A controversial, state-created water authority set to take over Jackson’s water and sewer systems is now limited by a partial federal injunction announced on Monday. By design, the Metro Jackson Water Authority would only take over after the end of an ongoing federal receivership.

U.S. District Court Judge Henry Wingate granted in part and denied in part a request from the city to enjoin the water authority from moving forward. State lawmakers created the authority, under House Bill 1677, this past legislative session. A nine-member board would run the new utility with appointees from state and local officials. Jackson leaders have protested the law for not giving the city a majority of appointees.

Under the injunction ordered Monday, the authority and its board cannot take any action other than appointing and seating board members.

“The Authority may not at this time, select a Board President, unless and until this court gives approval,” Wingate’s order said. “The Authority shall enact no regulatory measures, finalize no lease agreements, issue no bonds, and assume no managerial influence or deputy control over Jackson’s water and sewer systems unless and until this court explicitly alters this decree or determines to relinquish its ongoing authority over the systems.”

In its request for an injunction, the city argued HB 1677 interfered with the federal receivership Wingate initiated in 2022. In an order placing Jackson’s sewer system under the receivership, Wingate tasked receiver Ted Henifin with creating a transition plan by Oct. 5.

As things stand, the judge wrote, HB 1677 doesn’t interfere with his 2022 order because it only takes effect once the court allows Henifin and his company, JXN Water, to step down. Moreover, Wingate could reject the Metro Jackson Water Authority altogether.

“The state law, in this court’s eye, simply stands as an unexecuted contingency—a structure waiting in the wings,” Wingate wrote. “If this court decides to reject the Authority as a viable successor entity within the final transition framework, the Authority cannot assume control.”

Even so, the judge specified three ways the water authority law “attempts to encroach upon” his role overseeing Jackson’s utilities:

• First, by creating a specific governance model, the state law attempts to narrow the options for a succession plan available to the court.
• Second, the state law says the president of the water authority would serve as Henifin’s deputy, disrupting the “inner management” of JXN Water.
• And third, the state law requires the authority to immediately negotiate a lease of the water and sewer assets with the city, in addition to allowing the authority to issue bonds as soon as July 1. Such actions would “infringe upon” the court’s rule overseeing the utility systems’ finances.

“This court is persuaded that the potential insertion of a state-appointed official into the operational hierarchy of the (interim third party manager) risks creating an administrative dichotomy that could fracture the unified command necessary to rehabilitate Jackson’s infrastructure,” Wingate ruled.

Officials so far have named most of the nine board members. Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann chose Jackson businessman Sandy Carter, the city of Ridgeland named its city engineer, Paul Forster, and the city of Byram chose WGK engineer Tramone Smith.

Jackson Mayor John Horhn selected Daniel Walker, a water treatment professional, as well as longtime politico Austin Barbour and Jackson businesswoman Shirley Tucker. The Jackson City Council, though, still has to confirm the mayor’s picks.

Gov. Tate Reeves last month declined to name his two selections, citing Wingate’s initial temporary injunction against the water authority. Reeves and Horhn have to consult over the ninth board appointee.

Former Mississippi State head coach Mike Leach, the eccentric and revolutionary offensive savant whose teams set dozens of scoring and passing records over his 21-year head coaching career, is among the nominees for the 2027 College Football Hall of Fame class.

The National Football Foundation released the ballot Monday for the class that will be announced in January. It includes 80 players and nine coaches from the Football Bowl Subdivision and 99 players and 39 coaches from lower levels.

A player is eligible 10 full seasons after his last year in college and must have received first-team All-America honors by a major selector. The nominee’s college football achievements are a prime consideration, but his post-football record as a citizen also is a factor.

Leach, who died in 2022 at age 61, became eligible for induction under adjusted criteria for coaches to be considered. The NFF announced last year the minimum career winning percentage required would go from .600 to .595 beginning in 2027.

Leach had a .596 winning percentage with a 158-107 record at Texas Tech, Washington State and Mississippi State.

