Tag: mississippi

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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Former Gov. Phil Bryant helped Brett Favre secure welfare funding for USM volleyball stadium, texts reveal

Text messages entered Monday into the state’s ongoing civil lawsuit over the welfare scandal reveal that former Gov. Phil Bryant pushed to make NFL legend Brett Favre’s volleyball idea a reality.

The texts show that the then-governor even guided Favre on how to write a funding proposal so that it could be accepted by the Mississippi Department of Human Services – even after Bryant ousted the former welfare agency director John Davis for suspected fraud.

“Just left Brett Favre,” Bryant texted nonprofit founder Nancy New in July of 2019, within weeks of Davis’ departure. “Can we help him with his project. We should meet soon to see how I can make sure we keep your projects on course.”

When Favre asked Bryant how the new agency director might affect their plans to fund the volleyball stadium, Bryant assured him, “I will handle that… long story but had to make a change. But I will call Nancy and see what it will take,” according to the filing and a text Favre forwarded to New.

The newly released texts, filed Monday by an attorney representing Nancy New’s nonprofit, show that Bryant, Favre, New, Davis and others worked together to channel at least $5 million of the state’s welfare funds to build a new volleyball stadium at University of Southern Mississippi, where Favre’s daughter played the sport. Favre received most of the credit for raising funds to construct the facility.

Bryant has for years denied any close involvement in the steering of welfare funds to the volleyball stadium, though plans for the project even included naming the building after him, one text shows.

New, a friend of Bryant’s wife Deborah, ran a nonprofit that was in charge of spending tens of millions of flexible federal welfare dollars outside of public view. What followed was the biggest public fraud case in state history, according to the state auditor’s office. Nonprofit leaders had misspent at least $77 million in funds that were supposed to help the needy, forensic auditors found.

New pleaded guilty to 13 felony counts related to the scheme, and Davis awaits trial. But neither Bryant nor Favre have been charged with any crime.

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As Sludge Pours from Mississippi Sinks, Biden Admin Seeks $13 Billion MORE for UKRAINE

According to Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, although the water treatment plant finally failed in August, the system “has been failing for decades” and nothing is being done.

“I have said on multiple occasions that it’s not a matter of if our system would fail, but a matter of when our system would fail,” Lumumba said.

Even before it failed, the city had been on a months-long boil notice because of a warning over disease carrying bacteria in the water supply. Since 2016, officials knew about the corrosion of the system and inadequate treatment — yet nothing was done — and now sludge pours from Jackson residents’ water taps.

Lumumba estimates that it would take roughly $1 billion to get the systems back up and running in a safe capacity but they don’t have it. This is particularly perplexing to many folks who have watched a record amount of US taxpayer dollars in recent months flow outside of the United States and into Ukraine.

Since the war in Ukraine began in February, Biden authorized $1.3 billion followed by an additional $13.6 billion. This original $15 billion of your tax dollars that got dumped into Ukraine to arm literal Nazis in the region was offensive enough but it was just the tip of the iceberg. In May, the House passed yet another massive spending bill, authorizing another $40 billion in your tax dollars to arm Nazis and keep the country at war. And they show no signs of slowing down.

Since then, various packages of cash and weapons of mass destruction, ranging from just a few hundred million to a billion, have flowed into the arms of welcoming Ukrainian politicians and military leaders.

In late August, the Pentagon announced that yet another $775 million would be sent to Ukraine. As Antiwar.com reported, this was the eighteenth weapons package to Ukraine in six months. But that wasn’t enough, apparently.

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Mississippi Audit: Hundreds Of Thousands Of Mark Zuckerberg’s Election Funds Were Stolen And Misused

Three people were arrested in Mississippi in the last two weeks in another chapter in the story of the harm done to our elections by so-called “Zuckbucks,” this time with alleged embezzlement and fraudulent spending.

Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg poured millions into a nonprofit called the Center for Tech and Civic Life, or CTCL, in 2020. That nonprofit then gave more than $350 million in private funds to elections offices around the country. CTCL said its goal was to provide funding for the “safe administration” of elections during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Once the 2020 election was in the rearview, journalists and academics started turning over the stones of CTCL’s spending. What they found wasn’t pretty.

As The Federalist Editor-In-Chief Mollie Hemingway details in her book “Rigged,” CTCL focused its funding on Democratic counties (no surprise, given that CTCL’s leadership consisted of former Democratic staffers). While the money was supposed to be spent on pandemic-related items, Hemingway has written that much of it went to “measures that allowed elections offices to hire activists to work the election.”

That, of course, is just the spending we know about. CTCL “has been reluctant to share information about how its operation was run,” says Hemingway. Even when CTCL has described its spending, the Mississippi arrests show CTCL itself may not even know what they paid for or where it ended up.

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Mississippi Says to Isolate After Testing Positive for COVID-19 Or Face Up To 5 Years In Prison And A Fine

The Mississippi State Department of Health updated their numbers on Friday, revealing that 5,048 new cases of COVID-19 infection have been reported in the state, the highest number in a single day since the pandemic began.

The department also confirmed 54 new deaths related to COVID-19. While 22 of these deaths occurred between April 29 and August 14, an alarming 32 deaths occurred between August 8 and August 19.

