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Jailed for their own safety, 14 Mississippians died awaiting mental health treatment

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This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Mississippi Today. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Butch Scipper is haunted by the deaths of three men.

As chancery clerk of Quitman County in the Mississippi Delta, he coordinates a legal process in which people are ordered into treatment for serious mental illness or substance abuse — a common way for Mississippians, especially poor people without insurance, to access inpatient care.

Dozens of times a year, people ask Scipper for help because they are afraid sick family members will hurt themselves or others. Up until a few years ago, he sent many of those family members to jail as they waited to be evaluated and treated.

Jailing people with no criminal charges during the civil commitment process is common in Mississippi because many county officials see no other option when publicly funded mental health facilities are unavailable. In jail, Scipper figured, people going through the commitment process would be prevented from harming themselves or others.

Yet three men — Tyrone Compton, Brandon Raymond and Brian Sneed — killed themselves in the Quitman County jail. Compton and Raymond died the same way, in the same cell, just seven months apart in 2006 and 2007. Sneed died in 2019.

“These three guys run back and forth across my head,” Scipper said. Sending them to jail, he now believes, “was not the right thing to do.”

Since 2006, at least 14 Mississippians have died after being placed in jail during the civil commitment process, purportedly for their own safety. Nine of them, including those three men, died by suicide. Twelve had not been charged with a crime.

It’s not easy to know what goes on inside Mississippi jails — unlike in many states, they’re not subject to mandatory health and safety standards — but lawsuits and Mississippi Bureau of Investigation reports provide some visibility.

Mississippi Today and ProPublica read sworn testimony by family members, jail staffers, administrators, sheriffs and other inmates regarding deaths in jail during the commitment process. We reviewed medical and jail records. We compared suicide prevention policies to nationally recognized guidelines. And we shared key facts about these cases or the policies in effect at the time with a dozen experts in correctional health care, including psychiatrists and other physicians.

Before 11 of the deaths, the medical care and suicide prevention measures fell short of national standards, sometimes shockingly so, according to experts and a review of those standards. (The care provided before the other three deaths, including the most recent one in August, is unclear.)

Before most of the nine suicides, staff didn’t take some basic steps to prevent people from killing themselves, according to those experts and nationally accepted guidelines. And when people going through the commitment process exhibited serious medical issues, jail staff didn’t get them the help they needed, experts said after reviewing the circumstances of those deaths drawn from a Mississippi Bureau of Investigation report, depositions and records filed in court. Staff didn’t review medical histories. They interpreted signs of medical distress as manifestations of mental illness or the influence of drugs or alcohol. They failed to act.

Nakema Fox died in 2007 after being held in the DeSoto County jail, leaving behind her high school sweetheart and husband, Terry Fox (right), her daughter, Faith Fox (middle), her son Janauris Blanch (left) and two other children. Nakema Fox had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and was awaiting transportation to a state psychiatric hospital when she died. Over 11 days in jail, she barely ate, according to a Mississippi Bureau of Investigation report. Fox died of a pulmonary embolism soon after a jail employee noticed her coughing and called a nurse. DeSoto County officials declined to comment on Fox’s death, though a sheriff’s department official said staff keep track of when inmates refuse meals and have medical staff evaluate them. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today

“When you see somebody that ain’t eating, you can’t just let them sit there and do that. … They’re still somebody. They’re still a human being.”

Terry Fox, husband of Nakema Fox, who died of a pulmonary embolism in jail

Local officials in Mississippi say they sometimes need to jail people during the commitment process to keep them safe. But according to the experts we interviewed, jails not only fail to guarantee safety for people with serious mental illness, they can be particularly dangerous for them.

“There’s a whole lot more to safety than just bars and shackles,” said Dr. Robert Greifinger, the former chief medical officer for the New York state prison system.

That point has long been made by sheriffs and jail administrators in Mississippi, too. In 1999, for instance, a 43-year-old man killed himself in the Union County jail as he waited to be taken to Mississippi State Hospital near Jackson for psychiatric treatment.

“He was under watch, but you can’t watch him every minute,” Joe Bryant, then sheriff of the north Mississippi county, said at the time. “It just brings to light a problem that county jails face: There should be some means besides a county jail to house mental patients. A jail is not equipped for this.”

Nearly a quarter-century later, the problem persists. A law passed in 2009 requiring jails to meet state standards if they hold people awaiting psychiatric treatment has resulted in just one jail that’s certified among the 71 that detained about 800 such people in the year ending in June 2023.

