Tag: mississippi

Justice Department Finds Unconstitutional Conditions in 3 More Mississippi Prisons

A report released today by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division found that three Mississippi prisons fail to protect incarcerated people from rampant violence and sexual assault, and place hundreds of people in solitary confinement “for prolonged periods in appalling conditions.”

Federal investigators concluded that severe understaffing, unchecked gang violence, unsanitary living conditions, and the use of extreme isolation violated the 8th and 14th Amendment rights of inmates.

The Justice Department launched an investigation into the Mississippi prison system in 2020 following a string of gruesome deaths and years of deteriorating conditions. In 2022, the Justice Department released a report describing barbaric conditions at Mississippi State Penitentiary, more infamously known as Parchman Farm. 

Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said in a press conference that today’s report shows that constitutional violations inside the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) are “systemic and longstanding.”

“Our investigation uncovered chronic, systemic deficiencies that create and perpetuate violent and unsafe environments for people incarcerated at these three Mississippi facilities,” Clarke said. “The unconstitutional conditions in Mississippi’s prisons have existed for far too long, and we hope that this announcement marks a turning point towards implementing sound, evidence-based solutions to these entrenched problems.”

The MDOC is the latest corrections system to come under federal scrutiny for barbaric conditions. The Justice Department sued Alabama in 2020 for ignoring multiple warnings that its gore-soaked prison system violated the Constitution. Last year, the Justice Department announced an investigation into the Fulton County Jail in Georgia, where a schizophrenic man died covered in bedbugs, lice, and lesions.

But the problems in Mississippi have been profound. All three of the Mississippi prisons the Justice Department toured had 30 to 50 percent staff vacancy rates, leaving housing units with hundreds of people largely unsupervised. Emergency responses were often tardy and ineffective.

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Dexter Wade, buried without his family’s knowledge, had ID on him with his home address, lawyer says

An independent pathologist examining the newly exhumed body of Dexter Wade — the Mississippi man killed by police and buried in a pauper’s grave without his mother’s knowledge — found a wallet with a state identification card that included the address of a home he shared with his mother, the family’s lawyer said Thursday.

The pathologist, Frank Peretti, reported that he found the wallet in the front pocket of Wade’s jeans and that it contained his state identification card with his home address, along with a credit card and a health insurance card, attorney Ben Crump said in a statement.

Crump, who arranged for the independent autopsy, said he was sharing Peretti’s initial findings. NBC News has not seen the full autopsy report.

A representative of Crump’s confirmed that the home address was the same as his mother’s, Bettersten Wade. She reported her 37-year-old son missing on March 14, nine days after he was struck by a police cruiser as he was crossing a highway.

She got no information from police about what happened to him until Aug. 27, when she learned that he’d been killed less than an hour after he had left his house and buried in a pauper’s field owned by Hinds County.

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Atty. Ben Crump Demands Probe Into Finding of 215 Bodies Buried Behind Mississippi Jail

Civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump is calling for a federal investigation after the discovery of 215 bodies that were buried in a cemetery behind a Mississippi jail.

The Chicago Crusader reports that the remains were discovered in pauper’s cemetery behind the Hinds County Penal Farm in the “The Magnolia State” and Crump is searching for answers from the authorities.

Crump along with Reverend Hosea Hines, senior pastor of the Christ Tabernacle Church and the national leader of A New Day Coalition for Equity and Black America, want to know why officials failed to investigate the deaths of the victims and why the authorities never contacted the families. 

“People all across America are scratching their heads in disbelief about what’s happening in Jackson, Mississippi, with this pauper’s graveyard,” Crump said at news conferences in December. “It went from talking about the water” that was non-existent or contaminated, “to now we’re talking about the graveyard. What is going on in Jackson, Mississippi?”

“It’s unfortunate that we are living in a world that is college-educated and super sophisticated as it relates to telecommunications and IT,” Hines said in a recent interview.. “The amount of mistakes that were made, as to individual families not being notified about the deaths, is really unbelievable.”

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Federal Lawsuit Challenges Mississippi’s Ban On Marijuana Advertising, Citing Free-Speech Rights

Mississippi’s medical cannabis advertising ban is preventing a small dispensary from attracting customers, Tru Source owner Clarence Cocroft is arguing in a federal lawsuit that casts the law as a violation of his free-speech rights.

Though medical marijuana is now legal for Mississippians with qualifying conditions and a medical cannabis card, state law prohibits dispensary owners and cultivators from advertising cannabis products.

“It’s a daunting task to stay in the industry when you can’t advertise,” Cocroft told the Mississippi Free Press on December 8. “And it’s legal. If they allow you to get licensed, they should allow you to promote your business.”

