Mississippi Today
Jackson attorney may be king of conservatorships in Mississippi

Consider Jackson attorney Harry Rosenthal as the king of conservatorships.
By his own estimate, he has been a conservator for more than 100 vulnerable individuals. Hinds County Chancery Court records show he’s continuing to handle a dozen conservatorships.
Though it’s not known how much the attorney receives in each case, in Hinds County alone, Rosenthal’s income from being a conservator could be substantial.
The average salary for a non-family member conservator is $51,214 per year in Mississippi, according to the research blog salary.com. ZipRecruiter, which says it gets its salary estimates from employer job postings and third party data sources, puts the average salary in Mississippi at $47,787.
State Supreme Court Justice Dawn Beam, who helped craft changes to the conservatorship law, said most appointed conservators are family members, and they aren’t paid a lot of money.
The law allows a family member to be paid fees set by a judge for their service.
Professional conservators are entitled to reasonable fees, but the judge decides what is reasonable and must approve the amount before the conservator can be paid. Money for the conservator comes from the account of the person under a conservatorship. If a person under a conservator has little or no financial assets, the judge can appoint a public guardian/conservator who is paid from public funds.
Some attorneys say the new law makes it difficult for ordinary citizens to file conservatorship petitions without the assistance of attorneys.
Elder law experts say the cost of obtaining a conservatorship over someone can be expensive with the hiring of attorneys or attorneys to represent the individual, family members and interested parties. There are also court and other fees involved with a conservatorship petition.
READ: The Conservatorship fight over Opal
Rosenthal told the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, a part of Mississippi Today, that most of the wards for whom he has served as conservator were once clients in criminal cases.
More than 30 years ago, the attorney provided $12,000 in bail money to try to help white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith get out of jail after he was indicted and arrested for the third time in the assassination of Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers.
Although Jewish, a group of people Beckwith disparaged, Rosenthal, 82, has said he provided the money to Beckwith because he believed his speedy trial rights were being violated after two previous trials in 1964 ended in hung juries.
In 1994, 30 years after his previous trials, Beckwith was convicted in Hinds County Circuit Court of Evers’ murder and sentenced to life in prison. Beckwith died in 2001 in custody.
Thirty-four years ago, Rosenthal filed the petition to become conservator for Gary Gordineer in Hinds County Chancery Court.
“I’ve had him for more than 30 years and I still have him,” Rosenthal said recently. In February, Rosenthal filed an annual accounting report of Gordineer’s assets, a court docket report shows.
Rosenthal said he knew Gordineer, Gordineer’s father and other family members. He said the younger Gordineer had been a criminal client. Rosenthal said he once had Gordineer, who is a veteran, in a home with his mother but now has him in a nursing home.
No family member of Gordineer could be reached for comment.
Rosenthal is also listed as conservator in another case, dating to 1989 involving Howard Ruffin Jr.
Ruffin’s niece, Erica Porter, said she has been his caregiver for the 100% disabled veteran the last four years. Other than her, Ruffin has little or no family alive, she said. “I’m all he has.”
In her four years of caring for Ruffin, she said she had never heard from Rosenthal until recently when she went to his office to request more money than the $700 a month she receives for Ruffin’s care.
Porter said Rosenthal denied her request.
“My first time talking to him was actually last week,” Porter said recently of Rosenthal. “We haven’t heard from him or nothing.”
Rosenthal said everyone wants to spend a ward’s money.
“If you are a conservator or guardian, the money belongs to the person you are trying to protect, and the laws of the state of Mississippi say you are supposed to conserve and build upon the money, if possible,” he said.
Most of Rosenthal’s conservatorship cases in Hinds County occurred before an updated law went into effect three years ago.
About 2,500 conservatorship cases have been filed in Mississippi since then.
The updated law, known as the Mississippi Guard and Protect Act, seeks to protect the rights of those unable to take care of themselves, said Beam, who co-chaired the 26-member committee that came up with the recommendations. It was the first update of the guardian and conservatorship law in 30 years.
The law distinguishes guardianship of the person from conservator of the estate, clarifies the role of a guardian/conservator in a ward’s life, specifies the basis for appointing a guardian/conservator through improved medical evaluation forms, encourages individualized planning and use of the least restrictive alternative. It also creates accountability between the guardian/conservator and the courts to prevent fraud and abuse.