Leach was known for his innovative wide-open offenses and his knack for pulling upsets. He won 18 games against Top 25 opponents when his team was unranked.

Among other FBS coaches on the ballot are Larry Coker, whose Miami team won the 2001 season’s national championship; Dennis Franchione, who made stops at TCU, Alabama and Texas A&M; Ralph Friedgen, who led Maryland to bowls in seven of his 10 seasons; Darryl Rogers, 1977 Big Ten coach of the year at Michigan State; Jackie Sherrill, all-time wins leader at Mississippi State; and Tommy Tuberville, who coached at Ole Miss before leading powerful Auburn teams of the 2000s.

Heisman Trophy winners Cam Newton of Auburn (2010) and Robert Griffin III of Baylor (2011) are on the ballot along with first-time nominees Tavon Austin of West Virginia, Melvin Gordon of Wisconsin, A.J. Hawk of Ohio State and Barrett Jones of Alabama.

Nominees go through a screening process to assure they meet eligibility criteria before a vote is taken among members of the NFF and Football Writers Association of America. Voting results are sent to the NFF Honors Court, which makes final selections.

A Mississippi company plans to move forward in building a private power plant and an artificial intelligence industrial campus. 

State utility regulators, though, declined to make a ruling on the project, calling the developer’s request for an opinion “premature” and “hypothetical.”

The state’s two largest power companies are protesting the effort, arguing the project would classify it as a public utility. 

“We’re celebrating the ruling of the Public Service Commission,” said Gabriel Prado, CEO & president of PraCon Global Investment Group, the developer of the project and a slew of others throughout the Jackson metro area, including Topgolf in Ridgeland and a luxury apartment complex in Fondren.

While his initial filing to the PSC said the data center campus would be in Ridgeland, Prado has since said the project will be in the Jackson metro area and declined to say exactly where the project will be. The Jackson metro area, which includes Ridgeland, is in Entergy Mississippi’s service territory, meaning the company has exclusive rights to sell power there. 

In March, Prado AI, an affiliate of PraCon Global Investment, asked for a PSC opinion on whether it would be considered and regulated as a public utility if it generated and supplied power to its tenants at a potential data center and semiconductor manufacturing campus. It said in its initial filing that electricity would be included in the lease and not metered. 

On Friday, the PSC, which regulates public utility providers in the state, declined to issue an opinion saying that it did not have enough information. Central District Public Service Commissioner De’Keither Stamps told Mississippi Today that Prado didn’t answer “basic” questions, such as how many tenants the power would serve.  

“The limited facts presented by Prado AI present multiple questions of fact such that [a change in] any variable could result in a different opinion,” the report said. 

When asked why he didn’t provide more detail to the PSC, Prado said making that information available to the utility companies would take away the project’s competitive advantage. 

Prado called the decision “the best outcome in our legal strategy.” 

Prado AI is still working on securing all the funding it would need for a project of this size. Amazon’s data centers in Mississippi start at $1 billion in investment, and Gabriel Prado says his long term goal is to bring in over $25 billion. Any potential project would still need to go through state and local permitting.

In Mississippi, companies are generally allowed to generate power for their own use. The sticking point for utility companies is that Prado AI would be generating and providing power to its tenants. Entergy and Mississippi Power, the state’s two largest power providers, argue this arrangement would make Prado AI a public utility, subjecting it to the same PSC rules and regulations as them.   

In a brief to the PSC, Mississippi Power wrote that the request “could intentionally or unintentionally upset this delicate regulatory balance” and warned that the request could cause “significant and sweeping impacts that are truly difficult to overestimate.”

Prado AI disagrees and has cited an exemption which allows landlords to supply electricity to tenants. But the utility companies say the exemption only applies to transmitting electricity, not generating it. 

Even if Prado AI didn’t qualify as a public utility, the power companies argue Prado would need a “certificate of public convenience and necessity,” or CPCN, from the PSC in order to generate power. 

