Mississippi Today

Rankin County DA reviewing ‘Goon Squad’ cases. Legal experts say that’s not enough.

Published

8 months ago

March 11, 2024

Rankin County DA reviewing ‘Goon Squad’ cases. Legal experts say that’s not enough.

Rankin County District Attorney Bubba Bramlett confirmed that his office is reviewing criminal cases involving Rankin County’s “Goon Squad,” but he won’t divulge details, including how many cases have been dismissed and how far back his review will go.

In August, five deputies for the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department and a Richland police officer pleaded guilty to state and federal charges in a “Goon Squad” operation. Seven months earlier, they broke into a house without a warrant, tortured two Black men, Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker, threatened to use a sex toy on them and shoved a gun in Jenkins’ mouth and shot him. To conceal their crimes, they destroyed surveillance footage, planted false evidence and lied to investigators.

What these six officers did “violated the public trust and shook the foundation of our justice system,” Bramlett told Mississippi Today in a statement.

After learning of these crimes, “my office immediately conducted an extensive review to identify any and all cases in which these officers were involved,” he said. “We then reviewed each of those identified cases to determine if their testimony would be essential in the prosecution of that case.

Rankin County District Attorney Bubba Bramlett Credit: Courtesy of DA Bramlett's website

“As a result, my office moved to dismiss those indicted cases and declined those cases which were not yet indicted, wherein the integrity of the investigation may have been compromised. This is an ongoing process in which we will continue to review and identify cases involving those officers and act accordingly.”

An investigation by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting at Mississippi Today and The New York Times uncovered allegations that torture, coerced statements and false incident reports involving these six officers and more than a dozen others may stretch back two decades. Some of those interviewed alleged that deputies also planted evidence and filed false charges against them.

On March 19-21, five former Rankin County deputies and one former Richland police officer are slated to be sentenced in federal court for their roles in the torture of Jenkins and Parker.

When Mississippi Today asked the district attorney how many cases have been dismissed so far, whose charges were dismissed and how far back prosecutors plan to go in examining cases, he declined to answer those questions.

Since last August, prosecutors have asked judges to dismiss 25 drug indictments in Rankin County Circuit Court.

Seven dismissals don’t appear connected to Goon Squad actions. In two cases, co-defendants took the blame for crimes. In another two, defendants died. In three cases, indictments were dismissed because defendants pleaded guilty in other cases or because of speedy trial issues.

One dismissal cited the involvement of a Goon Squad member: “The State has learned that former Rankin County Deputy Christian Dedmon’s involvement in this case would make a prosecution of this matter untenable.”

One mentions the unavailability of an essential witness, and another cites new evidence. One dismissal discusses “the discovery of facts that make a prosecution of this matter untenable.”

In the dismissal of 14 indictments, prosecutors gave no reason other than it was in “the interest of justice.”

Steven Drizin, co-director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University. Credit: Courtesy of Steven Drizin

Steven Drizin, co-director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, said a systematic review must take place of all cases involving these officers.

“It will be painful because it may require that many convictions are vacated, and many old wounds of victims will be reopened,” he said, “but it is necessary to restore the public’s faith in law enforcement and, in many instances, the district attorney’s office who relied on these officers for years and may have ignored warning signs.”

Drizin said the problem with prosecutors reviewing these cases is they “will have to judge some of their own colleagues and police officers who they may have worked with. Any review that they do will be subject to bias.”

Matt Steffey, professor of law at the Mississippi College School of Law, questioned why the district attorney limited his review to whether Goon Squad officers’ testimony was essential when these same officers have admitted they planted false evidence on innocent people.

He recommended that someone “do the tough work of looking at all cases” and that whoever does it, there must be transparency. Declining to say how far back prosecutors plan to go in looking at cases “is certainly not transparent,” he said.

Matt Steffey, professor of law at the Mississippi College School of Law Credit: Courtesy of MC School of Law

He noted that a review by prosecutors could be questioned because of potential conflicts. The sheriff’s daughter, Alexis Bailey Smith, works as an administrative assistant-paralegal in the district attorney’s office and earns $56,000 a year, according to the minutes of the Rankin County Board of Supervisors.

Steffey said Mississippi could model its approach after other states that have done systematic reviews.

In Chicago, a police detective and commander named Jon Graham Burge led a group of police known as the “Midnight Crew” and “Burge’s Ass-Kickers.” These detectives tortured more than 120 people, most of them Black men, between 1972 and 1991. The officers squeezed genitals, shoved guns in people’s mouths, beat them, suffocated them with plastic bags, burned them with cigarette lighters and used electrical shocks through a device Burge dubbed the “n—– box” to force false confessions.

In 1993, a decade after allegations of torture began to be exposed, Chicago police fired Burge, but it wasn’t until 2002 that a special prosecutor began to examine these allegations.

