A bill to license and regulate professional midwifery died on the calendar without a vote after Public Health Chair Hob Bryan, D-Amory, did not bring it up in committee before the deadline Tuesday night. 

Bryan said he didn’t take the legislation up this year because he’s not in favor of encouraging midwives to handle births independently from OB-GYNs – even though they already do, and keeping them unlicensed makes it easier for untrained midwives to practice. The proposed legislation would create stricter standards around who can call themselves a midwife – but Bryan doesn’t want to pass legislation recognizing the group at all.

“I don’t wish to encourage that activity,” he told Mississippi Today.

Midwifery is one of the oldest professions in the world. 

Proponents of the legislation say it would legitimize the profession, create a clear pathway toward midwifery in Mississippi, and increase the number of midwives in a state riddled with maternity health care deserts. 

Opponents of the proposal exist on either end of the spectrum. Some think it does too much and limits the freedom of those currently practicing as midwives in the state, while others say it doesn’t do enough to regulate the profession or protect the public.

The bill, authored by Rep. Dana McLean, R-Columbus, made it further than it has in years past, passing the full House mid-February. 

As it stands, Mississippi is one of 13 states that has no regulations around professional midwifery – a freedom that hasn’t benefited midwives or mothers, advocates say.

Tanya Smith-Johnson is a midwife on the board of Better Birth Mississippi, a group advocating for licensure. 

“Consumers should be able to birth wherever they want and with whom they want – but they should know who is a midwife and who isn’t,” Smith-Johnson said. “… It’s hard for a midwife to be sustainable here … What is the standard of how much midwifery can cost if anyone and everyone can say they’re a midwife?”

There are some midwives — though it isn’t clear there are many — who do not favor licensure.

One such midwife posted in a private Facebook group lamenting the legislation, which would make it illegal for her to continue to practice under the title “midwife” without undergoing the required training and certification decided by the board.

On the other end of the spectrum, among those who think the bill doesn’t go far enough in regulating midwives, is Getty Israel, founder of community health clinic Sisters in Birth – though she said she would rather have seen the bill amended than killed. Israel wanted the bill to be amended in several ways, including to mandate midwives pay for professional liability insurance, which it did not.

“As a public health expert, I support licensing and regulating all health care providers, including direct entry midwives, who are providing care for the most vulnerable population, pregnant women,” she said. “To that end, direct entry midwives should be required to carry professional liability insurance, as are certified nurse midwives, to protect ill-informed consumers.”

The longer Mississippi midwives go without licensure, the closer they get to being regulated by doctors who don’t have midwives’ best interests in mind. 

That’s part of why the group Better Birth felt an urgency in getting legislation passed this year. 

“I think there’s just been more iffy situations happening in the state, and it’s caused the midwives to realize that if we don’t do something now, it’s going to get done for us,” said Erin Raftery, president of the group.

Raftery says she was inspired to see the bill make headway this year after not making it out of committee several years in a row. 

“We are hopeful that next year this bill will pass and open doors that improve outcomes in our state,” she said. “Mississippi families deserve safe, competent community midwifery care.”

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

The worst-kept secret about Mississippi’s elections is that any voter can vote by absentee each cycle if they are willing to lie.

Prosecutors, election officials and lawmakers know about it, and there’s very little they can do about it.

Exhibit A for this glaring flaw came when Rep. Becky Currie, a Republican from Brookhaven, admitted in a House Elections Committee meeting last week that she previously lied on absentee ballot applications but no longer does because she is over 65 — one of the legal reasons for voting absentee. 

“I finally got old enough that I don’t have to lie,” Currie said, and members of the committee laughed in response. 

To be fair to Currie, she’s by far not the only person in Mississippi who has done this, and her honesty is refreshing. Numerous people each election cycle do the same thing she’s done. 

In fact, Secretary of State Michael Watson, the state’s top elections administrator, acknowledged in a November interview on Mississippi Today’s, “The Other Side” podcast, this practice happens and there’s virtually no way to verify if people are being honest on these forms.