“An entity seeking to construct a generator, even without becoming a public utility, must still obtain a CPCN from the (PSC) first, giving the (PSC) the opportunity to determine whether the construction of the generator is in the public interest,” Entergy wrote in an April 13 filing. 

The company added, in a statement to Mississippi Today on Monday, that while it “supports customers’ right to generate their own power in compliance with state laws,” Entergy wants to guarantee the facility won’t affect its ratepayers. 

“We want to ensure if this large industrial project asks to connect to the electric grid in the future, it will cover all related interconnection costs so those costs aren’t passed on to Entergy’s residential, small business and other customers,” Entergy said in the statement. 

In the Jackson metro area, officials are trying to balance economic development with pushback from residents over environmental impacts. Jackson officials are grappling with potential zoning changes after being recently approached by a data center developer, while the City Council is considering a six-month moratorium on any data center construction in the city. 

Prado said that while he’s opposed to a moratorium in Jackson, he thinks it’s important for there to be public debate.

“When we go into our site and then need to speak to the public, I will be there,” Prado said. 

In April, Ridgeland officials passed an ordinance creating a 500-foot buffer between data centers and residents, and also ensuring such facilities plan for their utility needs ahead of time, including electricity, water and sewer. 

Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens, former Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba and former Jackson City Council Member Aaron Banks declined to plead guilty by a federal judge’s Friday deadline on charges they face in an FBI operation that roiled Jackson officials in 2024. 

U.S. District Judge Daniel Jordan set the deadline last year in an effort to ensure orderly resolution of a complex case. An expert says, though, that nothing would prevent the three men  from pleading guilty before or during a trial. 

Owens, Lumumba and Banks are the remaining defendants in the case. They are set to go to trial on July 13 in what the judge previously wrote he expects to be a month-long proceeding. 

Each of three defendants has previously pleaded not guilty. They can change to a guilty plea at any time, said Matt Steffey, a Mississippi College School of Law professor. 

“Let’s be clear, there’s nothing that prevents the parties from at any time agreeing to a negotiated plea,” Steffey said. “You can try anything.” 

At the same time, the judge is free to reject a plea – a move Steffey said would be unusual but not rare. 

“If the judge rejects the terms of the plea agreement, then a defendant has the right to withdraw the plea,” he said. 

Owens, Banks and Lumumba are facing multiple charges stemming from a sweeping FBI operation aimed at exposing public corruption. Undercover agents, posing as real estate developers, sought to build a convention center hotel in downtown Jackson on a plot of land the city had previously obtained a federal loan to develop. 

The undercover agents enlisted an unsuspecting Owens to help them gain credibility with powerful Jacksonians, including Banks and Lumumba, Mississippi Today previously reported.

The only bribes that the indictment charges Lumumba with taking are campaign contributions. While on a yacht off the coast of Florida, Lumumba discussed the payment Owens was going to give him on behalf of the developers and then placed a call asking a city employee to shorten a bid window for the hotel development, the indictment alleges. 

Prosecutors allege Banks took cash bribes in exchange for his vote on the development, but the city never selected a winning bid and the vote did not come to fruition. 

Two people have already pleaded guilty in the scheme: Another former City Council member, Angelique Lee, and Owens’ cousin and associate, Sherik “Marve” Smith. 

WEST POINT — Tameshia Shelton remains in prison for life for murder — a conviction contradicted by much of the evidence, including an apparent suicide note never presented to the jury, a four-year investigation by Mississippi Today has found.

Mississippi Today retraced Shelton’s path through the criminal justice system from the beginning, attending multiple court hearings, examining hundreds of pages of transcripts, exhibits and other court records, and conducting dozens of interviews.

The reporting revealed law enforcement concluded 21-year-old Danelle Young’s death was a homicide even though much of the evidence pointed to suicide, creating a cloud of suspicion that landed Shelton behind bars.