He conducted a four-year investigation that concluded these officers had likely committed torture but that their crimes couldn’t be prosecuted because they fell outside the statute of limitations.

Afterward, the governor stepped up and pardoned four of Burge’s victims, all of them on death row, after concluding they were innocent. Concluding the death penalty system was “fraught with error,” he also commuted the death sentences of the 167 others to life sentences.

In 2010, Burge was finally convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury and sentenced to more than four years in federal prison.

“The freedom that we treasure most of all in this country is the right to live free of governmental abuse of power,” U.S. District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow told him. “When a confession is coerced, the truth of the confession is called into question. When this becomes widespread …, the administration of justice is undermined irreparably. How can one trust that justice will be served when the justice system has been so defiled?”

In the wake of these revelations, the state of Illinois established a Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission for victims. So far, 211 people have filed claims.

Lawyers say a full review of Rankin County cases is needed. “It’s very clear there have been an untold number of convictions that were substantially procured through fraud, coercion or the planting of false evidence, which all these guys admitted to on some level,” said civil rights lawyer Trent Walker, who represents Jenkins and Parker.

Defense lawyer John Colette, who has represented many clients in Rankin County, said every case the Goon Squad members worked on could be called into question and that “an independent review” is needed to “ensure integrity.”

State Public Defender Andre de Gruy said to address this, the Legislature could provide extra funding to the Capital Post-Conviction Counsel to hire some temporary lawyers and investigators “to accept requests for case review from anyone convicted in Rankin County during the period.”

If lawyers reviewing each case found a basis for a post-conviction relief motion, they could file it, he said.

Senate Appropriations Chairman Briggs Hopson said he hasn’t talked to de Gruy about this idea, but his off-the-cuff reaction is that the U.S. attorney’s office or the Mississippi attorney general‘s office would handle such claims.

If wrongful convictions are proven, people are entitled to back pay, he said.. State law provides $50,000 for each year of wrongful incarceration with a ceiling of $500,000.

Tucker Carrington, executive director of the Mississippi Innocence Project, called on state officials to review all the cases involving any member of the “Goon Squad.”

After Innocence Project officials uncovered evidence that two men had been wrongly convicted of murder because of the testimony of bite expert Michael West and pathologist Dr. Steven Hayne, Carrington said then-Attorney General Jim Hood promised to review all of their cases.

But that never happened, he said, and the courts are still dealing with those cases, some of which have been overturned.

As a part of their cooperation with authorities, Goon Squad members should be required to tell all of the cases they “messed around with,” Carrington said. “It should be like these serial killers, who have to tell everything they did.”

J. Cliff Johnson, director of the University of Mississippi’s MacArthur Justice Center, said the state could follow the lead of Illinois in creating an independent commission, made up of those in law enforcement, the judiciary and the community, to examine these cases.

“When you have widely known and outrageous acts by officers over a 20-year period of time, you have a duty to the victims to right their wrongs,” he said. “The other obligation is to the community. An important part of that is to be absolutely transparent in providing a remedy so that the public can once again trust the process.”

Any efforts undertaken must recognize the injustice of what happened, identify victims and provide remedies, he said, because “our system already struggles with credibility and respect.”

Brian Howey and Nate Rosenfield contributed to this report. This article was supported in part by a grant from the Pulitzer Center.

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

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Mississippi Today

Senate panel weighs how much — or whether — to cut state taxes

Published

2 hours ago

November 4, 2024

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – Taylor Vance – 2024-11-04 15:42:00

A group of state senators on Monday grappled with how much to slash state taxes or if they should cut them at all, portending a major policy debate at the Capitol for next year’s legislative session.

The Senate Fiscal Policy Study Group solicited testimony from the state government‘s leading experts on budget, economic and tax policies to prepare for an almost certain intense debate in January over how much they should trim state taxes while balancing the need to fund government services.

Senate Finance Chairman Josh Harkins, a Republican from Flowood whose committee has jurisdiction over tax policy, told Mississippi Today that he wanted senators to have basic facts in front of them before they help decide next year if Mississippi should cut taxes.

“We’re getting a tax cut the next two years whether we do anything or not,” Harkins said. “I just want to make sure we have all the facts in front of people to understand we have a clear picture of how much revenue we’re bringing in.”

Mississippi is already phasing in a major tax cut. After a raucous debate in 2022, lawmakers agreed to phase in an income tax cut. In two years it will leave Mississippi with a flat 4% tax on income over $10,000, one of the lowest rates in the nation.

However, the top two legislative leaders, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann who oversees the Senate and House Speaker Jason White, have both recently said they want legislators to consider new tax cut policies.

Hosemann, the Republican leader of the Senate, has publicly said he would like to see the state’s grocery tax, the highest of its kind in the nation, reduced, though he hasn’t specified how much of a reduction or how long it would take for the cut to be implemented.