The law also mandates wellbeing reports.
The updated law applies to cases filed after Jan. 1, 2020, but a judge has the authority to apply the new law to older cases if no rights are violated.
In a 2021 state Supreme Court appeal, Hattiesburg attorney Carol Bustin said that, for decades, courts have treated conservatorships as mere ministerial actions and the imposition of conservatorships as matters of petitioners’ rights.
Unless someone is a party in a conservatorship case, court records in cases like those of Gordineer and Ruffin are sealed, except for the brief descriptions placed on the court docket.
Rosenthal said some things in the new law look good on paper, but accountability isn’t being strictly enforced.
The sister of one of Rosenthal’s wards questions the lawyer’s accountability.
“I think the rule, or unofficial rule, should be to talk to family members before they put people into a court-appointed conservatorship to make sure there is no one who can take over the responsibility,” said Linda Taylor of Memphis, whose brother, Edward Redmond, was one of Rosenthal’s wards.

At one point, Rosenthal had Redmond living in a facility in south Mississippi, according to Taylor.
But Rosenthal was forced by court order to move Redmond to Jackson to be closer to family.
Taylor said her brother initially was able to spend time with family.
“In August 2019, however, Rosenthal forbade us to take him away from his assisted living residence to spend time with him. He even claimed he had a warrant out for my brother Robert’s arrest because he had violated that order and picked Edward up once, anyway.”
Redmond, a Marine veteran, was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic in the 1980s and became addicted to drugs. He was determined to be 100% disabled by the VA hospital. Redmond’s parents became guardians over his military and Social Security benefits.
In 1994, Redmond’s parents agreed to let Rosenthal become his guardian without fully understanding what they were consenting to, according to Taylor. She said she and another sister in Texas didn’t know anything about what was going on with their brother until after Rosenthal had already been court appointed guardian/conservator.
At one point, Redmond was allowed to live with Taylor and her husband in Memphis on a trial basis. During that time, Redmond overcame his addiction for a while. He had a great testimony about his victory over drugs. Rosenthal forced Redmond to move back to Jackson for unexplained reasons.

Taylor said her brother was moved over the years to different locations throughout the state of Mississippi, and that all of those places Rosenthal chose were not approved by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Rosenthal said he won’t apologize for the care Redmond received in Jackson. Taylor wanted too much money for keeping Redmond, he said. “I’m not ashamed of what happened. I had a tremendous problem with her trying to get his money.”
Taylor said the family requested to have guardianship over Edward while allowing Rosenthal to continue being conservator over his money.
“Rosenthal refused,” she said. “The record speaks for itself.”
This project was produced by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, now part of Mississippi Today, in partnership with the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
Early voting proposal killed on last day of Mississippi legislative session
Mississippi will remain one of only three states without no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting.
Senate leaders, on the last day of their regular 2025 session, decided not to send a bill to Gov. Tate Reeves that would have expanded pre-Election Day voting options. The governor has been vocally opposed to early voting in Mississippi, and would likely have vetoed the measure.
The House and Senate this week overwhelmingly voted for legislation that established a watered-down version of early voting. The proposal would have required voters to go to a circuit clerk’s office and verify their identity with a photo ID.
The proposal also listed broad excuses that would have allowed many voters an opportunity to cast early ballots.
The measure passed the House unanimously and the Senate approved it 42-7. However, Sen. Jeff Tate, a Republican from Meridian who strongly opposes early voting, held the bill on a procedural motion.
Senate Elections Chairman Jeremy England chose not to dispose of Tate’s motion on Thursday morning, the last day the Senate was in session. This killed the bill and prevented it from going to the governor.
England, a Republican from Vancleave, told reporters he decided to kill the legislation because he believed some of its language needed tweaking.
The other reality is that Republican Gov. Tate Reeves strongly opposes early voting proposals and even attacked England on social media for advancing the proposal out of the Senate chamber.
England said he received word “through some sources” that Reeves would veto the measure.
“I’m not done working on it, though,” England said.
Although Mississippi does not have no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting, it does have absentee voting.
