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Mississippi Today

New faces emerge as winners in sheriffs and DA races

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Over 20 new sheriffs and three new district attorneys are expected to take office next year following last week’s primary elections, and that number could grow after runoff elections later this month and the November general election.

There are at least a dozen runoff sheriff elections scheduled for Aug. 29, according to a review of unofficial election results, and a dozen sheriff incumbents who ran without opponents who will face a challenger on Nov 7.

About half of the state’s incumbent sheriffs faced no challengers and are expected to be the only name on the ballot in the general election. The same is true for most of the state’s district attorneys and coroners.

Here is a look at wins and losses from the primary elections and what is to come for the runoffs and general election.

Sheriffs

Clay County: Sheriff Eddie Scott won the Democratic primary against challengers Chief Deputy Sheriff Ramirez Williams and law enforcement officer Cedric Sykes with 51% of the vote, according to unofficial election results.

Scott was the subject of a July investigation by Mississippi Today and the New York Times that details accusations that he used his office’s power to harass women who were detained at the jail or worked for the sheriff’s office, coerce some into sex and retaliate against those who alleged abuse or criticsized him.

In an interview with Mississippi Today, Scott denied the allegations. 

Last month, he said he would be vindicated and that voters would see through the allegations to re-elect him.

DeSoto County: Thomas Tuggle will become the county’s first Black sheriff since Reconstruction. He ran against County Supervisor Michael Lee in the GOP primary to replace Sheriff Bill Rasco, who will retire after 15 years.

Tuggle, a Republican, is a Marine Corps veteran and worked in local and state law enforcement, including as director of the Mississippi Law Enforcement Officer Training Academy. Lee is also a former law enforcement officer.

Hinds County: Incumbent Tyree Jones won about 70% of the vote in a second faceoff against former interim sheriff Marshand Crisler, who is under federal indictment on bribery charges.

Jones will face Independent candidate Reginald Thompson, who has worked for the sheriff’s office and the Bolton Police Department.

Lauderdale County: Chief Deputy Sheriff Ward Calhoun and Lauderdale County Justice Court Judge Ricky Roberts faced off in the GOP primary to succeed longtime Sheriff William “Billy” Sollie.

Calhoun will face Gerald Reon Johnson, a Democrat who has worked as an auxiliary officer with the Meridian Police Department and operated a private security agency.

District Attorney

5th Circuit Court District: Assistant District Attorney William Adam Hopper won the GOP primary against fellow ADA Rosaline Jordan.

Instead of waiting until January to take office, Hopper will step into the role this week after Gov. Tate Reeves appointed him to serve the remainder of Doug Evans’ term.

Evans retired in June instead of finishing out his term. He ran for 5th Circuit Court judge last year, but lost in a runoff election to then-Winona Municipal Court Judge Alan “Devo” Lancaster.

Hopper worked with Evans on the Curtis Flowers case. Flowers faced six prosecutions by Evans and his team of assistant district attorneys for the 1997 killings of four people at the Tardy Furniture Store in Winona. Four of those convictions included the death penalty, but they were overturned by state and federal courts.

In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Flowers’ conviction, saying Evans barred Black jurors in the case. A year later the state dropped charges against Flowers after he spent 23 years in prison.

6th Circuit Court District (Adams, Amite, Franklin and Wilkinson counties): Incumbent District Attorney Shameca Collins is seeking a second term, and will face Independent Tim Cotton, a Natchez attorney, in the general election.

Jody Owens Credit: Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today, Report For America

7th Circuit Court District (Hinds County): Incumbent Jody Owens, also seeking a second term, will face a challenge from Independent Darla Palmer in November. Owens faced off against the Jackson attorney in the 2019 Democratic primary.

14th Circuit Court District (Lincoln, Pike and Walthall counties): Democrat Patrick Beasley and Republican Brandon Adams are seeking to succeed District Attorney Dewitt “Dee Bates,” who has been in office since 2003.

16th Circuit Court District (Clay, Oktibbeha, Lowndes and Noxubee counties): Assistant District Attorney J. Douglas “Jase” Dalrymple II won the GOP primary against ADA Chuck Easley. The current incumbent district attorney, Scott Colom, was the only candidate listed on the democratic primary ballot and will face Dalrymple in November.

Colom was nominated last year for a judgeship with the U.S. District Court of Northern Mississippi, but that confirmation has been held up by Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith.

23rd Circuit Court District: This is the first elected, full term for a district attorney to represent DeSoto County, which was made into its own judicial district earlier this year.

Special prosecutor and private attorney Matthew Barton beat Robert ‘Bob’ Reid Morris III in the GOP primary with about 60% of the vote, according to unofficial results.

Gov. Reeves appointed then-assistant district attorney Morris to become district attorney

in September after the death of John Champion and prior to DeSoto becoming its own judicial district.

Barton said most of DeSoto’s crime problems are because of Memphis and he said the office would bring harsher penalties for people from there who commit crimes in the county, according to his campaign website.

“Stop Memphis. Save Desoto” he said in a post announcing his primary win.

Lauderdale County Coroner: For the first time in decades, the country won’t have a coroner with the last name “Cobler.” Clayton Cobler is the current coroner, and his father, Marl Cobler, also served in that role before him. Clayon Cobler has served for 20 years in that position; his father for 24.

Two GOP candidates, Stella McMahan and Kenneth Graham, are headed to a runoff, local media reported from unofficial election results. The winner will face Democrat Rita Jackson in the general election.

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

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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 Today

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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Mississippi Today

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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