A recent Mississippi law that allows the state to appoint judges and prosecutors in Hinds county, including the majority-Black capital of Jackson, constituted a “crude scheme that singles out and discriminates against Black residents”, the justice department said on Wednesday.
The agency announced its intent to intervene in a lawsuit filed by the NAACP against the state, arguing that the law, signed by the Republican governor, Tate Reeves, in April, took voting authority away from Black residents in Jackson and Hinds county, which are both Democrat-run and majority-Black.
“This thinly veiled state takeover is intended to strip power, voice and resources away from Hinds county’s predominantly-Black electorate, singling out the majority-Black Hinds county for adverse treatment imposed on no other voters in the state of Mississippi,” Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general of the justice department’s civil rights division, said in a statement.
The 32-page federal complaint argues that the state created a “two-tiered system of justice” by crafting a new court system in the part of Jackson called the Capitol Complex Improvement District and doubled the area’s size through incorporating Jackson’s predominantly white neighborhoods in a majority-Black city.
That means state capitol police and state appointed judges and prosecutors would oversee the city’s predominantly white areas and insulate “residents within its boundaries from judges accountable to the Black voters of Jackson and Hinds county”, the complaint notes.
Republicans in the majority-white Mississippi legislature who supported the bill’s passage argued that the law, which included an expansion of capitol police, was aimed at curtailing crime and improving public safety. Federal prosecutors questioned why the state could not address crime rates by “creating new elected offices, rather than singling out Hinds county residents by imposing a surfeit of largely unaccountable state-appointed officials”.
Unlike the NAACP case, which also challenges the law’s expansion of state capitol police as engaging in “separate and unequal policing”, the justice department’s intervention focuses on the state’s appointment of judges and prosecutors within the newly created court system.
“When our state leaders fail those they are supposed to serve, it is only right that the federal government steps in to ensure that justice is delivered,” the NAACP president, Derrick Johnson, who lives in Jackson, said in a statement.
The federal complaint also argued that the state’s appointment powers meant that Jackson voters would be unable to hold new officials accountable because the state would appoint them, unusual in a state where most judges are elected.
The state law also came after the Mississippi legislature “shortchanged” the Hinds county criminal justice system for decades by failing to “provide the county with the resources, funding and personnel that it needs”. That made it difficult for local police, prosecutors and judges to combat crime.
The Mississippi supreme court recently heard arguments in a separate case challenging the law. In June, a federal judge temporarily blocked the law from going into effect. The same judge will now determine whether the federal government can join the case.