This narrative went unchallenged through Mississippi’s justice system until it hardened into a murder conviction through discrepancies in officers’ testimony, a since recanted deputy state medical examiner’s homicide ruling and a defense attorney so ineffective that an appeals court later ruled he violated Shelton’s constitutional rights.

Not long after arriving at Young’s fatal shooting on Oct. 16, 2009, Clay County sheriff’s deputies concluded his death was a homicide. Shelton, who has maintained her innocence, became the prime suspect because she was the last known person to see Young alive. 

Current Sheriff Eddie Scott, then the chief deputy, told a local reporter he’d ruled out the possibility that Young died from suicide or an accident because the 21-year-old had been shot in the chest from 30 feet away.

Only the gun was actually fired from less than an inch away. That’s what a State Crime Lab expert concluded after finding gunfire burns in Young’s jacket.

Studies show this finding is far more consistent with suicide. 

The deputy state medical examiner officially ruled Young’s death a homicide — a determination the pathologist has since called an “error.”

A grand jury indicted Shelton for murder, and a jury convicted her in 2015.

After five years behind bars, Shelton was granted an opportunity that could lead to freedom: The Mississippi Supreme Court ordered Clay County to hold a hearing to determine if she deserved a new trial. But after hearing new testimony, the trial judge denied her request in 2024.

The Mississippi Court of Appeals recently ruled in her favor, but it will be up to the Mississippi Supreme Court to decide by July if she gets a new trial.

“I’m trying to fight for my innocence,” Shelton said in a phone interview from prison. “I’m trying to fight for my life. I’m trying to fight for my freedom.”

Regardless of the outcome, her case illustrates how each step of Mississippi’s criminal justice system failed her. “It was easy for them to sit there and just throw me up behind the system,” she said of Clay County authorities. “Now it’s hard for me to get out from under the system.”

‘Y’all took too long! He’s dead!’

Shelton’s journey through Mississippi’s justice system begins with the night of Young’s death: Oct. 16, 2009.

Tameshia Shelton told the 911 dispatcher there had been an accidental shooting and shrieked, “Oh, my God! Danelle!”

“What’s going on?” the dispatcher asked.

Shelton paused before replying, “OK, he’s still breathing.”

The dispatcher told an ambulance and deputies to head to Mhoon Valley, a Clay County community that arose on the fertile soil of the Black Belt. The land grew gobs of cotton and became even busier when the Georgia Pacific Railroad set up a station in the late 19th century, but the place had long since fallen on hard times.

For Shelton and her family, the anchor became the Mhoon Valley Missionary Baptist Church, where they spent much of their time. Shelton sang in the choir and taught the girls in the congregation to mime dance.

After graduating from the nearby Mary Holmes College with an associate degree in cosmetology, she cut hair and did other work until the 2000s, when she began to suffer health issues, including seizures, that prevented her from working. But she continued to cook, making the family’s meals.

Left: Danelle Young was found fatally shot on the night of October 16, 2009, outside Tameshia Shelton’s trailer home in Mhoon Valley under an oak tree, pictured 17 years later on May 17, 2026. Credit: Jerry Mitchell/Mississippi Today

Right: The oak, pictured May 17, 2026, was a favorite of Tameshia Shelton’s grandfather. Credit: Madeline Nguyen/Mississippi Today

Shelton breathed hard and told the dispatcher, “Could you please hurry up?”

She shared that Young told her he saw a raccoon in a nearby oak — the same one her late grandfather loved to sit beneath and regale her and other children with stories.

Young asked for a gun to shoot the raccoon, and she handed him her grandfather’s .22-caliber pistol, she said. “I was in the house. Next thing I know, I heard a shot. I came outside. He’s down on the ground on the tree.”

Shelton, barefoot and in pajamas, walked to the middle of the street so the first responders could see her. The chilly wind gusted as she clutched her 5-month-old daughter, Treasure, in a baby blanket.

“She’s out here in the cold,” Shelton told the dispatcher. “Please hurry up.”

Her youngest sister, Ketina Tutton, arrived and saw her boyfriend on the ground. She began to scream, pull her hair and stomp the ground. 

