When Mississippi voters head to the polls Tuesday to decide who should become the country’s next president, a large swath of voters will also participate in a battle for seats on the state‘s highest court. 

Incumbent Justice Jim Kitchens, the second-most senior judge on the Mississippi Supreme Court, is facing a challenge from four opponents, most notably Republican state Sen. Jenifer Branning of Neshoba County. 

In the five-person race for the Central District, which covers part of the Delta and the state’s capital Metro Area, the Republican Party has thrown its infrastructure and money behind Branning, a self-described “constitutional conservative.” There are three other challengers: Ceola James, a former Court of Appeals judge, and Byron Carter and Abby Gale Robinson, both private-practice attorneys.

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

“It’s one thing to talk about being tough on crime and another to sign your name at the bottom of a death warrant,” Kitchens said at the Neshoba County Fair. “You heard me right — a death warrant. I’ve done that, too, and I’m the only candidate who’s done that.” 

Kitchens has raised over $288,000 and spent around $189,000 of that money, leaving him with roughly $98,000 in cash on hand. Most of his campaign donations have come from trial attorneys around the state. 

Kitchens is one of two centrist members of the high court and is widely viewed as the preferred candidate of Democratic elected officials, though the Democratic Party has not endorsed his candidacy. Not only are GOP forces working to oust one of the dwindling number of centrist jurists on the high court, they appreciate Kitchens is next in line to lead the court as chief justice should current Chief Justice Mike Randolph step down.

Branning, a private practice attorney, was first elected to the Legislature in 2015. She has led the Senate Elections Committee and the Senate Transportation Committee. During her time at the Capitol, she’s voted against changing the state flag to remove the Confederate battle emblem, voted against expanding Medicaid to the working poor and supported 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. 

“The bottom line is this: We can elect conservatives to our executive and legislative branches,” Branning said at the Neshoba County Fair this summer. “But if we elect liberal, activist judges to our judicial branch, they will undermine the will of the voters and undo the conservative policies that are helping our state grow.” 

Branning has raised over $666,000 and spent roughly $312,000, leaving her with around $354,000 in cash on hand. Several special interest groups and trade associations have donated to her campaign, but the donations have been supercharged by a $250,000 personal loan she gave her campaign. 

Branning and Kitchens have spent thousands of dollars on TV ads in recent weeks, blitzing the airwaves before the election.

One of Kitchens’ ads is a play on his name and similar to ads he’s aired in past elections. His wife, in the commercial, maintains he needs to be on the high court to keep him out of her kitchen.

One of Branning’s ads contains footage of a violent riot (not in Mississippi) with a narrator claiming “radical judges are overturning laws, threatening our safety and putting our freedom at risk.”

“As a constitutional conservative, I will always follow the law, and I will never legislate from the bench,” Branning says in the ad. “That means I will call balls and strikes instead of writing the rules of the game.” 

Judicial races in Mississippi are supposed to be nonpartisan, and candidates have some restrictions on what they can say on the campaign trail. But these elections are essentially nonpartisan in name only. During a recent hearing over how Supreme Court justices are elected, an attorney with Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office even said partisan politics plays a large role in the elections. 

The Southern Poverty Law Center, an advocacy group specializing in civil rights litigation, has endorsed Kitchens’ bid for reelection, while the state GOP has endorsed Branning’s campaign. 

Southern Supreme Court Seat 

David Sullivan is also challenging incumbent Justice Dawn Beam for her seat in the Southern District, which includes Hattiesburg and the Gulf Coast area. 

Sullivan is a public defender in Harrison, Stone and Pearl River Counties and has been a municipal judge in D’Iberville since 2019. A Gulfport resident, Sullivan comes from a family of attorneys and judges. His father, Michael D. Sullivan, also served as a Supreme Court justice. 

Beam joined the state Supreme Court in 2016 after former Gov. Phil Bryant appointed her to the bench to fill the seat left vacant by former Justice Randy Pierce. She was later elected to a full eight-year term and is now running for her second term. She is the only woman on the court.

Before joining the state’s highest court, Beam served as a chancery court judge. Throughout her career, she has focused on improving child welfare in the court system.  