When someone dies in jail awaiting treatment, litigation is the primary way families can try to hold officials accountable. Yet none of the nine lawsuits filed over deaths since 2006 have resulted in a court ruling that held county or jail officials responsible. Four were settled. One is ongoing. The rest were dismissed or lost at trial.

Legal experts say such suits rarely succeed, in part because it’s so hard to prove that jail medical care was so bad that it violated someone’s constitutional rights.

But the failure to meet a legal standard doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem. Correctional health care experts said Mississippi’s practice of jailing people solely because they’re mentally ill or addicted to drugs or alcohol has caused deaths that could have been prevented.

“It’s taking people with a suspected health problem and putting them in a place that is likely going to increase their risk of dying from that health problem. The health risks of jail are well established, and they include suicide,” said Dr. Homer Venters, former chief medical officer of New York City jails.

“It’s a terrifying practice.”

Unwatched and Unprotected

Vanessa Saba, special to ProPublica. Source image obtained by Mississippi Today and ProPublica.

After Scipper took office as Quitman County chancery clerk in 1992, he started handling up to 100 civil commitments a year. He instructed family members on how to file the paperwork, waited for judges to order people into treatment and, if families didn’t want them at home, figured out where to hold them in the meantime. “We used to just automatically put them in the jailhouse,” he said.

In 2006, a man came to Scipper’s office to file commitment papers after his son attacked him. The father was concerned the young man, Tyrone Compton, would hurt himself. Later that day, Compton hanged himself from a set of bars mounted in front of a window in his cell.

Seven months later, Brandon Raymond hanged himself from the same bars as he waited to be taken to a state hospital for drug rehab. It wasn’t until after his death that a piece of metal was welded onto the bars, even though the jail administrator had warned county officials about the danger after the first suicide, according to a deposition in a lawsuit filed over Raymond’s death.

It was an obvious shortcoming. For years, suicide was the leading cause of death in U.S. jails, primarily from hanging. Long-accepted standards direct jail staff to keep people who are at risk of suicide away from bars or protrusions.

A review of court filings and investigations related to the suicides points to shortcomings in how people going through the commitment process were screened for suicide risk, where they were held and how they were monitored.

Suicide prevention policies that address these issues have long been recognized as an essential element of jail medical care. But the former Quitman County jail administrator testified that he didn’t know about any policies whatsoever at the time of Compton and Raymond’s deaths.

David Fathi, an attorney who has worked on litigation over jail and prison conditions for more than 25 years and now serves as director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, reviewed suicide prevention policies that were in effect at five Mississippi jails where several people died by suicide. Some, he said, were “among the worst policies I’ve ever seen.” One policy said staff could turn off water in a cell to reduce the risk of self-harm — a practice Fathi said has resulted in deaths by dehydration of people with mental illness.

“To send people to jail because they have mental illness, and to send them to a jail that has either flagrantly inadequate suicide policies or no suicide policy at all, is a recipe for disaster,” Fathi said.

If you or someone you know needs help:

  • Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988
  • Text the Crisis Text Line from anywhere in the U.S. to reach a crisis counselor: 741741

Screening inmates for suicide risk is a key part of such policies, and it’s a standard part of the booking process at jails across the country. Staff should ask inmates multiple questions, ranging from explicit ones about whether they have considered suicide to less direct ones like “Have you ever wished you were dead or wished you could go to sleep and not wake up?”

At least six of the nine people who killed themselves, including Compton and Raymond, weren’t screened at all or underwent screenings that didn’t meet national standards, according to depositions and jail records.

For nearly three years after Raymond died without being screened, staff still did not conduct screenings for medical or psychiatric issues, according to depositions. Jail policy had required such screenings for years, but employees, including the former jail administrator, didn’t know that, according to depositions.

Quitman County’s current medical questionnaire does ask staff to determine whether the inmate is “so disoriented or mentally confused as to suggest the risk of suicide,” but leaders in correctional health care told Mississippi Today and ProPublica that’s not sufficient.

Brandon Raymond’s sister, Stacy Raymond, has few pictures of her brother; she got this one from a Facebook memorial post. She said if she had known he would die so young, she would’ve taken more photos. She described him as big-hearted, always happy and a devoted father to his son. Credit: Photo courtesy Stacy Raymond

“I can still see Brandon in my yard. I can still see Brandon coming in my front door. I’ve lost my daddy, and I’ve lost my mama, but it’s nothing like my baby.”