White, a Republican from West, said last week that he would like to see the state’s 4% income tax phased out and have the state’s 7% grocery tax cut in half over time.

“We are hoping to construct a tax system that, yes, prioritizes certain needs in our state, but it also protects and rewards taxpayers,” White said last week.

But it’s difficult to collect accurate data on the state’s grocery tax, and state lawmakers must grapple with a laundry list of spending needs and obligations based on testimony from state agency leaders on Monday.

Mississippi currently has a 7% sales tax, which is applied to groceries. The state collects the tax but remits 18.5% back to cities. For many municipalities, the sales tax is a significant source of revenue.

If state lawmakers want to reduce the grocery tax without impacting cities, they could pass a new law to change the diversion amounts or appropriate enough money to make the municipalities whole.

State Revenue Commissioner Chris Graham said the Mississippi Department of Revenue, the agency in charge of collecting state taxes, does not have a mechanism in place for accurately capturing how much money cities collect in grocery taxes. This is because the tax on groceries is the same as non-grocery items.

However, Graham estimates that the state collects roughly $540 million in taxes from grocery items.

The other problem lawmakers would have in implementing significant tax cuts is a growing list of spending needs in Mississippi, a state with abject poverty, water and sewer and other infrastructure woes and some of the worst health metrics in the nation.

Representatives from the Legislative Budget Office, the group that advises lawmakers on tax and spending policy, told senators that lawmakers will also be faced with rising costs in the public employee retirement system, the Medicaid budget, public education, state employee health insurance, and state infrastructure projects.

State agencies, including the employee retirement system, also requested $751 million more for the coming budget year.

“That’s the billion dollar question, I guess,” Senate Appropriations Chairman Briggs Hopson, a Republican from Vicksburg, said. “How we’re able to fund basic government services?”

Harkins and Hopson said the committee would likely meet again before the Legislature convenes for its 2025 session on January 7.

A House committee on tax cuts has also been holding hearings, and White in September held a summit on tax policy.

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

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Mississippi Today

Already dire lack of affordable housing for low-income Mississippians on verge of worsening

Published

6 hours ago

November 4, 2024

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – Simeon Gates – 2024-11-04 11:00:00

In Mississippi, where there’s already a dearth of 50,000 or more affordable homes for extremely low-income residents, that number could grow in the next five years.

Housing units available under the federal Low Income Tax Credit program could lose their affordability by 2030 –a number estimated nationwide to be 350,000 with 2,917 in Mississippi, alone; 496 in the state already have.

The federal program responsible for most of the nation’s affordable housing is expiring.

The Low Income Housing Tax Credit, introduced as part of the Tax Reform Act of 1986, provides for developers to buy, build and restore low-income housing units. Under the deal, the housing only needs to stay low-rent for 30 years. Construction began in the early 1990s.

Some LIHTC housing will remain affordable due to other subsidies, nonprofits, state law and individual landlords.

“I think the low-income housing tax credit has done everything that it can to address the need for affordable housing around the state,” said Scott Spivey, executive director of the Mississippi Housing Corporation, a state office that administers the program and works with the state government and those in the affordable housing industry to create and support affordable housing

Spivey supports the proposed Affordable Housing Credit and Improvement Act, a federal bill that would expand upon the low-income housing tax credit in several ways, including giving developers more credit for certain projects for low-income households and changing tenant eligibility rules.

The bill was introduced in the House and the Senate last session, and is co-sponsored by Mississippi Sens. Cindy Hyde-Smith and Roger Wicker and in the House by Reps. Mike Ezell, and Michael Guest. As of this spring, both bills are in committee.

While housing has become a major issue for Americans, getting legislation passed has been challenging. “Everybody knows that housing is an issue, but it gets caught up with everything else…and it kind of gets lost in the shuffle,” said Spivey.

This issue is especially important in Mississippi, where demand for housing is high across all incomes.

“All the market studies that we see that come with the applications tell us that there’s a huge need for affordable housing across the state at all the income bands” said Spivey.

According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, almost a third of Mississippi renters are extremely low income; 65% of them are severely cost burdened, meaning they spent more than half their income on rent. The majority of these households are seniors, disabled people, single caregivers of young children, people enrolled in school, or other.

Director of Housing Law at the Mississippi Center for Justice, Ashley Richardson said housing problems worsened after Mississippi stopped participating in the federal rental assistance program in 2022.

MCJ’s work on housing includes a statewide eviction hotline, investigating instances of housing discrimination, and more.

Richardson praised the LIHTC program, but echoed Spivey’s concerns. “Even with the affordable housing we do have in Mississippi, we are still at a lack,” she said.

The National Housing Preservation Database estimates Mississippi is short 52,421 affordable and available rental homes for low-income people. The National Low Income Housing Coalition puts the figure at 49,478.

