states.

“We painted that porch bar and the rest is history,” Rhonda Horton said, adding that they went on to complete detailed work on mantles, kitchen cabinets and a cigar room at Florczak-Seeman’s North Jackson Street residence.

Over the years, the couple built a relationship with Florczak-Seeman, who is seeking to open a women’s empowerment center called the Butterfly Garden, in the building next to city hall.

Yvonne Florczak-Seeman poses for a portrait at her business, The Butterfly Garden, in Crystal Springs, Miss., Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today

Florczak-Seeman has supported the couple numerous times, including helping them pay a late water bill and offering them work. She called them talented painters and hired them again to paint the interior of the future center, located at East Railroad Avenue.

In pieces, Rhonda Horton told Florczak-Seeman about her husband’s arrest and later the injuries she said he sustained from it. Florczak-Seeman had questions about the encounter and other potential injustices at play, so she offered to help.

“I just want them to pay for what they’ve done not just to him, but everybody,” Rhonda Horton said. “That’s what I want, justice.”

The Arrest

On Sept. 24, 2023, Horton was walking home from a friend’s house when officers approached him. One grabbed his arms to handcuff him, and he remembers them cutting his wrist and causing it to bleed.

Then, he said, a second officer slammed his head into the top of the police car, followed by another officer who slammed his head again. During the encounter, a bag of marijuana that Horton said he found fell out of his pocket onto the ground.

An officer put Horton in the back of the cruiser and took him to the station where Horton asked to speak to the police chief and call his wife. He said the police took his phone and clothes.

Afterward, he was taken to the Copiah County Detention Center in Gallman.

Police Chief Tony Hemphill disputed Horton’s allegation of mistreatment, saying he did not sustain any injuries that required hospitalization. He said Horton’s wrist was cut while he resisted arrest.

“He was not brutalized and targeted,” Hemphill said. “If he had just complied, he wouldn’t have had to come up there (to jail) that night.”

Two police reports from the night of the September 2023 arrest detail how officers had responded to a possible assault and were given the description of a white man. While in the area, they encountered Horton — the only person who fit that description.

Hemphill said a mother called police after her daughter told her she was assaulted. He said officers approached Horton on the street and tried to talk with him to rule him out as a suspect.

That’s when Horton began “fighting, pulling away, and kicking against (the officer’s) patrol vehicle, trying to run,” according to a police report from the night and Hemphill. Horton denies doing any of that.

The next day police took Horton from the county jail to the Crystal Springs police station. There, police informed him a teenage girl reported being assaulted. After learning about the assault allegation, Horton remembered feeling shocked and saying it couldn’t be true because he was not on the street where the alleged incident took place.

Hemphill confirmed the police investigated the assault allegation and found it not credible, meaning Horton wouldn’t face any related charges. He said he communicated this to Horton and his wife early on and since then, which the couple disputes.

As Horton was being arrested and detained, his wife grew worried because she had just spoken with him on the phone and expected him to arrive home shortly. Rhonda Horton and her adult son started calling Roger’s phone, each not getting an answer.

Then during one of the calls by her son, someone who did not identify himself answered Roger’s phone and said, ‘Your daddy’s dead’ and then hung up, Rhonda Horton said.

She was starting to assume the worst had happened. Rhonda Horton wouldn’t have confirmation her husband was alive until he called from the county jail in the early morning.

The next morning as she talked with the police chief, Rhonda Horton asked the chief about who answered the phone and told her son that Roger was dead. The chief told her the person who answered must have been from the county.

Hemphill later told Mississippi Today that he did not know about the call and that type of behavior by his staff “is not going to be tolerated.” Similarly, Copiah County Sheriff Byron Swilley said he had not heard about it and could not say whether a member of his department made the comment to Rhonda and Roger Horton’s son.

A Sept. 25, 2023, citation signed by Hemphill, shared with Mississippi Today, summoned Roger Horton to municipal court for the misdemeanor charges of possession of marijuana and resisting arrest and directed him not to have contact with the alleged victim in the assault case. No contact orders are typically for cases such as domestic violence and sexual assault and they are set by a judge.

LaKiedra Kangar, who works in municipal court services, said the no contact order was put in place because of the assault allegation. She confirmed Horton was not charged with the offense following the police department’s investigation of the allegation.

Weeks passed. Roger Horton went to court for the misdemeanor charges, to which he pleaded guilty. Felony assault charges were not part of the hearing. Municipal Court Judge Matthew Kitchens ordered Roger to pay over $900 in fines for the misdemeanors.

Horton was able to pay for some of the fine through at least 10 hours worth of court-ordered community service, which he said involved painting buildings for the city.

Months later after learning about Horton’s arrest and how he said the police treated him, Florczak-Seeman said she wanted to know more. Horton didn’t have access to his arrest documents, so she accompanied him and his wife to the police department to ask for them.