Open Court of Appeals seat 

Three candidates – Ian Baker, Jennifer Schloegel and Amy Lassiter St. Pe –  are competing for the open seat on the Mississippi Court of Appeals. The seat, concentrated in South Mississippi, opened up when Judge Joel Smith decided not to seek reelection. 

Baker is an assistant district attorney for Harrison, Hancock and Stone counties. 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. 

The state Supreme Court often has the final say in cases involving criminal, civil and death penalty appeals, questions on the state’s laws and its constitution, and legal issues of public interest. To prevent a backlog of cases, the Supreme Court assigns cases for the Court of Appeals to consider.

The top two courts in recent years have had the final say over legislation to create a support court system within the city of Jackson, struck down Mississippi’s ballot initiative process and ruled on whether the Legislature can appropriate public tax dollars to private schools. 

Absentee voting is currently ongoing, and in-person absentee voting ends at noon on November 2. Voters can cast in-person ballots for judicial races on November 5 from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. 

With more than two candidates competing in the Central District Supreme Court seat and the Court of Appeals race, a runoff election would take place on Nov. 26 if no single candidate in the two races receives a majority of the votes cast.

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

In 2016, Jarrius Adams’ absentee ballot never arrived at his apartment in Oxford, so the then-19-year-old at the University of Mississippi was left with one option to vote: Skip all his classes and drive four hours home to his polling place in Hattiesburg. 

Faced with a similar situation, the reality is most college students would decide not to vote, said Adams, who now works with the nonprofit Mississippi Votes. 

“For some students, it’s just as simple as eating three times a day now that you have no supervision,” he said. “To add voting for the first time?” 

It can be hard to cast a ballot in Mississippi, where state voting laws consistently rank as among the strictest in the nation. 

But for the state’s tens of thousands of college students — many of whom are voting for the first time while also trying to stay on top of homework, classes, chores and having a social life — the barriers to the ballot box faced by all Mississippi voters pose an even greater challenge. 

Mississippi is one of just three states without early voting. This means college students who choose to vote in person most likely have just one day to get to the polls, which are not always on campus. According to a list provided by the Secretary of State’s office, three of the eight public universities in Mississippi lack an on-campus polling location for this election. 

When college students turn 18 in Mississippi, they are not automatically registered to vote if they have a driver’s license, a law on the books in 23 other states. There’s no same-day voter registration, which voting experts say can pose an issue for college students whose addresses, and therefore precincts, change more often than other voters. And Mississippi doesn’t have online voter registration for new applicants. 

Mississippi “pretty much has all the things that make it hard to vote,” said Jennifer McAndrew, the senior director of strategic communications for Tisch College at Tufts University, which houses the National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement.

Nevertheless, colleges and students who have been working all semester long to encourage their peers to vote say that young Mississippians pursuing higher education are motivated to turn out this Election Day. 

“Our young Mississippians are the future of our state,” Secretary of State Michael Watson, who has visited colleges across the state to talk to students about voting, said in a statement. “It is important for them to educate themselves not just on the voting process, but also the policies and issues affecting the state and nation..”

At Ole Miss this semester, the Center for Community Engagement has registered more students to vote before the deadline in an election year than it ever has before: About 350 students, according to William Teer, the program director for student leadership programs and financial well-being. 

Now, it’s just a matter of getting these students to the polls. 

“Everyone hears about how young people and college students in particular don’t vote in huge numbers for whatever reason,” said Marshall Pendes, a senior math and economics major who serves as a voting ambassador at Ole Miss. “I get a chance as a student to try and change that.” 

Pendes cited a study that Tufts’ National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement conducted of student voting at Ole Miss, which found that about 15,000 students — more than 75% of campus — were registered to vote during the last presidential election.

That’s in part because of the efforts of voting ambassadors like Pendes. In his four years at the university, Pendes estimated he’s helped register more than 600 students. He’s helped students complete the Mississippi Secretary of State’s paper registration application all across campus, at fraternities and sororities, before and after class, during student government meetings, in the Circle and at meetings for all kinds of political clubs. 

But not so much on in the Grove.

“During games, people aren’t really interested in doing paperwork,” Pendes said. 

The goal is to educate students on how, where and why it’s important to vote, Pendes said, whether that’s in-person in the county where they attend school or at home through an absentee ballot. 

“One of the great things about voting as a college student is you have so many choices,” he said. “Every person’s situation is different.”

