Auditor White reports $10.9 million in misspent funds in past fiscal year while $1.1 million, including only $18,000 in misspent welfare funds, was recovered.
Now 78, Ed Blackmon has spent his life using the law to build Black political power in Mississippi: suing to dismantle at-large electoral districts, redrawing legislative maps to more than double Black representation in the Legislature and even engineering the state's first majority-Black judicial subdistricts.
Read the full story: https://mississippitoday.org/2026/08/18/ed-blackmon-redistricting-mississippi/
Watch the latest episode of The Other Side, Mississippi Today's political podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9Xt5FZkm1U
In December of 2025 Kristen Windham, director of policy for Gov. Tate Reeves, emailed a state lawmaker with a "report" on the status of a long-awaited review of Mississippi’s prison health care system.
The document that Windham called a report was a letter that barely stretched beyond a page. And her update was that the monitoring report lawmakers were expecting still did not exist.
That came as a surprise to lawmakers who passed a law that said they are due a review of the medical services contract from the corrections department on Dec. 15 of each fiscal year. The state recently approved paying the law firm Butler Snow $700,000 for monitoring prison health care, despite no report being delivered yet.
Read the full story: https://mississippitoday.org/2026/07/28/prison-health-care-report-mississippi/
A Rankin County jail guard who was caught on camera in 2022 punching an inmate and breaking his jaw will now police schoolchildren in the county.
In a Facebook post Tuesday, the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department shared that Jordan McQueary, the former guard, had been assigned as a school resource officer, and congratulated him on completing his law enforcement training.
In a video that surfaced in January, McQueary can be seen lunging and punching an inmate in the face, knocking him to the ground, after a verbal altercation. The inmate, Dustin Rives, suffered a fractured jaw and developed a deep infection during the following month, ultimately requiring surgery.
Mississippi Today has documented potentially thousands of people living with hepatitis C going without treatment, amputations following delayed care and trouble getting cancer screenings. Such findings, as well as handwritten letters sent to lawmakers by prisoners seeking care and panicked messages from their family members, drew bipartisan condemnation in the state House and numerous hearings at the Capitol.
The first episode of Black Box is here. In this episode, reporter Allen Siegler meets Jonathan and Shelby Aultman, whose daughter Chelsea died of a drug overdose at 35 years old.
Listen the full episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Find more ways to listen on Deep South Today's website.
Mississippi Today and Deep South Today announce the launch of “Black Box,” a new investigative podcast that takes listeners inside one of the most consequential public health and government accountability stories unfolding in Mississippi.
Hosted by Mississippi Today Mental Health Reporter Allen Siegler, “Black Box” follows the money behind Mississippi’s opioid settlement and examines how more than $400 million intended to address addiction, treatment and recovery is being spent across the state.
The five-part narrative series combines original reporting, on-the-ground storytelling and exclusive interviews with public officials, advocates, families and people directly impacted by the opioid crisis.
The first two episodes launched Tuesday, with the final three episodes launching in coming weeks.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
A former University of Mississippi employee is arguing in a federal appeal that a judge’s dismissal of her lawsuit against Chancellor Glenn Boyce would allow a government employer to punish a worker for protected political speech because of backlash from outside critics.
Lauren Stokes, the former Ole Miss employee, is asking the appeals court to reverse the dismissal and allow the lawsuit to proceed. The brief, filed Thursday in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, contends that firing a public employee over protected political speech violates the First Amendment.
A Mississippi police officer involved in last month’s fatal shooting of 1-year-old Kohen Wiley at a Walmart was previously accused of exaggerating the risks that a vehicle posed to officers during another parking lot confrontation that escalated into violence in 2019, records show.
Read the full story: https://mississippitoday.org/2026/07/15/special-session-youth-court-legislature-2/
Nolan Xavier Wells' parents said the Jackson County district attorney told them she will present the investigation's findings to a grand jury to determine whether there was criminal wrongdoing in his death.
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves has ordered the Legislature to convene on Wednesday for a special session to reform Mississippi’s youth court system after lawmakers failed to act during their regular session months ago.
For the third year in a row, Gov. Tate Reeves opted out of a state-federal partnership that would have given summer grocery benefits to roughly 320,000 Mississippi children who rely on free meals during the school year.
Read the full story: https://mississippitoday.org/2026/07/06/mississippi-summer-hunger-kids/
Miles from the Mississippi Gulf Coast on a remote island whose beauty of clear beaches and white sand dunes was immortalized by famed American artist Walter Inglis Anderson, Nolan Xavier Wells’ young life came to an end.
How and why are among the many unanswered questions that remain after the 18-year-old from Ocean Springs was last seen on the Fourth of July and his body found two days later off Horn Island.
Read the full story: https://mississippitoday.org/2026/07/10/nolan-xavier-wells-update/
Nearly a month after police in Mississippi shot and killed 1-year-old Kohen Wiley outside Walmart in Senatobia, department officials released a brief report Friday about the shoplifting call that led to the fatal encounter.
But the two-page report — obtained by Mississippi Today through a public records request — contains almost no details of what happened.
Reporters from Mississippi Today and The New York Times are looking for information from people who were at the Walmart Supercenter in Senatobia, Mississippi, on June 14, the day a police officer shot and killed 1-year-old Kohen Wiley.
If you know anything about what happened that day – if you were around, if you have any photo or video evidence, if you witnessed the incident, or if you know someone who did – we want to hear from you.
You can find information on how to contact the reporters, Mukta Joshi and Joseph Cranney, at the link above.
After months of confusion, state leaders say the bonus they granted earlier this year is intended for all special education teachers in Mississippi.