Allowing House Bill 1020 to stand “would constitute a tremendous transfer of power from the voters of Mississippi, who have for over 100 years elected our circuit judges, to the Legislature,” attorney Cliff Johnson told eight members of the Mississippi Supreme Court during hearings Thursday.
Mississippi Supreme Court Chief Justice will no longer be a defendant in a federal lawsuit challenging House Bill 1020’s requirement for him to appoint four judges to serve Hinds County, the majority-Black home of the capital City of Jackson.
Jackson residents who commit local misdemeanor offenses could soon appear before an unelected, Mississippi Supreme Court-appointed municipal judge from any part of the State after the Mississippi Legislature sent the final version of House Bill 1020 to Gov. Tate Reeves’ desk. If signed, the bill would take some authority away from elected judges and prosecutors over the 83% Black city’s capitol district.
Mississippi House Rep. Trey Lamar, R-Senatobia, is sponsoring a bill to establish a court system with unelected judges and prosecutors to oversee Jackson’s Capitol district.
Beverly Pool worries about her brother, Marvin Pernell, who was in the Oktibbeha County jail in Starkville, Miss., from July 2021 until January 2023 and is now at the Mississippi State Hospital, a state-funded psychiatric hospital in Whitfield, Miss. Now 48, Pernell is a military veteran who served in the U.S. Marines from 1994 to 1998.
University of Mississippi School of Law Dean Susan H. Duncan and Mississippi College School of Law Dean Patricia Bennett wrote in August 2021 asking the Mississippi Supreme Court to limit the number of allowed bar examination attempts to four.
Wednesday will be the last day the Jackson Women’s Health Organization can provide abortions after a state court declined to block a near-total abortion ban from going into effect in two days.
The fate of Mississippi’s abortion trigger law, which will ban nearly all abortions in the state by July 7 if allowed to take effect, could be decided at a hearing in a Hinds County Chancery Court on Tuesday, July 5.
John Knight, Terun Moore and Benny Ivey have all experienced life in prison and now mentor criminal-justice-system-involved young people as credible messengers with the Strong Arms of JXN, which launched in 2018. The Strong Arms of JXN gathers formerly incarcerated individuals devoted to showing young people alternate paths from the ones they at one point chose and have since turned away from.
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