Even though college students qualify for an absentee ballot in Mississippi, students say it’s far more common for their peers to register to vote in their college’s county.

“It’s more common for students to register on campus,” said Avantavis TyMon, an elementary education major at Alcorn State University who is also a Mississippi Votes’ Democracy in Action fellow. “It’s easier, and it’s more accessible … especially for the out-of-state students who don’t have cars.” 

Alcorn State University is one of five public universities that will host on-campus precincts this year, along with Mississippi Valley State University, Mississippi State University, the University of Southern Mississippi and Jackson State University. 

Though Delta State University does not have an on-campus voting location, there is a precinct across the street.

On Election Day, TyMon said he and other student leaders plan to canvass the dorms and ask students if they want to join a “stroll to the polls” event, which will involve a short walk to the on-campus precinct. 

“It’s a little bit of a walk from where students live,” TyMon said, adding that in previous years, “we would meet up and all walk together.” 

Mississippi’s absentee ballot process, which experts describe as onerous, may be another reason college students register to vote in-person in greater numbers. 

“It is an unbelievable barrier for college students who don’t live in Mississippi or are voting absentee in Mississippi,” McAndrews said. 

First, a voter must request an absentee ballot application from their circuit clerk’s office, according to a step-by-step guide from the Mississippi Secretary of State’s office. Once they receive the application in the mail, the voter must have it witnessed by a notary, unless they are disabled. When a voter gets a ballot, the next step is finding another notary to watch the voter fill it out.

“You can do your taxes in one day,” Adams said. In Mississippi, “you cannot vote by mail in one day.” 

Even some notaries think Mississippi’s absentee ballot law could be eased. 

Bill Anderson, the vice president of government affairs at the National Notary Association, said that, of the handful of states that involve notaries in the process, Mississippi’s law is the strictest. 

“You’d expect us to be supportive of states that allow or create a role for notaries in absentee ballots,” Anderson said. “We think this is a good idea. … These states, including Mississippi, want there to be a layer of security that is absent for voters voting absentee.” 

Nonetheless, Anderson said he is hoping to work with Mississippi lawmakers next year on some issues he sees with what he called the “non-notarial functions” required by the state’s law. 

For instance, Mississippi’s law requires notaries to sign the back of the envelope containing the voters’ ballot, something Anderson said is not expressly permitted by the notary laws of his home state in California. And Mississippi doesn’t oblige notaries to affix their seal to the envelope, which Anderson said other states require notaries to do. 

“You can just imagine the poor voter,” Anderson said. “They’re out here, and the California notary is trying to find their state law and doesn’t want to get in trouble with the Secretary of State of California and says look … I’d love to do this for you, but I can’t.” 

For his part, Pendes said he thinks students who want to vote absentee are motivated to find notaries, which can be relatively easy to do on a college campus. 

“In my experience, people usually aren’t defeated by the notarization part,” he said. 

At Mississippi State, the student government association and the Division of Student Affairs held an event called “Notary Day” last week. More than 70 students had their absentee ballots notarized, said Carson McFatridge, the student association president. 

“When I think of a notary, I think of someone at the bank,” she said. “That can be a challenge just not knowing who has the capability to do that … so it was really, really cool to be able to see people like our dean of students volunteer an hour of his time to sit out there and help people.” 

McAndrew said it’s important for colleges to make voting as a student as simple as possible, because even the perception that voting is complicated is itself a barrier.

“There’s so much out there about strict voter ID laws, it becomes this ghost barrier on top of the actual barrier,” McAndrew said. 

“Anything we can do not only to reduce the complexity but to reduce the intimidation and anxiety factor is really important,” she added. 

To that end, many professors have canceled classes to give students the day off to vote, and universities across the state are offering rides to the polls. At Ole Miss, buses will leave from the Walk of Champions and behind Ole Miss Bike Shop from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Election Day. 

This does more than help students without cars, Pendes said. 

“The other thing to consider is that parking spaces on our campus are extremely hard to come by,” he said. “Do you want to move your car and lose your parking space to try to go vote? Because that isn’t necessarily something that’s always guaranteed to you, especially in commuter spaces.” 