Sandra Pruitt, mother of Brandon Raymond, in a deposition

Compton’s father and Raymond’s mother filed lawsuits against Quitman County, the sheriff and sheriff’s department staff. In response to the Compton lawsuit, the defendants argued they were shielded by qualified immunity, a doctrine that protects government officials from liability for violations of constitutional rights that are not clearly established. They also argued that Compton’s death was the result of his own conduct and that even if his rights had been violated, it wouldn’t have been due to a county policy.

In response to the Raymond lawsuit, defendants argued that qualified immunity applied, jail staff had no reason to believe Raymond was at risk of suicide, and no county policy led to a violation of his rights.

Quitman County settled both lawsuits for undisclosed sums. The sheriff and county officials other than Scipper did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Once people are booked into jail, there are nationally accepted guidelines on what staff should do to prevent people from killing themselves.

People who are seriously mentally ill are “naturally at higher risk for suicide,” said Dr. Brent Gibson, former chief health officer at the National Commission on Correctional Health Care and founder of the health care consulting company Avocet Enterprises. “All of these people should be directly observed in some kind of way.”

Staff should check on people at risk of suicide at irregular intervals of no more than 15 minutes, according to standards developed by the National Commission on Correctional Health Care. People who are trying to hurt themselves or say they plan to do so should be watched constantly. At-risk inmates should be housed in cells that are “suicide-resistant.” If necessary, their clothes and bedding should be replaced with smocks and blankets made of thick, sturdy material.

Before all nine suicides in Mississippi jails, those things didn’t happen — in part because at least two inmates were never screened in the first place — according to depositions, Mississippi Bureau of Investigation reports and jail records. Just one person was put on suicide watch and housed in a suicide-resistant cell. At least eight weren’t monitored as frequently as guidelines say. At least seven of the eight who hanged themselves weren’t provided with special clothing or blankets. At one jail, the policy was to put someone on suicide watch only if they had attempted suicide there.

Quitman County Sheriff Oliver Parker said in a deposition that his staff did not keep an especially close eye on Raymond because his commitment did not stem from a suicide attempt.

In 2019, 12 years after Raymond died, Brian Sneed was booked into the Quitman County jail without criminal charges as he awaited a drug rehab bed. When the 52-year-old welder was discovered dead from suicide, it had been more than an hour since jail staff had checked on him, according to a Mississippi Bureau of Investigation report.

Quitman County Chancery Clerk Butch Scipper poses for a portrait at the Quitman County Courthouse in Marks, Miss., Friday, June 16, 2023. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today

“They may die out on the street — I can’t say they don’t. But in a jail cell is just not a good spot for them.”

Quitman County Chancery Clerk Butch Scipper

After Sneed’s death, Scipper concluded he couldn’t guarantee people waiting for treatment would be safe in jail. “I said right then, they may die out on the street — I can’t say they don’t,” he said in an interview. “But in a jail cell is just not a good spot for them.”

Now, he tells people to wait at home until a publicly funded treatment bed is available. Nothing in state law prohibits that, though the state Department of Mental Health says people who are well enough to wait at home may not actually need to be committed.

When The Doctor’s Waiting Room is a Jail Cell

Vanessa Saba, special to ProPublica. Source images obtained by Mississippi Today and ProPublica.

The bare-bones medical care in many Mississippi jails can be dangerous for people who are mentally ill even if they aren’t suicidal.

Over the three days that Princess Anderson was held in the Marshall County jail awaiting a commitment hearing in February 2011, her physical condition declined precipitously. Jail staff did little to inquire about her medical history, according to depositions in a lawsuit later filed over her death. And staff failed to call for help as she exhibited signs of medical distress.

Angela Anderson wrote in a text message that her daughter Princess Anderson, at left with unidentified people, had a “Beautiful Spirit that she carried everywhere.” Angela Anderson testified that hospital staff wouldn’t let her take her daughter home because commitment proceedings were underway. She was surprised to learn that meant Princess would wait in jail for psychiatric treatment. Credit: Photo courtesy Angela Anderson

“I would never ever thought in my life that anything like this would ever go on, you know, what happened to my child. … They’re supposed to be protecting you. They supposed to be caring for you.”

Angela Anderson, mother of Princess Anderson

By the time Anderson arrived at a hospital, “she may very well have been one of the sickest patients I’ve ever seen,” her attending physician in the intensive care unit testified in that lawsuit.

