Mississippi could renew debate on revising tight parole laws
JACKSON — Mississippi legislators should try again to revise some of the strictest parole laws in the nation as a way of reducing the state’s “dangerously” large prison population, a nonprofit group said Tuesday.
Republican Gov. Tate Reeves vetoed a bill in July that would have made more inmates eligible for the possibility of parole. He described the bill as “well-intentioned,” but said some law enforcement officers and prosecutors were concerned about the possibility of inmates with violent histories being released.
FWD.US, which was founded by technology and business executives, released a report Tuesday that said twothirds of Mississippi inmates are serving sentences that make them ineligible for parole. Mississippi’s prison population, and prison budgets, increased dramatically after the state set stricter parole laws in the mid-1990s.
“This year, lawmakers must finish what they started and enact criminal justice reform legislation to save lives and reduce wasteful prison spending,” FWD.US said in its report.
Mississippi has one of the highest incarceration rate in the U.S., and the state’s prison system came under Justice Department investigation in February after outbursts of violence left some inmates dead and others injured.
Senate Judiciary A Committee Chairman Brice Wiggins told The Associated Press on Tuesday that another bill attempting to revise parole eligibility is being filed this year.
Wiggins, a Republican from Pasca
goula, said he and other legislators met with sheriffs and prosecutors after Reeves vetoed the bill last year. Wiggins said he believes some of their concerns were well-founded, but “a lot of misinformation was put out there and regurgitated” before the veto.
The push to change Mississippi’s parole laws has come from groups across the political spectrum, including the liberal Poor People’s Campaign and the libertarian Mississippi Center for Public Policy.
The bill that Reeves vetoed last year had passed with bipartisan support. It said people convicted of nonviolent offenses could become eligible for parole after serving 25% of their sentence. Those convicted of violent offenses and sentenced between July 1995 and June 2014 would have become eligible for parole after completing 50% of their sentence or after 20 years, whichever comes first.
The bill would have allowed people convicted of most violent offenses after July 2014 to become paroleeligible after serving 50% of their sentence served or after 30 years, whichever is less. It also would have allowed parole hearings for those 65 and older who have served 10 years of their sentences. Habitual offenders, sex offenders and inmates sentenced for capital murder would not have been eligible for parole.
FWD.US published a report in 2019 saying that Mississippi’s habitual offender laws are causing “extreme” prison sentences that disproportionately affect Black men and cost the state millions of dollars for decades of incarceration.
Mississippi county to put up marker for lynching victims
OXFORD — A Mississippi county will put up a marker to remember Black men who were lynched by white mobs between 1885 and 1935. It will be near a statue that honors Confederate soldiers.
Lafayette County supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to approve the memorial for seven Black men known to have been lynched in in the county during the 50-year span.
The vote originally was scheduled for December, but it was delayed because one supervisor, David Rikard, said he did not want to memorialize a man who was accused of killing a white woman in 1908.
News outlets reported that Rikard met with a committee that planned the marker, and they agreed that the marker would say Lawson Patton was “accused in the murder of a white woman.” The original proposal was to say the man was “accused in the death of a white woman.”
The metal sign will go outside the county courthouse on the Square in Oxford, near a marble statue of a Confederate soldier that was put up in 1907.
Calls to remove the Confederate monument have intensified in recent months amid the national discussion over racial injustice, but the all-white Board of Supervisors has said the soldier statue will remain.
Many lynching victims in the U.S. were Black people who were accused — sometimes falsely — of committing a violent crime.
Patton never went to trial because a white mob seized him from the Lafayette County Jail and lynched him. Patton was sometimes called Nelse Patton in documents. According to the New York Times’ 1908 account of the lynching, W.V. Sullivan, a former U.S. senator from Mississippi, led the lynch mob.
The group that got approval to put the marker on the courthouse lawn is the Lynching Memorialization in Lafayette County Committee, which has worked with the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal aid organization seeking to reshape the narrative around lynchings and acts of racial terror.
US attorney for southern Mississippi names interim successor
JACKSON — The U.S. attorney for the southern half of Mississippi says his first assistant will be elevated to the interim head of the office, starting Wednesday.
Darren Lamarca “is wellrespected by law enforcement, the defense bar and our community, and he will do an outstanding job as acting U.S. attorney,” U.S. Attorney Mike Hurst said in a news release Tuesday, his last day in office.
Hurst, who was nominated by President Donald Trump, announced his plans to retire earlier this month.
U.S. attorneys are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. It’s common for the federal prosecutors to resign when the administration changes. Under federal law, the first assistant becomes interim U.S. attorney when the appointed U.S. attorney resigns unless the president says otherwise.
Lamarca, who joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office in 2007, is a graduate of Northeast Louisiana University and the Mississippi College School of Law. He was a law clerk to state Supreme Court Justice Roy Noble Lee, then worked in a private law firm in Jackson for four years before opening his own practice in Clinton. He also was a municipal judge from 2002 to 2007.