Tag: mississippi

It Didn’t Take Long for Free Speech to Prevail in Mississippi

Last week, we brought you the story of a city council in Mississippi that was so thin-skinned that it couldn’t handle a critical editorial in the local paper. The City of Clarksdale took the Clarksdale Press Register to court over an op-ed in which the editors questioned why the city lobbied the state government for a “sin tax” without notifying the citizens or local media.

“The editorial highlighted how the mayor has touted his ‘open’ and ‘transparent’ governance, yet he and the city council didn’t notify the press about its intentions despite promising to ‘give appropriate notice thereof to the media,’” I wrote last week. “The editors admitted that they support the tax, yet they questioned why the city left everyone in the dark about the lobbying efforts.”

In the court filing, the city clerk admitted that she forgot to notify the media of the city’s efforts, which turned out to be a violation of state law. Nevertheless, Judge Crystal Wise Martin issued an order demanding that the paper take the editorial off its website — without a hearing that would give the paper a chance to tell its side of the story.

“For over a hundred years, the Press Register has served the people of Clarksdale by speaking the truth and printing the facts,” said Wyatt Emmerich, president of Emmerich Newspapers, the Press Register’s publisher. “We didn’t earn the community’s trust by backing down to politicians, and we didn’t plan on starting now.”

The order set off a First Amendment firestorm, and the paper enlisted the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) to help defend itself against this unconstitutional onslaught. By the end of last week, FIRE had agreed to help the Press Register work to lift the judge’s order.

“The implications of this case go beyond one Mississippi town censoring its paper of record,” said FIRE attorney David Rubin. “If the government can get a court order silencing mere questions about its decisions, the First Amendment rights of all Americans are in jeopardy.”

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Mississippi bill would pay bounty hunters to catch undocumented immigrants

A Mississippi district attorney proposed new legislation Wednesday to pay bounty hunters a reward for helping to deport immigrants in the country illegally.

DeSoto County District Attorney Matthew Barton announced his support for House Bill 1484, authored by state Rep. Justin Keen (R), which would create the Illegal Alien Certified Bounty Hunter Program.

“We’ve seen firsthand the danger posed by bad actors and violent criminals who enter this country illegally, like the innocent life of Laken Riley,” Keen said in a statement. 

“President Trump’s administration has made it clear that deporting illegal immigrants is a priority, and we are proud to do our part here in Mississippi to help support his agenda and protect our citizens.”

Keen and Barton suggested offering a $1,000 reward to registered bounty hunters for each successful deportation they help facilitate, which would be funded by the general assembly and administered by the state treasurer, according to a press release from his office.

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Mississippi Democrat Proposes ‘Contraception Begins at Erection Act’ — Would Criminalize Masturbating or ‘Discharge of Genetic Material’ Without Intent to Fertilize

A bill put forward by a Mississippi Democrat is essentially seeking to outlaw masturbation.

Democrat State Sen. Bradford Blackmon this week introduced the “Contraception Begins at Erection Act,” which would prevent men from masturbating or engaging in sexual activity when there is no “intent to fertilize an embryo.”

The legislation put forward this week proposes fines of $1,000 for a first offense, $5,000 for a second, and $10,000 for subsequent violations.

Blackmon, a first-term senator representing a district north of Jackson, is apparently seeking to hold men accountable for their role in women having abortions.

“All across the country, especially here in Mississippi, the vast majority of bills relating to contraception and/or abortion focus on the woman’s role when men are fifty percent of the equation,” he told local media affiliate WLBT.

He added that the bill, which stands no chance of passing, is more about bringing men into the “conversation” around abortions.

”This bill highlights that fact and brings the man’s role into the conversation,” he continued.

”People can get up in arms and call it absurd but I can’t say that bothers me.”

In another statement provided to Clarion Ledger, Bradmon expanded on his reasons for coming up with such a bizarre proposal.

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Multiple Mississippi elected officials indicted in federal bribery investigation

Several top elected officials in Mississippi’s most populous county are now defendants in a federal bribery probe.

HuffPost reporter Sam Levine tweeted an announcement from the Department of Justice, stating that an indictment was unsealed in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Mississippi in which three high-profile officials have officially been charged with “participating in a bribery scheme to enrich themselves.”

According to the indictment, Jackson, Mississippi Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens and Jackson city council member (and former council president) Aaron Banks are all named as defendants. Mayor Lumumba confirmed his indictment to local NBC affiliate WLBT on Wednesday.

The indictment alleges that Jackson’s mayor, the district attorney in Jackson and members of Jackson’s city council conspired to accept bribes in exchange for official acts benefiting purported real estate developers,” said Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Nicole M. Argentieri, who heads the DOJ’s Criminal Division.

“Officials who abuse their positions of authority to enrich themselves undermine public confidence in government. The Justice Department is committed to restoring that confidence by working with its law enforcement partners to investigate and prosecute public corruption.”

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Indiana and Mississippi Are Sued Over Online Age Verification Digital ID Laws

A group associated with big (and smaller) tech companies has filed a lawsuit claiming First Amendment violations against the state of Mississippi.

This comes after long years of these companies scoffing at First Amendment speech protections, as they censored their users’ speech and/or deplatformed them.

We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.

It might seem hypocritical, but at the same time, even a broken clock is right twice a day. In this case, it is the industry group NetChoice that has launched the legal battle (NetChoice v. Fitch), at the center of which is state bill HB 1126 which requires age verification to be implemented on social networks.

NetChoice correctly observes that forcing people (for the sake of providing parental consent) to essentially unmask themselves through age verification (“age assurance”) exposes sensitive personal data, undermines their constitutional rights, and poses a threat to the online security of all internet users.

The filing against Mississippi also asserts that it is up to parents – rather than what NetChoice calls “Big Government” – to, in different ways, assure that their children are using sites and online services in an age-appropriate manner.

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SHOCK REPORT: Mississippi – The Reddest State Has Enough Anomalous Voters and Aberrations in Its Voter Rolls to Impact a Statewide Election

Mississippi citizens invited the Fractal quantum technology team to audit the Mississippi voter rolls – and the results, as you can see in this video, are surprising.

The reddest state, or one of them, has voter rolls with enough obvious aberrations – found with Fractal quantum compute in less than 45 minutes – to impact a statewide election.

Here is the Mississippi video.

What you will see in this video – has been sitting dormant in Mississippi, and 26 other states’ voter rolls, for 25 years – completely missed by national voter integrity organizations.

Mississippi has honest, diligent, highly patriotic election management at the state level.

The Mississippi Secretary of State, Michael Watson, is a national leader – almost alone – demanding voter rolls be free of illegal alien voters.

The Mississippi Secretary of State office provided very clean, professional, inexpensive, data exports. Of the 26 states where the Fractal team received voter rolls, those in Mississippi were by far the most professional.

The office of the Secretary of State offered the team every bit of cooperation – Mississippi citizens ought to be pretty pleased the Secretary of State team there is vitally interested in any data they can get on how to improve voter rolls.

Even a great Secretary of State office, like Mississippi’s, doing all the right things, can have very inaccurate voter rolls if it has crappy tools.

Mississippi uses relational technology/SQL – like every Secretary of State in America, and every voter integrity organization and thus vast numbers of invisible anomalous voters remain on the rolls.

Nobody could have done a better job than the Mississippi Secretary of State with relational technology – it is a tools problem, not a people or talent problem.

Mississippi is not alone.

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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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