Jackson, MS (Mississippi Free Press)
Two candidates vying for a seat on the Mississippi Supreme Court have starkly different records on key issues. Conservative Republican Mississippi Sen. Jenifer Branning is hoping to unseat moderate Justice Jim Kitchens in a runoff election for his Supreme Court District 1 seat on Tuesday, Nov. 26, 2024.
Supreme Court District 1 includes voters located mostly in central Mississippi, including in Bolivar, Claiborne, Copiah, Hinds, Holmes, Humphreys, Issaquena, Jefferson, Kemper, Lauderdale, Leake, Madison, Neshoba, Newton, Noxubee, Rankin, Scott, Sharkey, Sunflower, Warren, Washington and Yazoo counties.
In 2021, Justice Jim Kitchens disagreed with the conservative majority’s decision overturning a voter-approved medical marijuana program and nullifying the entire citizen-led ballot initiative system. The ballot initiative system allowed citizens to put issues on the ballot after gathering a requisite number of signatures from each congressional district.
Mississippi voters decided by a 68% to 31% vote in 2020 to adopt Initiative 65, an expansive medical-marijuana program that citizens first began gathering signatures to put on the ballot in 2018. The mayor of Madison, Miss., Mary Hawkins Butler, sued to stop the program because she said she did not want “pot shops” in her city.
A majority of the court agreed to her request, noting that Section 273 of the Mississippi Constitution, adopted in 1992, says residents must gather signatures from each of the state’s five congressional districts. But Mississippi lost a congressional district after the 2000 Census due to population decline and now only has four districts.
Six of Mississippi’s nine Supreme Court justices took a literal approach to the issue in their ruling, ending the ability of Mississippians to put issues on the ballot unless the state regains a fifth congressional district or the Legislature takes action.
Justice Kitchens was one of three justices who dissented, joining a dissenting opinion written by Justice James D. Maxwell II that accused the other six justices of stepping “completely outside of Mississippi law to employ an interpretation that not only amends but judicially kills Mississippi’s citizen initiative process.”
The Mississippi Legislature has failed to reach an agreement on restoring ballot initiative rights, but did adopt a stricter version of a medical-cannabis program in 2022. Sen. Jenifer Branning was one of just five senators, all Republicans, who voted against the medical-cannabis bill.
Branning had previously told the Neshoba Democrat in 2021 that she believed Initiative 65 was too open-ended but said that she would be open-minded about a medical-cannabis program for the state.
“However, I also feel like I have a duty to my constituents to ensure that if a program is put into place, it is one that is tight enough in nature that it does not lead us down a path toward recreational use. That is my concern,” she said.
She suggested that medical-cannabis should only be available as prescription pills that patients pick up from a pharmacy, rather in various other forms at dispensaries.
“Pill form would be the most medicinal form that could be offered,” Branning said to the Neshoba Democrat. “When you get into other forms as in edible or smokable, that’s where I have a concern. I think that is a very slippery slope, and we need to be careful.”
During the 2023 Mississippi Legislative session, Sen. Jenifer Branning voted to create four unelected special circuit court judges in Hinds County that the state’s white leadership would appoint instead of having Hinds County’s majority-Black population elect them. The appointed judges would have joined four elected judges on the circuit court. The Mississippi Supreme Court, including Justice Jim Kitchens, said the provision was unconstitutional in an 8-0 ruling.
The plan was part of House Bill 1020, which also proposed creating one lower court in the Jackson Capitol Complex Improvement District. The Supreme Court upheld that part of the law in a 6-2 vote with Kitchens dissenting.
“While House Bill 1020 may seem to carve the jurisdiction of the CCID court (a criminal trial court) from that of the circuit court, no statutory mechanism operates to place the CCID court under the controlling authority of the circuit court,” Kitchens wrote in his dissent. “This is a fatal constitutional deficiency that cannot be rectified by the judicial branch of government.”
In July 2020, Sen. Jenifer Branning was one of 14 Republican senators who voted against retiring the 1894 state flag that featured the Confederate flag emblem. During the discussion about the flag, Branning said she wanted to let voters decide which flag they wanted by putting four flag designs, including the 1894 flag with the Confederate emblem, on the ballot in the spring 2021 municipal elections.
“It wouldn’t be so rushed and would give everyone time to create several options for the people,” she said.
During the November 2020 election, about 70% of Mississippi voters chose to adopt the new magnolia flag. The new state flag, which a committee designed, features 20 white stars and one yellow star in a circle with “In God We Trust” inscribed on the bottom of the circle surrounding a magnolia flower on a red, blue and yellow striped background.