This is why it was surprising that House Elections Committee Chairman Noah Sanford last week successfully pushed to expand this system further by scrapping a Senate bill to establish no-excuse early voting in the state and replace it with a proposal to add a new excuse to the absentee voting system. 

Sanford’s proposal adds an excuse for people who care for children or disabled adults to vote by absentee. His measure also clarifies that people who anticipate having to work on Election Day can vote absentee.

The way a person votes by absentee is they go to their local circuit clerk’s office, request to vote absentee, and the circuit clerk’s employee gives them an absentee ballot application. 

The voter then must check one of around 12 legal excuses for voting absentee. These excuses range from being temporarily disabled, being in college, or being older than 65. A Mississippi voter is not supposed to simply vote absentee out of convenience. 

But what they can do is say on their application that they will be out of the county on Election Day, when, in reality, they’re binge watching the latest season of “Severance,” violating the law. Yet will anyone prosecute them? More than likely not. 

The application clearly states at the end, “I realize that I can be fined up to $5,000 and sentenced up to five years in the penitentiary for making a false statement in this application and for selling my vote and violating the Mississippi Absentee Voter Law.”  

But there’s no realistic way for anyone to police this, and local prosecutors dealing with more serious crimes likely wouldn’t want to prosecute anyone over this anyway. 

To sum it up, nearly everyone who deals with elections knows voters routinely lie on these forms, legislators are laughing about it at the Capitol and are pushing to expand this program. 

Given that the national and state Republican Party claims to care about election integrity and ballot security, why would Sanford and House leaders opt for this absurd system that in its strictest and technical interpretation, is ripe with voter fraud, instead of a much cleaner, more straightforward early voting bill? 

Sanford told reporters this week that he is personally OK with some form of early voting, but he doesn’t have enough support from colleagues to pass the measure. Sanford said he didn’t know why other House members oppose early voting. 

Instead, he’s offering an expanded absentee balloting proposal as an alternative way to keep the conversation alive at the Capitol. Senate Elections Chairman Jeremy England told Mississippi Today if the proposal passes the House, he will negotiate with Sanford later in a conference committee.  

Perhaps a reason House leaders are trying to push a convoluted absentee ballot system is because they’re scared of mean tweets from Republican Gov. Tate Reeves, who has come out in opposition to early voting because he says Democrats want it. 

Reeves previously blasted England for shepherding the early voting bill through the Senate and inaccurately claimed a Democratic senator labeled the measure as one of his priorities. 

Instead, the governor and the House, at least for now, seem content with, again, being an outlier among the vast majority of states, including Republican states, on early voting.  

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

by Jimmie E. Gates, Mississippi Today, Mississippi Today
March 5, 2025

The former head of the office for discipline of attorneys in Wisconsin has filed a complaint with the Mississippi Supreme Court stating retired prosecutor Doug Evans should face suspension from the practice of law for misconduct in the prosecution of Curtis Giovanni Flowers.

Flowers spent 23 in prison, most of it on death row. Flowers was tried six times for the 1996 murders of four people in a furniture store in Winona. After the sixth reversal, the state dropped its case against him.

Evans prosecuted all six trials against Flowers. None of the trials resulted in a legally valid conviction. Four of them resulted in capital murder convictions and death sentences, all of which were overturned because of Evans’ misconduct, including what the United States Supreme Court described as a “relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of black individuals” throughout the course of the trials, according to a settled federal lawsuit filed on behalf of Flowers.

Gerald ”Jerry” Sternberg of Madison, Wisconsin, first filed a complaint with the Mississippi State Bar in 2021 against Evans but said in a complaint with the Mississippi Supreme Court last year the Bar never acted on his complaint.

Sternberg served almost 16 years as administrator of the Wisconsin Supreme Court Board of Attorneys Professional Responsibility. In that role, he said he prosecuted attorneys, including some prosecutors, for actions deemed less severe than Evans’ actions in the Flowers’ case.