This semester, the Center for Community Engagement was also successful in finding a solution to an issue that has troubled student voters for years at Ole Miss, which is that residence halls and Greek Life houses are not considered acceptable mailing addresses at which to register. 

Teer, the program director, said he worked with the Lafayette County Circuit Clerk’s office to establish the center as a mailing address for students who live on campus. 

“We’ve had students coming in daily because they’ve received an email from us that their voter information cards had arrived,” Teer said. 

Every Thursday, students at Alcorn State held a voter registration event at the campus chapel. TyMon also helped organize a voter registration block party that featured food trucks. These efforts resulted in more than 400 students registering to vote. 

TyMon said he thinks student leaders have an important role to play in setting an example for their peers. 

“When they see that we’re serious, they get serious,” he said.

That’s why A’Davion Bush, a sophomore political science major at Ole Miss, is going to drive home to Indianola not just to vote, but to volunteer at the polls. The Mississippi Votes’ Democracy in Action fellow said he’s going to post about his plan on social media so his friends who are still in high school will be inspired to vote when they turn 18.  

“The older population is not doing anything to influence young people in my county,” he said. 

McFatridge, the student body president at Mississippi State, said she recently registered a student to vote who had just become a U.S. citizen, which reminded her that while voting is a right, it’s also a privilege not had by everyone around the world.

Not voting in the U.S. is “kind of like looking a gift horse in the mouth,” McFatridge said. 

“It’s a silly phrase,” she added, “but I truly believe that when given the opportunity to share your own thoughts and beliefs, I don’t know why you wouldn’t.” 

An Arkansan, McFatridge had intended to vote early in her hometown of Searcy during fall break, but a family emergency prevented that. 

It’s too late for her to order an absentee ballot, so now she’s driving home to vote before Election Day, 4.5 hours away.

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

James Tatsch had no criminal charges pending against him when he died in jail from a complication of diabetes. 

Tatsch, who was 48 years old, was jailed while waiting on mental health treatment during Mississippi’s involuntary commitment process. When he was found unresponsive in his cell in Corinth on Jan. 17, he had been detained for 12 days. 

His death was caused by diabetic ketoacidosis, a condition that develops when a person’s body does not have enough insulin for blood sugar to provide energy to its cells, according to the findings of the state medical examiner’s autopsy report. 

Jail staff knew Tatsch was diabetic, Alcorn County Sheriff Ben Caldwell told Mississippi Today. He does not believe the jail is at fault for Tatsch’s death. 

“From everything that I’ve seen and all the reports and all the information that I’ve checked on, it appears that my staff was doing what they needed to do,” he said. “It’s a tragedy.”

Alcorn County Correctional Facility does not have a written or uniform policy for treating diabetic patients, said Caldwell. Rather, the facility’s medical staff – a doctor, registered nurse and a licensed practical nurse – creates an individualized procedure of care for each patient. 

Death by diabetic ketoacidosis is preventable, said nurse practitioner KC Arnold, owner of The Diabetes Center in Ocean Springs.

Illness, missed insulin shots, a clogged insulin pump or the wrong insulin dose are the most common causes of diabetic ketoacidosis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Arnold said people in custody with diabetes are often given a combination of intermediate and rapid-acting insulin twice a day. 

“It’s not the best care, but that would keep him out of (diabetic ketoacidosis) if he had known diabetes,” she said. 

READ MORE: Committed to Jail series

Jails and prisons should have written policies and procedures for diabetes care and provide training to medical and non-medical staff, said the American Diabetes Association in a statement published earlier this year. 

“These policies would ensure that detainees have timely access to necessary treatment at all appropriate levels of care,” the statement said. 

Tatsch is one of at least 15 people who have died after being jailed through Mississippi’s involuntary commitment process. Nine of them committed suicide. 

During the process, people who pose a threat to themselves or others can be ordered to county jails while they await mental health evaluation or treatment. 

Laws allowing people with mental health concerns to be involuntarily taken into custody exist in every state. But reporting from Mississippi Today and ProPublica revealed that no other state jailed people in the civil commitment process without criminal charges with such frequency, and often for days or weeks. 

The state revised its civil commitment law earlier this year. It now requires a screening to be completed by the local Community Mental Health Center before a person is jailed and for other treatment options be considered first.  