Richardson wants the state to deal with issues like providing more tenant protections and rental assistance. There’s also a need to improve homes that are rundown or in poor condition, and many housing nonprofits are running out of funding.

Spivey said people should talk to their property managers and learn about their rights. MHC’s website has resources for homebuyers and renters.

As the housing crisis goes on, there are options for people struggling to find and keep affordable housing and an effort to take action at the federal and state levels.

Some aspiring low-income homeowners may qualify for Habitat for Humanity, a program that builds homes for families in need. Families who qualify work on the homes alongside volunteers, pay an affordable mortgage and receive financial literacy education.

New applicants must meet the qualifications, including a good debt-income ratio, 125 hours of sweat equity and taking classes on financial literacy, home repairs, and being a good neighbor.

Merrill McKewen, executive director for Habitat for Humanity Mississippi Capital Area, emphasized the importance of housing to individuals and communities.

“There are untold studies that have been done that, you’ve gotta have a safe, decent, affordable place to live. The children are better students, the parents are better employees…it grounds you to a community that you can contribute to and be a part of. It is the American dream, to own a home, which is what we’re all about,” she said.

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

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Mississippi Today

Mississippi Election 2024: What will be on Tuesday’s ballot?

Published

6 hours ago

November 4, 2024

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – Bobby Harrison – 2024-11-04 10:00:00

Mississippians will go to the polls on Tuesday, Nov. 5, to elect federal and state judicial posts and some local offices, such as for election commissioners and school board members.

Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Tuesday. To find your polling place, use the secretary of state’s locator, or call your local county circuit clerk.

The following is a list of the candidates for federal and judicial posts with brief bios:

President

Kamala Harris, current vice president and Democratic nominee for president. Her running mate is Tim Walz.
Donald Trump, former president and current Republican nominee. His running mate is J.D. Vance.
Robert Kennedy Jr. remains on the ballot in Mississippi even though he has endorsed Trump. His running mate is Nicole Shanahan.
Jill Stein is the Green Party candidate. Her running mate is Rudolph Ware.
Five other candidates will be on the Mississippi ballot for president. For a complete list of presidential candidates, see the sample ballot.

U.S. Senate

Ty Pinkins is the Democratic nominee. He is a Rolling Fork native and attorney, representing, among other clients, those alleging unfair working conditions. He served 21 years in the U.S. Army, including combat stints, other overseas deployment and posts in the White House,
Roger Wicker is the Republican incumbent senator. He resides in Tupelo and has served in the U.S. Senate since late 2007 after first being appointed to fill a vacancy by then-Gov. Haley Barbour. He was elected to the post in 2008. He previously served in the U.S. House and as a state senator. He is an attorney and served in the United States Air Force.

House District 1

Dianne Black is the Democratic nominee. She is a small business owner in Olive Branch in DeSoto County.
Trent Kelly is the Republican incumbent. He was elected to the post in a special election in 2015. He previously served as a district attorney and before then as a prosecuting attorney for the city of Tupelo. He is a major general in the Mississippi Army National Guard.

House District 2

Bennie Thompson is the Democratic incumbent. He was first elected to the post in 1993. Before then, he served as a Hinds County supervisor and as alderman and then as mayor of Bolton.
Ronald Eller is the Republican nominee. He grew up in West Virginia and moved to central Mississippi after retiring from the military. He is a physician assistant and business owner.

House District 3

Michael Guest is the Republican incumbent and is unopposed.

House District 4

Mike Ezell is the Republican incumbent first being elected in 2022. He previously served as Jackson County sheriff.
Craig Raybon is the Democratic nominee. Raybon is from Gulfport and began a nonprofit “focused on helping out the community as a whole.”

Central District Supreme Court

Jenifer Branning currently serves as a member of the state Senate from Neshoba County.
Byron Carter is a Hinds County attorney and previously served as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Armis Hawkins.
James Kitchens is the incumbent. He has served on the state’s highest court since 2008.
Ceola James previously served on the Court of Appeals.
Abby Gale Robinson is a Jackson attorney. She previously was a commercial builder.

Southern District Supreme Court

Dawn Beam is the incumbent, having been first appointed in 2016 by then-Gov. Phil Bryant and later winning election to the post. She is a former chancellor for the Hattiesburg area.
David Sullivan is an attorney in Harrison County and has been a municipal judge in D’Iberville since 2019. His father, Michael, previously served on the state Supreme Court.

Northern District Supreme Court seats

Robert Chamberlin of DeSoto County is unopposed.
James Maxwell of Lafayette County is unopposed.

Court of Appeals 5^th District seat

Ian Baker is an assistant district attorney in Harrison County.
Jennifer Schloegel is a Chancery Court judge for Harrison, Hancock and Stone counties.
Amy St. Pe is a Municipal Court judge in Gautier.