Cocroft owns Tru Source, the state’s first Black-owned medical cannabis dispensary, located in the southeast industrial zoning area of Olive Branch, Mississippi. Cocroft and his dispensary filed a lawsuit on November 14 against the officials in charge of the regulations at the Mississippi State Department of Health, the Mississippi Department of Revenue and the Mississippi Alcohol Beverage Control Bureau.

To open a medical cannabis shop in the state, a person must apply for a dispensary license, register for a sales tax permit and pay thousands of dollars in fees. A person must have a medical cannabis card and be over the age of 21 to enter a dispensary.

“The fight was, ‘OK, we’re paying you all a lot of taxes. We’re abiding by all your rules that you have set forth. All we’re asking is simple: Allow us to advertise. It’s going to increase your tax rate as a state,’” Cocroft said.

Tru Source relies on its website, word of mouth and signs posted on the building for advertising. But Cocroft cannot advertise his dispensary or its website in any other advertising medium. The owner said many customers would not have known about the store if they had not driven by the area.

“It’s not just me in my location that cannot advertise,” he said. “It’s every location in Olive Branch; it’s every dispensary in DeSoto County and all 82 counties,” Cocroft said.

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Mississippi politician Michael Cassidy, 35, is charged with criminal mischief after ‘BEHEADING’ Satanic altar statue inside Iowa State Capitol

A former US Navy pilot and unsuccessful congressional candidate has been charged with criminal mischief after allegedly destroying a controversial Satanic Temple’s display inside the Iowa State Capitol.

Michael Cassidy, 35, was arrested for tearing down the Iowa Satanic Temple’s Baphomet display on Thursday morning, Iowa State Police confirmed to DailyMail.com. 

The display featured a statue of Baphomet – a goat-headed figure used to represent Satan along with the seven tenets of Satanism, Satanic symbols and candles. 

Cassidy was charged with fourth-degree criminal mischief after he allegedly ripped the head off Baphomet.

The passionate Christian confirmed his act of destruction in a text to Fox News, saying he tore down the statue because ‘it was extremely anti-Christian.’

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A mother reported her son missing in March. Police kept the truth from her for months.

Seven months of searching for her lost son brought Bettersten Wade to a dirt road leading into the woods, past an empty horse stable and a scrapyard.

The last time she’d seen her middle child, Dexter Wade, 37, was on the night of March 5, as he left home with a friend. She reported him missing, and Jackson police told her they’d been unable to find him, she said. 

It wasn’t until 172 excruciating days after his disappearance that Bettersten learned the truth: Dexter had been killed less than an hour after he’d left home, struck by a Jackson police car as he crossed a nearby interstate highway. Police had known Dexter’s name, and hers, but failed to contact her, instead letting his body go unclaimed for months in the county morgue. 

Now it was early October, and Bettersten had finally been told where she could find her son. 

She pulled up to the gates of the Hinds County penal farm, her sister in the passenger seat. A sheriff’s deputy and two jumpsuited inmates in a pickup told her to follow them. 

They bounced down the road and curved into the woods, crawling past clearings where rows of small signs jutted from the earth, each marked with a number.

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GOP Guv Spent Millions in Tax Dollars on Governor’s Mansion Upgrades

After Republican Tate Reeves was elected governor of Mississippi in 2019, he sold his home and moved his family, naturally, into the governor’s mansion.

But that new home, a national historic landmark, was far from perfect for Reeves. And over the last three and a half years, while not having to pay personal property taxes on his new state-owned mansion, Reeves plowed more than $2.4 million in taxpayer dollars into renovations and upkeep for his temporary home, according to public records obtained by The Daily Beast.

During Reeves’ brief stay, the governor’s mansion has also seen what appears to be an additional $900,000 in renovations, restoration, and refurbishments. Those investments, however, came courtesy of anonymous donors, and appear in federal tax records filed by the Governors Mansion Foundation—a nonprofit whose board features Reeves’ campaign treasurer and a top campaign donor who runs a controversial installment loan business.

That would mean that, in the years since he stopped paying property taxes on his old home, Reeves has put a total of $3.3 million into updating the mansion. His former home, which Reeves sold in July 2020, was last listed for $629,000, according to several real estate websites. In the time since Reeves was first elected lieutenant governor—2012—Mississippi property taxes have increased by about 7.2 percent, according to state data.

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Six former Mississippi cops known as ‘The Goon Squad’ plead guilty to torturing and abusing two black men during raid on their home

Six former Mississippi law enforcement officers have pleaded guilty to charges accusing them of torturing and abusing two black men during a raid.

Members of the self-called ‘Goon Squad’ each carried a coin with the name emblazoned on one side and the other with Rankin County Sheriff’s Office’s badge. 