The first visit, Horton asked but did not receive the arrest report. Florczak-Seeman asked if he had a fine for any of the charges, which police said Horton did even after completing some community service hours. Florczak-Seeman paid for the remaining balance and had him work for her for two days to pay that off.

This year, they went to the police department a second time so Horton could ask for his arrest paperwork. An officer told him he didn’t need it and that the rape allegation had been investigated and found not to be credible, Horton told Mississippi Today.

Florczak-Seeman asked why Horton couldn’t receive the report. She said Hemphill asked if she was Horton’s attorney, and Florczak-Seeman clarified she was his representative.

The chief left for a few minutes and returned with two pieces of paper and handed them to Horton. Hemphill told Mississippi Today he did not recall whether he was the one who handed the report to Horton.

Florczak-Seeman took the document from Horton and began to read it as they stood in the lobby. She said she was horrified to see the name of the alleged, underage victim and her address in the report.

Hemphill said the victim’s personal information should have been restricted and not doing so was an oversight.

After reading the report, Florczak-Seeman went down the street to the mayor’s office at city hall to explain what happened, and how she believed the mayor had grounds to fire the police chief because he provided that document to Roger with the alleged victim’s information.

Crystal Springs Mayor Sally Garland Credit: Crystal Springs website

Mayor Sally Garland confirmed she had a conversation with Florczak-Seeman about the police chief’s employment.

She said she reviews all complaints about city officials, and Garland said she goes to the department head to get a better understanding of the situation. If she determines there are potential grounds for termination, a hearing would be scheduled with the Board of Aldermen, and the group would vote on that decision.

Garland did not find grounds for termination, and Hemphill remains police chief.

A Strange Visit

The Hortons and Florczak-Seeman hadn’t given much thought about the 2023 arrest, until weeks ago when a teenaged girl suddenly showed up in Florczak-Seeman’s yard.

At the end of September at the North Jackson Street home, Florczak-Seeman heard screaming and found the teenage girl who came onto her property. She asked what was wrong, and the teenager said she was chased by a dog, which Florczak-Seeman and Rhonda Horton did not see.

The teenager asked for a soda, and Rhonda Horton went inside to get one. Florczak-Seeman asked where the teenager lived, and she gave an answer that Florczak-Seeman said conflicted with what two girls who were standing nearby on the public sidewalk said she told them.

Then Florczak-Seeman asked the teenager’s name and recognized it as the name of the alleged victim on Horton’s arrest record. Immediately, Florczak-Seeman said she turned to Horton and told him to stay back, and she told the teenager to get off her property, which she did.

At the moment, they were not able to verify whether the teenager was the alleged victim from the report. Neither the Hortons nor Florczak-Seeman had seen her before, and they only knew her name from the arrest report.

“That didn’t make sense at all,” Rhonda Horton told Mississippi Today.

Florczak-Seeman called 911 to report the situation and ask for police to come, which they did not. Hemphill told Mississippi Today a dispatcher informed him about the call with Florczak-Seeman, including details with the teenage girl and how she wanted to report the girl for trespassing.

Florczak-Seeman is one of the people who have noticed a difference in Horton’s vision. It’s clear when comparing the detailed and clean paint job Roger completed at her Jackson Street property in 2019 and the center where he painted last year.

During an interview at the center in October, Florczak-Seeman pointed to the ceiling and noted spots that Horton did not paint. She remembers telling him about them and realized that he couldn’t see them.

“The spots on my ceiling are still not painted, and they’re not painted as a reminder of the injustices that happened in this situation and why I got involved,” Florczak-Seeman said.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mississippi Today

Central, south Mississippi voters will decide judicial runoffs on Tuesday

Published

6 hours ago

November 22, 2024

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – Taylor Vance – 2024-11-22 11:16:00

Some Mississippi voters head to the polls Tuesday to decide who should represent them on the state’s highest courts.

Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Tuesday. Absentee voting has begun, and in-person absentee voting at county circuit clerk’s offices ends at noon on Saturday.

In the Jackson Metro area and parts of central Mississippi, incumbent Supreme Court Justice Jim Kitchens will compete against Republican state Sen. Jenifer Branning of Neshoba County. In areas on the Gulf Coast, Jennifer Schloegel and Amy St. Pé will face each other for an open seat on the Court of Appeals.

Candidates for judicial offices in Mississippi are technically nonpartisan, but political parties and trade associations often contribute money to candidates and cut ads for them, which has increasingly made them almost as partisan as other campaigns.

In the Central District Supreme Court race, GOP forces are working to oust Kitchens, one of the dwindling number of centrist jurists on the high Court. Conservative leaders also realize Kitchens is next in line to lead the court as chief justice should current Chief Justice Mike Randolph step down.

