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Black voting power at center of fight over state Supreme Court election districts
Decades-old voting districts have taken away the power of Black Mississippians to choose justices to sit on the state’s highest court, civil rights lawyers argued at the start of a federal trial on Monday.
A group of Mississippi voters is challenging the boundaries of three voting districts under the Voting Rights Act. The three districts, which haven’t been redrawn since 1987, divide the state into northern, central and southern regions. The plaintiffs argue that Black voters, who make up about 36% of Mississippi’s electorate, aren’t consistently able to elect judges of their choosing. None of the three Supreme Court voting districts is majority Black.
“That is vote dilution in a nutshell,” wrote lawyers for the plaintiffs in a trial brief.
In total, only four Black justices have ever sat on Mississippi’s nine-member Supreme Court, with the first joining the high court in 1985. Only one Black justice has ever served on the high court at a time.
The legal argument focuses on District 1, in the central part of the state. As of the 2020 census, District 1 had a Black voting age population of about 49%. Plaintiffs argue it could be redrawn as a Black-majority district. The state argues in its defense that District 1 voters have elected both White and Black officials, and that “it is hard to imagine finding a more equal district anywhere in the country.”
The bench trial — before U.S. Northern District Judge Sharion Aycock sitting in Oxford — is expected to last at least 10 days.
Four state Supreme Court seats will appear on November’s ballot, with two incumbents facing challengers and two other incumbents running unopposed. If Aycock rules for a new redistricting plan, it likely would not impact the upcoming elections, but could require the Legislature to redraw state Supreme Court voting districts before the next judicial election in 2026.
This trial follows a recent federal appeals court ruling that ordered the state Legislature to redraw three legislative districts to be majority Black.
Power outages plague Parchman amid intense heat
At Mississippi State Penitentiary’s Unit 29 in Parchman, which has no air conditioning, hundreds of incarcerated people often struggle to manage sweltering heat with wet towels and 8-inch fans. But for the past week, as the heat index surpassed 100 degrees, intermittent power outages shut off the fans.
The outages began Aug. 2, according to prison reform advocate Nicole Montagano. Kate Head, a spokesperson for the Mississippi Department of Corrections, told The Marshall Project - Jackson in an email that the outages are due to a “faulty switch” that needs to be repaired. A spokesperson for Entergy Mississippi, the company that supplies electricity to the prison, said the prison has its own distribution system and is responsible for maintenance issues such as the one causing the outage, but the company has provided assistance.
People in the prison, confined to concrete cells, often face extreme high temperatures. A 2022 Department of Justice investigation reported internal facility temperatures of up to 145 degrees from the prison’s logs. The report stated that the facility’s “egregious conditions,” violated imprisoned people’s constitutional rights. The facility was also the subject of a 2020 federal lawsuit backed by rapper Jay-Z, which demanded its closure. The lawsuit was dismissed last year following some improvements.
The Mississippi Department of Corrections began installing air conditioning in Parchman in 2022, but has provided no clear timeline on when cooling will be installed in Unit 29. As of Aug. 7, the unit housed 671 people, including those on death row.
Exposure to extreme heat can be fatal, especially for incarcerated people, who have high rates of chronic mental and physical illnesses. Analysis from the National Bureau of Economic Research also found that violence in prisons increases with high temperatures.
“They’re literally being tortured,” Montagano told The Marshall Project - Jackson. “There’s no reason that anybody should have to endure those types of living conditions.”
Woman at center of our investigation into public defense now indicted
Earlier this year, The Marshall Project - Jackson reported that a north Mississippi woman named Kayla Williams was denied a public defender and even forced to represent herself during a key early court appearance in Yalobusha County after she said she couldn’t afford an attorney.
Now, Williams has been indicted on unrelated charges in a different county where a public defender is representing her.
Her case demonstrates how widely Mississippi’s dysfunctional, patchwork public defense system can vary across the state.
Williams, who has a history of treatment for mental health disorders, was arrested in June 2023 in Yalobusha County and charged over allegations of shooting her stepfather in the leg during a tussle. Despite asking repeatedly for an appointed attorney, she was denied a lawyer by a judge who didn’t even ask her any questions about her finances. He told a reporter that “she just didn’t strike me as an indigent person.” Reporting by The Marshall Project - Jackson, ProPublica and the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal found that the two judges in Yalobusha County Justice Court appointed lawyers for just 20% of the five dozen felony defendants who came before them in 2022, a number far below prevailing appointment rates across the country.
In February of this year, she was arrested again, this time in nearby Lee County, for allegedly setting two small fires at a homeless shelter where she was staying. She immediately received an appointed attorney to represent her.
Now, an indictment last month on her Lee County charges means she faces a felony prosecution and possible jail time, but she has an appointed lawyer. She has not been indicted or received an appointed lawyer in Yalobusha County, more than a year after her arrest there plunged her into the legal system and began a spiral into homelessness.
The Marshall Project - Jackson has reported extensively on Mississippi’s public defense system, including this year’s failure by the Legislature to pass any reforms and the lack of transparency in many local courts about how officials manage public defense.
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