Sternberg said in his complaint that Mississippi Bar’s Committee on Professional Responsibility has been utterly feckless in addressing serious misconduct by a prosecutor, citing unexcused delays and not being transparent. He said the only thing he heard from the Bar was when the case was on the agenda.

However, he said Bar officials indicated action would be deferred as long as a federal lawsuit filed by Flowers against Evans and others was pending. The federal lawsuit was settled in 2023. Also, Evans retired in 2023 after the settlement. He is retired but has been performing some private law practice in Grenada.

Despite retiring as district attorney, Evans should still face disciplinary action, according to Sternberg.

Evans, reached by phone March 3, said Sternberg doesn’t know him or anything about the case. He said Sternberg is only seeking publicity. Evans has repeatedly said he believed Flowers was guilty and he was doing his job as a prosecutor.

Sternberg said he became interested in the case after watching a broadcast by CBS “60 Minutes” news magazine about the Flowers’ case.

Sternberg said he was assured by the then-Bar’s general counsel, Adam Kilgore, that Evans’ retirement wouldn’t affect his ethics complaint. Kilgore retired from the Bar at the end of last year. Mississippi Today contacted Kilgore about Evans’ complaint. He referred our inquiry to current Bar General Counsel Melissa Scott.

Scott said Bar rules prohibit disciplinary agents and their staff from disclosing information relating to informal Bar complaints unless an accused attorney makes a public statement, or a formal complaint is filed with the Mississippi Supreme Court.

Sternberg said in Flowers’ first trial, on appeal, the court found Evans committed prosecutorial misconduct. In the second trial, the court found Evans committed prosecutorial misconduct by discriminating on the basis of race in striking a Black potential juror from consideration.

In Flowers’ third trial, his conviction was also overturned on appeal, citing Evans’ challenges in jury selection were racially motivated and thus unconstitutional. His four and fifth trials ended in hung juries.

In his sixth and final trial, on appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Evans violated the Batson decision, which prohibits discriminatory reasons in excluding potential jurors in a case.

When asked if she believes Evans should face disciplinary action, Cornell University Law Professor Sheri Lynn Johnson, who successfully argued Flowers’ appeal to the high court, said she would repeat what she told Supreme Court justices:

“The only plausible interpretation of all of the evidence viewed cumulatively is that Doug Evans began jury selection in Flowers VI with an unconstitutional end in mind, to seat as few African American jurors as he could.” Seven justices agreed. I am not a Mississippi lawyer, but I would hope that in every state deliberate violation of the Constitution would incur some professional cost,” Johnson said.

Sternberg said he believes the suspension of Evans’ license to practice law is appropriate to deter other prosecutors from engaging in similar misconduct and to send a clear message that his conduct in the past as district attorney is unacceptable.

District attorneys have tremendous power over people’s lives given their power to charge people with criminal activity, according to Sternberg. He said prosecutors have to exercise their power wisely. They are also supposed to fulfill the role of a minister of justice, not simply tallying up wins and losses, but rather, striking fair blows, he said.

“With these multiple acts of prosecutorial misconduct across at least four Curtis Flowers trials and Curtis Flowers serving more than 20 years in prison and death row, an analysis would be essential as to whether these acts of prosecutorial misconduct also were violations of the Mississippi Rules of Professional Conduct,” Sternberg wrote to state Supreme Court.

Hubbard T. Saunders, court administrator and counsel for the Mississippi Supreme Court, has acknowledged the court received Sternberg’s letters of complaint. Court officials, however, said there was no formal action before the court on Evans.

After the case was returned to the trial court for a potential seventh trial, Flowers was released on bail on Dec. 16, 2019. Evans then withdrew from the case in the face of a motion to recuse him. The Mississippi attorney general was appointed in his place.

Attorney General Lynn Fitch moved to dismiss the charges with prejudice – meaning they can’t be brought back up – after an independent review of the evidence. Flowers’ trial court judge granted that motion to dismiss the charges against Flowers in September 2020.

After the charges were dropped against Flowers, a court cleared him of any involvement in the crime and the state awarded him a total of $500,000, spread over 10 years, from the wrongly convicted fund.

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