To vote by absentee, a voter must meet one of around a dozen legal excuses, such as temporarily living outside of their county or being over 65. Mississippi law doesn’t allow people to vote by absentee purely out of convenience or choice.
Several conservative states, such as Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Florida, have an in-person early voting system. The Republican National Committee in 2023 urged Republican voters to cast an early ballot in states that have early voting procedures.
Yet some Republican leaders in Mississippi have ardently opposed early voting legislation over concerns that it undermines election security.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
Mississippi Legislature approves DEI ban after heated debate
Mississippi lawmakers have reached an agreement to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs and a list of “divisive concepts” from public schools across the state education system, following the lead of numerous other Republican-controlled states and President Donald Trump’s administration.
House and Senate lawmakers approved a compromise bill in votes on Tuesday and Wednesday. It will likely head to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves for his signature after it clears a procedural motion.
The agreement between the Republican-dominated chambers followed hours of heated debate in which Democrats, almost all of whom are Black, excoriated the legislation as a setback in the long struggle to make Mississippi a fairer place for minorities. They also said the bill could bog universities down with costly legal fights and erode academic freedom.
Democratic Rep. Bryant Clark, who seldom addresses the entire House chamber from the podium during debates, rose to speak out against the bill on Tuesday. He is the son of the late Robert Clark, the first Black Mississippian elected to the state Legislature since the 1800s and the first Black Mississippian to serve as speaker pro tempore and preside over the House chamber since Reconstruction.
“We are better than this, and all of you know that we don’t need this with Mississippi history,” Clark said. “We should be the ones that say, ‘listen, we may be from Mississippi, we may have a dark past, but you know what, we’re going to be the first to stand up this time and say there is nothing wrong with DEI.'”
Legislative Republicans argued that the measure — which will apply to all public schools from the K-12 level through universities — will elevate merit in education and remove a list of so-called “divisive concepts” from academic settings. More broadly, conservative critics of DEI say the programs divide people into categories of victims and oppressors and infuse left-wing ideology into campus life.
“We are a diverse state. Nowhere in here are we trying to wipe that out,” said Republican Sen. Tyler McCaughn, one of the bill’s authors. “We’re just trying to change the focus back to that of excellence.”
The House and Senate initially passed proposals that differed in who they would impact, what activities they would regulate and how they aim to reshape the inner workings of the state’s education system. Some House leaders wanted the bill to be “semi-vague” in its language and wanted to create a process for withholding state funds based on complaints that almost anyone could lodge. The Senate wanted to pair a DEI ban with a task force to study inefficiencies in the higher education system, a provision the upper chamber later agreed to scrap.
The concepts that will be rooted out from curricula include the idea that gender identity can be a “subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality.” The move reflects another effort to align with the Trump administration, which has declared via executive order that there are only two sexes.
The House and Senate disagreed on how to enforce the measure but ultimately settled on an agreement that would empower students, parents of minor students, faculty members and contractors to sue schools for violating the law.
People could only sue after they go through an internal campus review process and a 25-day period when schools could fix the alleged violation. Republican Rep. Joey Hood, one of the House negotiators, said that was a compromise between the chambers. The House wanted to make it possible for almost anyone to file lawsuits over the DEI ban, while Senate negotiators initially bristled at the idea of fast-tracking internal campus disputes to the legal system.
The House ultimately held firm in its position to create a private cause of action, or the right to sue, but it agreed to give schools the ability to conduct an investigative process and potentially resolve the alleged violation before letting people sue in chancery courts.
“You have to go through the administrative process,” said Republican Sen. Nicole Boyd, one of the bill’s lead authors. “Because the whole idea is that, if there is a violation, the school needs to cure the violation. That’s what the purpose is. It’s not to create litigation, it’s to cure violations.”
If people disagree with the findings from that process, they could also ask the attorney general’s office to sue on their behalf.
Under the new law, Mississippi could withhold state funds from schools that don’t comply. Schools would be required to compile reports on all complaints filed in response to the new law.
Trump promised in his 2024 campaign to eliminate DEI in the federal government. One of the first executive orders he signed did that. Some Mississippi lawmakers introduced bills in the 2024 session to restrict DEI, but the proposals never made it out of committee. With the national headwinds at their backs and several other laws in Republican-led states to use as models, Mississippi lawmakers made plans to introduce anti-DEI legislation.