Lieutenant Jeffrey Middleton appeared to be the ringleader of the group, with his coin embossed with ‘Lt Middleton’s Goon Squad’. 

Five other deputies for the Sheriff’s Office, and one from the Richland Police Department, have been charged with conspiracy to commit obstruction of justice.

Christian Dedmon, Hunter Elward, Brett McAlpin, Middleton and Daniel Opdyke, and ex-police officer Joshua Hartfield, were all charged in relation to the assault of Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker in January. 

Elward was charged with home invasion and aggravated assault for shoving a gun in the mouth of Jenkins and pulling the trigger – in what prosecutors called a ‘mock execution’.

They are accused of assaulting them with sex toys, firearms, stun guns, milk, eggs, alcohol and chocolate syrup on January 24. 

The cops are potentially facing a maximum combined sentence of 641 years and two life sentences in prison for state and federal charges, as well as a combined $12.25 million in fines. 

Dedmon was charged with home invasion after kicking in a door, with McAlpin, Middleton, Opdyke and Hartfield each facing an additional charge of first-degree obstruction of justice.

Middleton admitted in court that he was convicted of vehicular manslaughter in 2007 for hitting/killing a man. 

The victims stared down their attackers after arriving together in court, sitting in the front row just feet away from their attackers’ families.  

Prosecutors say that some of the officers nicknamed themselves the ‘Goon Squad’ because of their willingness to use excessive force and cover it up.

They were targeted after a white neighbor complained that two black men were staying at the home with a white woman. 

Parker was a childhood friend of the homeowner, Kristi Walley, who has been paralyzed since she was 15 – and he was helping to care for her.  

All of the officers have pleaded guilty to the state charges on Monday, and previously pleaded in a connected federal civil rights case. 

In January, the officers entered a property in Mississippi without a warrant, and handcuffed Jenkins and Parker before assaulting them. 

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A Civil Rights Attorney Started Filming a Traffic Stop. Then Police Arrested Her.

When Jill Jefferson, a civil rights attorney, began filming the traffic stop of a black motorist in Lexington, Mississippi, police turned their attention to her—eventually “snatching” her phone, searching through her car, and arresting her. Now, Jefferson says that her arrest—and the charges against her—could have been retaliation for a pending lawsuit against the Lexington Police Department filed by an organization Jefferson founded. 

According to an interview with CNN, Jefferson says she was driving home from an event on Saturday when she saw Lexington police conducting a traffic stop on a black driver. Jefferson, a Harvard alumna, began filming police from inside her car. Police soon noticed her, and pulled her over as well. 

Jefferson says police asked for her ID, but she refused to give it—an assertion backed up by audio from the incident. After refusing to give police her ID, Jefferson says they seized her phone after “yanking” her out of her car. Jefferson also claims that officers began to search her car illegally.

“They went through my glove compartment, under my floor mats, they went into the briefcase and unzipped it and started taking things out and looking through them. All of this is an illegal search,” Jefferson told CNN. Eventually, the police arrested her.

“I told her to give me her license 5, 6, 7, 8 times. She argued she ain’t got to,” one officer said to another in audio from an unclear point during the incident. “She came riding by filming…. I guess she thought that was a good idea.”

Making matters worse for Jefferson, she says that she soon recognized one of the officers from her legal advocacy—and they recognized her. “I heard them talking about me once they took me to jail. They said, ‘That’s the woman that’s suing us,'” Jefferson told CNN. “That’s when I learned that they definitely knew who I was when I got there.”

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‘Mississippi Lynching’: What Happened to Rasheem Carter?

Last October, Rasheem Carter told Taylorsville, Mississippi police that he had been chased by truckloads of white men yelling racial slurs at him. 

Days later, Carter was officially reported missing. 

His remains were found a month later, just 1 mile south of the town. In a statement posted to Facebook at the time, the Smith County Sheriff’s Office, where Taylorsville is located, said that there was “no reason to believe” that foul play was involved. 

Months after Carter’s disappearance, the state Bureau of Investigation and local police still maintain that an investigation is ongoing, but have provided his family with scant information. His family thinks that Carter, a 25-year-old Black man, was murdered in cold blood and found decapitated—and that police inaction put Carter in danger and is now stalling his family’s quest for justice. 

On Monday, civil rights attorney Ben Crump stood with Carter’s mother Tiffany outside of a federal court in Jackson and displayed photos from an independent autopsy, which he said showed that Carter’s head had been severed from his body and his spinal cord had been found unattached to the rest of his body. 

“This was a nefarious act. This was an evil act,” Crump said. “Someone murdered Rasheem Carter. And we cannot let them get away with this.”

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