Sen. Jenifer Branning, a native of Philadelphia, Miss., in Neshoba County, is the granddaughter of Olen Burrage, a member of the Ku Klux Klan whom prosecutors tried and a jury acquitted over his alleged involvement in the 1964 murders of three civil-rights workers: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.
The three men were Freedom Summer volunteers who came to Mississippi in the summer of 1964 to help Black residents register to vote in a state that still used violence to deny Black suffrage. The men were driving to Meridian, Miss., on June 21, 1964, when they got a flat tire while passing through Philadelphia. Neshoba County Deputy Cecil Price arrived on the scene and took the men to the county jail. He released them around 10 p.m. The trio were last seen driving down Highway 19 toward Meridian.
Investigators found their damaged car near a swamp three days later. The FBI, local and state law enforcement, and 400 U.S. Navy sailors conducted an extensive search of the area but did not find the bodies until two months later after receiving a tip to check out Burrage’s farm.
There, the team found the bodies of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner in a dam by a pond on his farm. Burrage did not live on the land, though. He had hired Herman Tucker to build the pond as a watering hole for his cattle. Prosecutors alleged in Tucker’s trial that he used a bulldozer to bury the bodies on Burrage’s property, but a jury also acquitted him in the murders.
Klansman Horace Doyle Barnette confessed to the FBI in 1964 that a group of white supremacists in Neshoba County had murdered the three civil-rights workers after Deputy Price released the men from jail. He said he met with Burrage after the killers buried the men’s bodies in the dam. An FBI agent read Barnette’s statement on the stand during Burrage’s trial.
“Burrage got a glass gallon jug and filled it with gasoline to be used to burn the 1963 Ford car owned by the three civil rights workers,” Barnette said in his confession. “Burrage took one of the diesel trucks from under the trailer and said, “I will use this to pick you up, no one will suspect a truck on the road this time at night.” It was then about 1 to 1:30 in the morning.”
Norma Bourdeax, a member of the federal grand jury that indicted Burrage, told the Clarion-Ledger that she believed Burrage was guilty. She also later served eight years as a Mississippi state representative, beginning in 1991.
“A man who has a piece of property doesn’t generally have people come in, take a bulldozer and bury three bodies under a dam unless he knows about it,” the former juror said.
But during his trial, Burrage claimed he did not know anything about the murders. His family and friends backed his alibi that he was at home and at church on the night of the murders. The jury acquitted him in 1967. He died in 2013.
The Mississippi Burning investigation pinpointed the involvement of members of the local White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Philadelphia Police Department and the Neshoba County Sheriff’s Office. Despite acquittals for Burrage, Tucker and mothers, juries ultimately convicted seven other men for the murders, including former KKK leader Edgar Ray Killen in 2005. Killen was the only person convicted of murder charges.
Justice Jim Kitchens has his own connection to a notorious civil rights-era murderer. In 1994, he served as a court-appointed defense attorney for Byron De La Beckwith, the Citizens Council member who assassinated Mississippi civil-rights leader Medgar Evers outside his Jackson home in 1963.
Evers, an Army veteran who became the NAACP’s first field Secretary in Mississippi, had fought for voting rights for Black Mississippians and to end racial segregation in public life. Evers’ wife, Mylie Evers, and the couple’s three children were at home on June 12, 1963, when Beckwith shot him in the back across from the family’s home.
During Beckwith’s trial, Kitchens said that his client’s white supremacist views were not on trial and that jurors should focus on the facts of the case, including whether there was reasonable doubt about his guilt.
“Nobody can legally or morally question your verdict if you don’t believe that the state’s case has been proven without reasonable doubt,” the New York Times reported Kitchens saying in February 1994. “We don’t just do that for people we like and admire, but for everyone. And if Byron De La Beckwith can’t get a fair trial, then no one can get a fair trial.”
At trial, witnesses recalled Beckwith boasting about the murder.
“Killing that n-ger didn’t cause me any more physical harm than your wife having a baby,” witness Delmar Dennis recalled Beckwith saying at a 1965 Ku Klux Klan rally in Byram, Miss.
The jury convicted Beckwith of Evers’ murder and sentenced him to life in prison, where he died in 2001 at age 80.
This story is provided as a service of the Institute for Nonprofit News’ On the Ground news wire. The Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) is a network of more than 475 independent, nonprofit newsrooms serving communities throughout the US, Canada, and globally. On the Ground is a service of INN, which aggregates the best of its members’ elections and political content, and provides it free for republication. Read more about INN here: https://inn.org/.
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