This surge in numbers prompted action from the Mississippi State Health Officer, who issued an order on Friday requiring those with COVID-19 to isolate at home or face a fine, imprisonment, or both.

As noted in his order, failing or refusing to obey a lawful order from the health officer is a misdemeanor punishable by fine up to $500, imprisonment for up to 6 months, or both. When a life-threatening disease, such as COVID-19, is involved, the fine can go up to $5,000 and the period of incarceration can be up to 5 years.

The order specifies that individuals are required to remain in their homes for 10 days from the onset of illness, or in the case of asymptomatic individuals, for 10 days from the date of a positive test. While at home, the order details that visitors should not be allowed, and individuals should stay away from other household members and use a separate bathroom, if possible.

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Mississippi Supreme Court overturns medical marijuana Initiative 65

The Mississippi Supreme Court on Friday issued a much-anticipated ruling that strikes down the Medical marijuana program enshrined in the state constitution by voters in November.

The ruling also voids — for now — the state’s ballot initiative process that allows voters to take matters in hand and pass constitutional amendments. The court ruled that the state’s ballot initiative process is “unworkable and inoperative” until lawmakers and voters fix state law and the constitution.

With six of the nine state justices agreeing, the court wrote, “We grant the petition, reverse the Secretary of State’s certification of initiative 65 and hold that any subsequent proceedings on it are void.”

Madison Mayor Mary Hawkins Butler filed a Supreme Court challenge to Initiative 65 just days before voters approved it on Nov. 3. Butler argued that Mississippi’s ballot initiative process is constitutionally flawed and Initiative 65 was not legally before voters. She said a provision requiring an equal number of signatures from Mississippi’s five congressional districts could not be met, because Mississippi has only had four districts for two decades.

Besides derailing the medical marijuana program, the ruling also jeopardizes six pending ballot initiatives, including one to expand Medicaid and others to reinstate the state’s 1890 state flag, allow early voting and to approve recreational marijuana use. The ruling also could open to challenge two constitutional amendments that voters have passed since they were allowed to do so in 1992, one limiting eminent domain powers over government to take private land and one requiring a government-issued ID to vote.

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This 38-Year-Old Man Will Spend Life in Prison Over 1.5 Ounces of Marijuana

Reminder: People are still sentenced to life in prison for marijuana possession. With so many states choosing to legalize marijuana, it’s easy to forget how draconian the penalties for possession can still be. Case in point: The Mississippi Court of Appeals just upheld a life sentence for 38-year-old Allen Russell for being in possession of about one and a half ounces of the drug.

Russell was sentenced in 2019, after being convicted for having 1.55 ounces (or about 44 grams) of marijuana. On appeal, Russell’s lawyers argued that his life sentence amounts to “cruel and unusual punishment and is grossly disproportionate.”

In general, “possession of between 30 and 250 grams is a felony punishable by a maximum of 3 years imprisonment and/or a maximum fine of $3,000” in Mississippi, according to the drug policy group National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML).

But this sentence can increase drastically if a person has previous felony convictions.

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Mississippi Cops Can Now Use Your Ring Doorbell Camera To Live Stream Your Neighborhood

Today in “those who surrender their liberty for security” news…

The Jackson, Mississippi police department is piloting a 45 day program that allows them to live stream private security cameras, including Amazon Ring cameras, at the residences of its citizens. 

It’s no surprise that Amazon’s Ring cameras were the only brand named for the pilot program, as EFF pointed out, since they have over 1,000 partnerships with local police departments. 

The program allows Ring owners to patch their camera streams to a “Real Time Crime Center” – i.e. a dispatcher on desk duty whose new favorite way of passing the time is to watch you bring out your garbage twice a week in a bathrobe. 

While the pilot program is supposedly “opt-in” only, meaning residents have to volunteer to be a part of it, it is an obvious step in the wrong direction of mass privacy invasion without a warrant. 

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Mississippi Coroner Says State’s Coronavirus Death Tally Is Misleading, Causing ‘Unnecessary Fear In The Public’

AMississippi county coroner said his state’s death count from coronavirus could be incorrect, telling residents that possible misreporting has led to “unnecessary fear in the public.”

Joshua Pounder, the coroner for DeSoto County in northwest Mississippi, wrote on his Facebook page Thursday night a breakdown of all causes of death in the county in July. He said he felt compelled to act because of the “many facebook google experts and politicians with politically driven agendas driven by money reporting information that is twisted and false to the public.”

The post, which has since garnered nearly 3,000 shares, described what Pounder called an “average month in Desoto county,” despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The coroner’s office recently completed reports for 144 deaths in July, Pounder wrote.

Pounder attributed the highest number of deaths to heart conditions, lung or vascular diseases and strokes, with 67 reported deaths. Pounder wrote that cancer was the second-highest, causing 30 reported deaths in the county.

Of the 11 causes of death Pounder listed, coronavirus was not among them. Instead, the 24 DeSoto County residents who had a positive COVID-19 test at the time of their death were included in the count of total deaths and attributed to causes other than the novel coronavirus, Pounder said.

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