Anderson’s journey through the commitment process had started four days before, when she went to a hospital near Memphis and learned she might be suffering from an ectopic pregnancy, a painful and possibly fatal condition. She was released but later that day went to Baptist Memorial Hospital-DeSoto, where she reported that she had ingested cough syrup and marijuana and complained of nausea and anxiety. After she shoved nurses and screamed that she was going to die, a mental health assessor working on behalf of the hospital filed paperwork to have her involuntarily committed.

Anderson was taken in shackles from the hospital to the jail in neighboring Marshall County, where she lived, to await a psychiatric evaluation. On one jail document, her “most serious charge” was recorded as “LUNACY.”

Booking officer Adella Anderson, who is not related to Princess Anderson, handled the medical screening. Princess Anderson didn’t respond to her questions, so the booking officer later testified that she filled out the screening form with the limited information in the commitment paperwork.

Experts said the booking officer should not have simply stopped her inquiries because Anderson didn’t respond; she should have asked a mental health professional to gather more information.

The booking officer testified that she knew Anderson had been brought from a hospital but didn’t find out why. She said she didn’t open an envelope containing Anderson’s medical records because she thought that was illegal. (The law allows correctional staff to review medical records if necessary, but experts said such staff should be trained in doing so, and she was not.) If she had opened the envelope, she might have seen hospital paperwork about the ectopic pregnancy.

Gibson said he has seen “numerous deaths” occur after a jail staffer gave up on a medical screening because an inmate didn’t provide information. “If someone is literally not responsive, they probably shouldn’t be in the jail at all — they should be in the hospital,” he said.

Efforts to reach Adella Anderson by email, phone and mail were unsuccessful.

The next day, an employee of Communicare, the local community mental health center, tried to evaluate Princess Anderson. Again, she was “unresponsive,” according to the form that therapist Debra Shelton filled out. Shelton used paperwork from the hospital to complete the form, concluding that Anderson had tried to harm herself after learning she was pregnant. “Recommend immediate transfer to hospital” for psychosis, Shelton wrote. (Efforts to reach her for this story were unsuccessful.)

Instead of being hospitalized, Anderson was left alone in her cell with inconsistent monitoring until she could be evaluated further as part of the commitment process.

If she had been in a state psychiatric hospital, medical professionals would have routinely checked her vital signs. That’s important because people with mental illness may not recognize signs of physical illness and ask for help, correctional health care experts said. In jail, however, none of the staff were required to have any medical training aside from CPR.

Over the next two days, Anderson’s condition became increasingly concerning to those around her — but not to jail staff, according to depositions.

She removed her clothes and, according to an inmate’s testimony, lay on the floor in a pool of water for hours at a time. “There wasn’t nothing abnormal for her to get on the floor,” the booking officer later testified. “Most lunacies do that.”

Anderson got sicker. She barely spoke. Her fingers bled from scratching the walls. When she foamed at the mouth, inmates beat on a cell block door for help and told jailers they thought she was having a seizure. Two inmates called 911. Even “the church people” who regularly came to the jail tried to get staff to call an ambulance, one inmate testified.

The booking officer later testified that she didn’t take those calls for help seriously. Inmates “do that with everybody,” she said.

Greifinger, the former chief medical officer for the New York state prison system, said that kind of thinking is common among correctional staff around the country. Even when they see an inmate vomiting or know someone hasn’t eaten for days, he said, “there’s a tremendous culture of disbelief that’s rampant.”

Meanwhile, Anderson’s mother, Angela Anderson, found hospital paperwork saying her daughter might have an ectopic pregnancy. Angela Anderson went to the courthouse to ask if she could take her daughter to a hospital for an ultrasound.

Sarah Liddy, the special master presiding over Princess Anderson’s commitment proceedings, allowed the young woman to leave the jail only after her mother signed a document promising to pay for her medical care. Liddy didn’t respond to a request for comment for this article.

When Angela Anderson arrived at the jail, she found a horrifying scene, according to her testimony. Her daughter was lying on the floor, in two inches of water, feces and vomit. Her fingernails were broken off and there was blood on the walls. Princess was unconscious, only able to groan. Angela begged jail staff to call 911, testifying later that she felt “like a fool” for calling for help from inside a jail.