When the first sheriff’s deputies — Sgt. Cassandra Smith and an auxiliary officer — arrived at the scene 17 minutes after Shelton called 911, she later testified that Shelton screamed, “Y’all took too long! He’s dead!”

Neither of the deputies were investigators. But testimony shows that Smith, a patrol officer, told her partner to let the chief investigator know she thought this was no accident — this was murder.

Qualifications: The state of Mississippi doesn’t require any homicide training for homicide investigators. Coroners aren’t required to have any medical experience. They simply must be 21 and have a high school diploma or its equivalent, but they must take a 40-hour course in death investigations and receive 24 hours of continuing education each year. 

Under Mississippi law, sheriffs aren’t required to have law enforcement experience. The only requirement? 

They can’t be atheists.

Young’s last week alive

Four days before his death, Young surprised Tutton by showing up at her home for her 22nd birthday and flashing his “Kool-Aid smile,” as his family called it.

The two had met in 2007 in Nashville, Tennessee, where Young was studying to become an auto mechanic while Tutton attended art school for graphic design.

After Young graduated in 2008, they began living together. When Tutton’s classes ended in April 2009, they moved to Mhoon Valley. A month later, they went together to the hospital to welcome Shelton’s new baby.

But the couple’s romance grew rocky. Family members recalled Tutton throwing Young’s clothes onto the lawn when the couple broke up that May.

Before Young left for his family’s home in Forest, Shelton’s middle sister, Shenikia, recalled him saying, “I’m tired of her leaving me, but she’ll see. Just wait. Just wait.”

In the months that followed in 2009, the couple began a long-distance relationship and eventually agreed to reunite. Starting in January, they planned to live together in Meridian, more than an hour and a half from Mhoon Valley.

Young dreamed about their future together, including marriage. The week he died, he gave Tutton a necklace and a birthday card addressed to “My Wife Mrs. Katina Young,” complete with a doodle of the couple holding hands.

He signed the card as “Yo Man, Yo Husband, Yo Hero, Yo Soulmate.”

“I’m giving You my life, You T, because I wanna spend mine with u,” he wrote Tutton, whom he called “T.” “I hate being away from u. It’s not fair 2 me & especially you.”

The couple spent the night together at Shelton’s trailer. But Tutton didn’t want to get married. She had gotten a full-time job nearby and no longer wanted to move away and live with Young.

Shenikia spent much of Young’s last week with him. “He was like my baby brother,” she told Mississippi Today. “My kids called him uncle.”

She said he talked about a change in plans, saying Tutton didn’t want to live together anymore.

On the morning of the day he died, Young babysat Shenikia’s son. Later that day, Young worked on Shelton’s car, and she cooked supper for him and the rest of the family.

That evening, Shenikia went to her mother’s red Ford Expedition to find her work schedule. She noticed Tutton and Young inside. 

They didn’t look happy, she said. The couple sat apart — Tutton remained in the middle of the back seat while Young rested on the floor with his legs hanging out the SUV’s open door.

Shenikia grabbed her schedule, went inside and returned later, asking the couple to go to Walmart to buy her some baby wipes.

By the time the couple returned at about 8 p.m., dreams of a new life together had deteriorated into a verbal spat that lasted 15 to 20 minutes. “I had just told him that we were not – that I was not going to move in January like we had planned,” Tutton later told deputies. “This was something we had planned … until I got the job.”

The argument ended with the couple parting ways. She said she walked inside her mother’s house, and Young headed to Shelton’s trailer. 

It was dark when Shelton said Young knocked on the bedroom window of her trailer. She was already in bed with her two daughters.

There was no way to open the window, which had an air-conditioner, so she headed for the front door. When she opened it, she said Young told her there was a raccoon in the tree and that he needed Shelton’s revolver and only one bullet to kill it.

She said she replied that he might need more than one bullet, so she loaded the .22 pistol and handed it to Young.