The policy debate also unfolded amid the early stages of a potential Republican primary matchup in the 2027 governor’s race between State Auditor Shad White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann. White, who has been one of the state’s loudest advocates for banning DEI, had branded Hosemann in the months before the 2025 session “DEI Delbert,” claiming the Senate leader has stood in the way of DEI restrictions passing the Legislature.
During the first Senate floor debate over the chamber’s DEI legislation during this year’s legislative session, Hosemann seemed to be conscious of these political attacks. He walked over to staff members and asked how many people were watching the debate live on YouTube.
As the DEI debate cleared one of its final hurdles Wednesday afternoon, the House and Senate remained at loggerheads over the state budget amid Republican infighting. It appeared likely the Legislature would end its session Wednesday or Thursday without passing a $7 billion budget to fund state agencies, potentially threatening a government shutdown.
“It is my understanding that we don’t have a budget and will likely leave here without a budget. But this piece of legislation …which I don’t think remedies any of Mississippi’s issues, this has become one of the top priorities that we had to get done,” said Democratic Sen. Rod Hickman. “I just want to say, if we put that much work into everything else we did, Mississippi might be a much better place.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
House gives Senate 5 p.m. deadline to come to table, or legislative session ends with no state budget
The House on Wednesday attempted one final time to revive negotiations between it and the Senate over passing a state budget.
Otherwise, the two Republican-led chambers will likely end their session without funding government services for the next fiscal year and potentially jeopardize state agencies.
The House on Wednesday unanimously passed a measure to extend the legislative session and revive budget bills that had died on legislative deadlines last weekend.
House Speaker Jason White said he did not have any prior commitment that the Senate would agree to the proposal, but he wanted to extend one last offer to pass the budget. White, a Republican from West, said if he did not hear from the Senate by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, his chamber would end its regular session.
“The ball is in their court,” White said of the Senate. “Every indication has been that they would not agree to extend the deadlines for purposes of doing the budget. I don’t know why that is. We did it last year, and we’ve done it most years.”
But it did not appear likely Wednesday afternoon that the Senate would comply.
The Mississippi Legislature has not left Jackson without setting at least most of the state budget since 2009, when then Gov. Haley Barbour had to force them back to set one to avoid a government shutdown.
The House measure to extend the session is now before the Senate for consideration. To pass, it would require a two-thirds majority vote of senators. But that might prove impossible. Numerous senators on both sides of the aisle vowed to vote against extending the current session, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann who oversees the chamber said such an extension likely couldn’t pass.
Senate leadership seemed surprised at the news that the House passed the resolution to negotiate a budget, and several senators earlier on Wednesday made passing references to ending the session without passing a budget.
“We’ll look at it after it passes the full House,” Senate President Pro Tempore Dean Kirby said.
The House and Senate, each having a Republican supermajority, have fought over many issues since the legislative session began early January.
But the battle over a tax overhaul plan, including elimination of the state individual income tax, appeared to cause a major rift. Lawmakers did pass a tax overhaul, which the governor has signed into law, but Senate leaders cried foul over how it passed, with the House seizing on typos in the Senate’s proposal that accidentally resembled the House’s more aggressive elimination plan.
The Senate had urged caution in eliminating the income tax, and had economic growth triggers that would have likely phased in the elimination over many years. But the typos essentially negated the triggers, and the House and governor ran with it.
The two chambers have also recently fought over the budget. White said he communicated directly with Senate leaders that the House would stand firm on not passing a budget late in the session.
But Senate leaders said they had trouble getting the House to meet with them to haggle out the final budget.
On the normally scheduled “conference weekend” with a deadline to agree to a budget last Saturday, the House did not show, taking the weekend off. This angered Hosemann and the Senate. All the budget bills died, requiring a vote to extend the session, or the governor forcing them into a special session.
If the Legislature ends its regular session without adopting a budget, the only option to fund state agencies before their budgets expire on June 30 is for Gov. Tate Reeves to call lawmakers back into a special session later.
“There really isn’t any other option (than the governor calling a special session),” Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann previously said.
If Reeves calls a special session, he gets to set the Legislature’s agenda. A special session call gives an otherwise constitutionally weak Mississippi governor more power over the Legislature.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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