Princess Anderson was admitted to an ICU with a diagnosis of psychosis, acute renal failure, a metabolic disorder and sepsis. She died a month later at the same hospital where staff had started the legal process that landed her in jail.

According to her autopsy report, Anderson may have experienced a miscarriage in jail. Based on the autopsy and the available information, a medical examiner concluded that she died from multisystem organ failure of an unknown cause.

Dr. Marc F. Stern, a professor at the University of Washington and former medical director for the Washington State Department of Corrections, reviewed key facts of Anderson’s case. He said the behavior that caused hospital staff to initiate commitment proceedings may have been caused by an underlying medical issue.

What happened to Anderson, he said, shows that Mississippi’s practice of jailing people who need medical care is “dangerous, unconscionable, and inhumane.”

‘Ignoble, Sordid, Upsetting, and Tragic.’ But Not Unconstitutional.

anessa Saba, special to ProPublica. Source image obtained by Mississippi Today and ProPublica.

When Anderson died, her mother sued Marshall County and Sheriff Kenny Dickerson, as well as Baptist Memorial Hospital-DeSoto. Hers was one of at least nine lawsuits filed by families seeking to hold accountable the people who had detained their loved ones.

Outside of criminal charges, such lawsuits are typically the only option relatives have. Eight of those suits have run their course; none have resulted in court rulings holding anyone liable.

Unlike the vast majority of Americans, incarcerated people have a constitutional right to health care, thanks to a 1976 Supreme Court decision. But in order to prove that insufficient medical care violated an inmate’s constitutional rights, a plaintiff must demonstrate “deliberate indifference” — that staff knew an inmate needed medical attention or was at risk of suicide, but did little or nothing in response.

“That’s a super hard standard to meet,” said Michele Deitch, an expert on jail oversight and director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. “You have to get into the head of the person who caused harm,” she said. “They had to know there was a risk of serious harm, and then they did this thing anyway, not caring.”

Princess Anderson’s mother couldn’t meet that standard.

Her suit alleged the sheriff’s office was deliberately indifferent to Princess Anderson’s medical needs. Attorneys representing the sheriff and the county argued the sheriff was entitled to qualified immunity and that jail staff had taken measures to care for Anderson, pointing out that hospital staff had medically cleared her to be taken to jail. The sheriff and other county officials didn’t respond to inquiries for this article.

The suit also alleged that the hospital failed to diagnose the cause of Princess Anderson’s altered mental state and stabilize her and that it handed her over to deputies without proper instructions. In response, the hospital argued that it was protected by a provision of Mississippi law that says anyone “acting in good faith” during the civil commitment process can’t be held liable.

A federal judge dismissed the case against the sheriff based on qualified immunity. The county was later dismissed as a defendant because jail policies were not the “moving force” behind Anderson’s death and jail staff had “periodically” monitored her.

“Officers observed Anderson’s pattern of taking off her clothes and lying on the floor, but they found this conduct to be consistent with other mentally ill inmates at the jail,” U.S. District Judge Debra M. Brown wrote in her December 2014 opinion.

Angela Anderson appealed that decision to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. In their ruling, circuit judges called Princess Anderson’s death “ignoble, sordid, upsetting, and tragic.” But they agreed that Anderson’s mother had not proven that officials had acted with deliberate indifference.

All of the lawsuits filed over these deaths alleged the care provided in jail demonstrated deliberate indifference. In the three cases in which judges issued rulings, none found those arguments persuasive.

Anderson’s suit against the hospital eventually went to trial in state court. A jury sided with the hospital.

In an email, Baptist Memorial Health Care’s director of public relations, Kim Alexander, wrote of Princess Anderson, “I am confident our medical team did everything they could to help her and provide compassionate treatment while she was in our care.”

“We are saddened by outcomes like Ms. Anderson’s,” Alexander wrote, “and fully support efforts by our state and mental health professionals to refine our mental health system.”

Eight of the nine counties where people died as they went through the commitment process, including Marshall County, still jail those people. Quitman, where Scipper works, no longer does.

Do you have a story to share about someone who went through the civil commitment process in Mississippi? Contact Isabelle Taft at itaft@mississippitoday.org or call her at (601) 691-4756.

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

Mississippi Today

Early voting proposal killed on last day of Mississippi legislative session

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-03 13:02:00

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 Legislature approves DEI ban after heated debate

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-02 16:34:00

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.

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House gives Senate 5 p.m. deadline to come to table, or legislative session ends with no state budget

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-02 16:13:00

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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