Because Tatsch’s death is under investigation, Mississippi Today could not access jail records. Caldwell, however, provided an account of what happened that day.  

The morning of the day he died, Tatsch began “acting erratically,” Caldwell said. He was moved from a standard housing unit to the jail’s “segregation” area, where he was locked in a cell alone and checked on by guards every 30 minutes. 

His blood sugar was checked at 12:08pm. It was high, and he was given insulin. 

A guard checked on Tatsch, spoke to him and observed him eating from a jail-issued snack bag less than half an hour before he was found unconscious. He was found unresponsive within 30 minutes and transported to Magnolia Regional Health Center, where he was pronounced dead. 

The incident time was 10:40pm, according to the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation incident report.

Caldwell was not certain what other diabetic care Tatsch received on the day of his death. He first told Mississippi Today that the midday blood sugar check was the result of a complaint made by Tatsch, but later said it was a regular mealtime test. He was unsure when Tatsch’s blood sugar was checked at other times during the day. 

He said he could not share details about Tatsch’s treatment regimen or say when he last received insulin because he turned all relevant documents over to the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, including statements from officers on duty. 

The agency began looking into Tatsch’s death after Caldwell asked for an investigation. He made the request less than an hour after Tatsch’s death occurred, according to the incident report. 

The investigation will be presented to a grand jury, or a group of citizens who review evidence to determine whether someone should be tried for a crime, in November. 

The grand jury proceeding was requested by former Alcorn County District Attorney John Weddle. Current District Attorney Jason Herring said he could not comment on pending matters, but that the county presents all in-custody death cases to a grand jury. 

Caldwell reviewed the incident for any possible policy changes that could have prevented the death but found none, he said. 

“This is a tragedy, but this is not representative of the care they provide the inmates here. That’s our number one priority, obviously the safety and security of the public as well as the inmates that are here and their safety and wellbeing.”

Arnold said symptoms of diabetic ketoacidosis arise before a patient is in critical condition and can include vomiting, frequent urination, weakness or nausea.

“Any medical practitioner would recognize that,” she said. 

Greta Martin, litigation director for Disability Rights Mississippi, said she sees a statewide failure in jails and prisons to properly treat diabetes, which qualifies as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act. 

Incarcerated people with diabetes often do not receive timely medication, regular chronic care check-ups or prescribed diabetes diets, said Martin. 

“Diabetes unchecked and untreated can cause a myriad of problems that could be significant and life threatening,” she said. 

Seventeen people have died in state custody from diabetes-related causes since 2015, according to Department of Corrections records. This number does not include people who are in counties’ custody, like Tatsch.

Jail and medical personnel have been held liable for an incarcerated person’s death from diabetes in Mississippi before. 

In 2022, George County agreed to pay a $2.8 million settlement after an insulin-dependent man in George County Regional Correctional Facility went seven days without insulin. The jail’s nurse was sentenced to 15 years for manslaughter. 

Sheriffs are responsible for providing proper medical care to people incarcerated in county jails, including people held in jail during civil commitment, said Cliff Johnson, the director of Mississippi’s MacArthur Justice Center, an organization that advocates for people who are incarcerated.

“Sheriffs have consistently complained to us that the burden of Mississippi’s inadequate mental health system has fallen on them,” he said. 

“They concede that they’re not trained to take care of people with mental illness and they wish they didn’t have to. The reality for sheriffs … is that they owe everyone in their jail a duty to keep them safe, to provide them with the medical care and the mental health care the law requires.”

It is unclear if Tatsch was ever evaluated by a mental health professional or had a hearing during his 12-day incarceration. At the time, the law required a hearing to be held within seven to 10 days. 

Alcorn County Chancery Clerk Keith Settlemires, whose office is responsible for coordinating the civil commitment process, declined to speak to Mississippi Today about Tatsch’s case. 

Jason Ramey, the executive director of Region IV, the local community mental health center that provides screening during the civil commitment process, said that Region IV has communicated with the Alcorn County Chancery Clerk’s office about the services the center provides, including a crisis stabilization unit.

Crisis stabilization units offer stabilization and treatment to people with severe mental illness or who are in psychiatric crisis and provide an alternative to incarceration for people in the civil commitment process. 

Mississippi Today reached out to several of Tatsch’s family members but did not reach any who knew him personally. 

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