Kitchens is one of two centrist members of the high court and is widely viewed as the preferred candidate of Democrats, though the Democratic Party has not endorsed his candidacy.

Kitchens, first elected to the court in 2008, is a former district attorney and private-practice lawyer. On the campaign trail, he has pointed to his experience as an attorney and judge, particularly his years prosecuting criminals and his rulings on criminal cases.

In an interview on Mississippi Today’s ‘The Other Side’ podcast, Kitchens said his opponent, who primarily practices real estate law, would be at a “significant disadvantage” because the state Supreme Court often reviews criminal cases and major civil lawsuits that are sent to them on appeal.

“I’m sure she has an academic knowledge about the circuit courts that she perhaps learned in law school or perhaps has been to some seminars, but she does not have the hands-on trial experience that I have,” Kitchens said. “And that’s so important to the work that I do.”

Branning, a private-practice attorney, was first elected to the Legislature in 2015. She has led the Senate Elections and Transportation committees. During her time at the Capitol, she has been one of the more conservative members of the Senate leadership, voting against changing the state flag to remove the Confederate battle emblem, voting against expanding Medicaid to the working poor and supporting mandatory and increased minimum sentences for crime.

While campaigning for the judicial seat, she has pledged to ensure that “conservative values” are always represented in the judiciary, but she has stopped short of endorsing policy positions — which Mississippi judicial candidates are prohibited from doing.

Branning declined an invitation to appear on Mississippi Today’s podcast.

“Mississippians need and deserve Supreme Court justices that are constitutionally conservative in nature,” Branning said in a recent interview with radio station SuperTalk Mississippi. “And by that, I mean justices that simply follow the law. They do not add or take away.”

The two candidates have collectively raised around $187,00 and spent $182,00 during the final stretch of the campaign, according to campaign finance reports filed with the Secretary of State’s office.

Since she initially qualified in January, Branning has raised the most amount of money at $879,871, with $250,000 of that money coming from a loan she gave her campaign. She spent around $730,000 of that money. Several third party groups have supported her campaign.

Kitchens has raised around $514,00 since he qualified for reelection. He’s spent roughly $436,000 of that money, and some of his top contributors have been trial attorneys.

For the open Court of Appeals seat, Schloegel and St Pe, two influential names on the Gulf Coast, are working to turn out their voters in a close election.

Schloegel is a Chancery Court judge in Harrison, Hancock and Stone counties. St. Pé is an attorney in private practice, a municipal court judge in Gautier, and a city attorney for Moss Point.

Schloegel has raised roughly $214,000 since she qualified, and has spent almost that same amount of money this election cycle. St. Pé has raised around $480,000 this year and spent approximately $438,067 during that timeframe.

Whoever wins the race, it ensures that a woman will fill the open seat. After the election, half of the judges on the 10-member appellate court will be women, the most number of women who have served on the court at one time.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mississippi Today

On this day in 1961

Published

11 hours ago

November 22, 2024

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – Jerry Mitchell – 2024-11-22 07:00:00

Nov. 22, 1961

Credit: Courtesy: Georgia Tourism & Travel

Five Black students, made up of NAACP Youth Council members and two SNCC volunteers from Albany State College, were arrested after entering the white waiting room of the Trailways station in Albany, Georgia.

The council members bonded out of jail, but the SNCC volunteers, Bertha Gober and Blanton Hall declined bail and “chose to remain in jail over the holidays to dramatize their demand for justice,” according to SNCC Digital Gateway. The president of Albany State College expelled them.

Gober became one of SNCC’s Freedom Singers and wrote the song, “We’ll Never Turn Back,” after the 1961 killing of Herbert Lee in Mississippi. The tune became SNCC’s anthem.

After her release from jail, Gober joined other students, and police arrested her and other demonstrators. Back in the same jail, she sang to the police chief and mayor to open the cells, “I hear God’s children praying in jail, ‘Freedom, freedom, freedom.’”

Albany State suspended another student, Bernice Reagon, after she joined SNCC. She poured herself into the civil rights movement and later formed the Grammy-nominated a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock to educate and empower the audience and community.

“When I opened my mouth and began to sing, there was a force and power within myself I had never heard before,” a power she said she did not know she had.

Other members of the Freedom Singers included Cordell Reagon, Bernice Johnson, Dorothy Vallis, Rutha Harris, Bernard Lafayette and Charles Neblett. On the third anniversary of the sit-in movement in 1963, they performed at Carnegie Hall.

“This is a singing movement,” SNCC leader James Forman told a reporter. “The songs help. Without them, it would be ugly.”

Today, the Albany Civil Rights Institute houses exhibits on these protesters, Martin Luther King Jr. and others who joined the Albany Movement.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.