The House on Thursday will likely let a proposal that would restore voters’ right to sidestep the Legislature and put measures on a statewide ballot die without a vote.

House Constitution Chairman Price Wallace, a Republican from Mendenhall, told Mississippi Today that he would let the measure die by Thursday’s legislative deadline because he believed the Senate would not be receptive to any ballot initiative proposal. 

“They’re not taking it up on that end of the building, so there’s no sense in us fighting about it down here,” Wallace said of the Senate. 

This would be the fourth straight year that lawmakers at the Capitol have been unable to agree on restoring the ballot initiative after the state Supreme Court in 2021 ruled the state’s initiative was unworkable because of the signature-gathering process. 

Despite the Mississippi Constitution explicitly stating that voters still have a right to offer amendments through an initiative process, citizens have no process to change state laws or the state Constitution. 

Since the court’s ruling that the initiative process was invalidated, some lawmakers have questioned whether Mississippi needs an initiative and raised concerns that uber-wealthy out-of-state donors can use their wealth to manipulate voters through a ballot initiative. 

During the 30 years that the state had an initiative, only seven proposals made it to a statewide ballot: two initiatives for term limits, eminent domain, voter ID, a personhood amendment, medical marijuana and a measure forcing lawmakers to fund public education fully.

Of those seven, only eminent domain, voter ID and medical marijuana were approved by voters. The rest were rejected.

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

Feb. 13, 1960

Students, many of them students from Fisk University, began sit-ins in downtown Nashville, Tennessee. In the months that followed, more than 150 were arrested. 

Rather than pay fines, the students served their time in jail. When a mayor’s committee suggested separate “Black” and “White” sections at the lunch counters, the students balked. 

Two months later, a bomb exploded, nearly destroying the home of Z. Alexander Looby, the defense attorney representing many protesters. Later that day, more than 3,000 marched to city hall. 

Diane Nash asked the mayor if it was wrong for a citizen of Nashville to discriminate on the basis of color. The mayor admitted it was wrong. Confronted about the lunch counters, the mayor acknowledged they should be desegregated. Weeks later, six downtown stores desegregated their lunch counters, serving Black customers for the first time. 

James Lawson, who knew the principles of nonviolent resistance, led the students, many of whom became important leaders in the civil rights movement: Nash, John Lewis, James Bevel, C.T. Vivian, Marion Barry and Bernard Lafayette. David Halberstam captured their story in his book, “The Children.”

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

An effort to create a statewide board to study domestic violence deaths to uncover trends and guide opportunities for intervention, support and policy unanimously passed both legislative bodies. 

Senate Bill 2886 by Brice Wiggins, R-Pascagoula, passed last week and House Bill 1551 by Fabian Nelson, D-Byram, passed Wednesday. Now both bills will head to the opposite chamber and are expected to be heard in committee. 

“When we see domestic violence incidents, they’re just counted as murder and the person is charged with murder and guess what? It’s not looked at any more, it’s not picked up to see what could we have done to stop it from getting here,” said Nelson on the House floor before the bill passed. 

The idea behind the legislation came through the Mississippi Coalition Against Domestic Violence, which represents survivors, shelters and advocates. 

Supporters have said data from a review board can help shelters and other providers see gaps in services and find ways to decrease and prevent domestic violence fatalities. They also see it as a way to encourage collaboration among shelters, the medical system, law enforcement, courts and other systems. 

The board could look at information from a number of sources including whether the victim had any domestic abuse protection orders and whether law enforcement was called multiple times to a location, well as medical and mental health records, court documents and prison records on parole and probation.  

“We have to keep people alive, but to do that, we have to have the infrastructure as a system to appropriately respond to these things,” Stacey Riley, executive director of the Gulf Coast Center for Nonviolence and a board member of the Mississippi Coalition Against Domestic Violence, told Mississippi Today. 

Passage of the bills come after a year where nearly 100 Mississippians died in domestic violence homicides, according to data compiled by Mississippi Today. 

After the 2024 legislative session, Mississippi Today began to track domestic violence fatalities similar to the way the review board would do. The organization’s compilation of data found 80 incidents that resulted in at least 100 deaths.

Victims were mostly women killed by male partners, which is in line with national statistics and trends about intimate partner violence. Other victims included men – victims and perpetrators – and a few children. Domestic incidents were also family violence between children, parents, grandparents and other members. 

Most of the compiled deaths involved a firearm, which research has shown is involved in more than half of homicides committed by an intimate partner. 

Both bills this session would create a board with appointed members with backgrounds in domestic violence, health and criminal justice – people who interact with victims and survivors. 

The Senate version would place the board under the Department of Public Safety, while the House version would place the board in the State Department of Health, which has similar boards that review child and maternal deaths. 

Last year, a bill that would have created the review board did not make it out of committee. 

Mississippi is one of several states without a domestic violence fatality review board, and without collecting information about fatalities, advocates say it’s difficult to know how many deaths and injuries there are in the state in any year. 

Meanwhile, several other domestic violence bills did not advance out of committee this session, including ones that proposed making second domestic violence conviction a felony, allowing judges to hold people charged with domestic violence for at least 24 hours, letting certain courts issue temporary protection orders and establishing domestic abuse court programs. 

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