She heard a shot, and when Young didn’t return, she said she went outside to check on him, only to find him face down beneath the towering oak her grandfather loved.

Drawing Conclusions: Renowned criminologist and former detective Kim Rossmo said the biggest problem with law enforcement making a conclusion before the majority of the evidence is collected is, “It’s hard to walk back that decision, even if you later realize it’s the wrong decision.”

A 1999 National Institute of Justice study compared DNA of suspects in more than 21,000 cases with DNA from the crime scene. DNA tests exonerated the prime suspect in 23% of the cases.

“If DNA excluded the prime suspect 23% of the time, that means authorities were looking at the wrong person in almost 1 out of every 4 cases,” said Lucian Dervan, law professor and director of Criminal Justice Studies at Belmont University College of Law. “One has to wonder what these results mean for the vast majority of cases where there is no DNA evidence to test.” 

In 2014, Rossmo and a fellow professor at Texas State University examined 43 wrongful convictions. They found that a rush to judgment was a significant factor.

“Wrongful convictions are a form of criminal investigative failure,” Rossmo said. Such failures harm society, cause people to lose faith in the criminal justice system and signal structural weakness in that system, he said.

The investigator never considered suicide

Clay County sheriff’s deputies discovered the .22 pistol in the grass near Young’s feet. It became one of the most important pieces of evidence in their death investigation.

They sent it to the State Crime Lab but didn’t ask for the pistol to be tested for fingerprints. If Young’s fingerprints had been present, that would have cast doubt that Shelton shot him.

Neither Sheriff Scott nor the Clay County Sheriff’s Department responded to repeated requests for an interview with Mississippi Today.

Chief Investigator Ramirez Williams rejected Shelton’s explanation of the moments leading up to Young’s shooting. The chief investigator testified he believed that because Young was wearing camouflage, the victim knew how to hunt. If Young truly had to shoot a raccoon, Williams reasoned, he would have asked for Shelton’s shotgun, not a pistol.

Shelton’s current lawyers, Sandra Levick and Tucker Carrington of the Mississippi Innocence Project, pointed out on appeal that “the reasonable inference is that Mr. Young asked for one bullet in the handgun rather than for the shotgun because he intended to turn the gun on himself. He used the ruse that there was a raccoon in the tree as a reason to ask for the gun.”

Deputies discovered a banana hair clip, a rubber band with hair in it and “badly disturbed” gravel at the scene. After learning Young and Tutton had argued that night, officers concluded a physical altercation had taken place in Shelton’s driveway. That speculation led them to conclude without any additional proof that Shelton had killed Young to protect her sister.

Officers from the Clay County Sheriff’s Department testified at Shelton’s 2015 murder trial that they found three pieces of evidence near Danelle Young’s body that made them conclude an “altercation” occurred before he died: “badly disturbed” gravel, a hair clip and a rubber band containing hair, as pictured in crime scene photographs from October 2009. Credit: Mississippi Supreme Court records

By his own admission, Williams never considered suicide as a possibility — even after deputies obtained a surveillance video that contradicted elements of the officers’ theory of an altercation. Tutton didn’t have a hair clip or rubber band in her hair when she and Young bought baby wipes earlier that night at Walmart.

Deputies shared their findings with the coroner, who wrote that “statements given to investigators at the scene indicate that there might have been some type of altercation or argument between Mr. Young and his girlfriend prior to the incident.”

Tunnel Vision and Confirmation Bias: Tunnel vision is the tendency for actors in the legal system to lock in on a crime and a suspect and build their investigation and prosecution around finding evidence to prove guilt, said Keith Findley, who co-founded the Center for Integrity in Forensic Sciences. “Confirmation bias is one of the psychological processes that can drive tunnel vision.”

He said confirmation bias takes place when anything that backs the conclusion is considered relevant and important while any contrary information is considered irrelevant or unreliable. 

For instance, if there is a mistaken eyewitness identification, officers may continue to “build a case” against that suspect, he said. Or if police interpret a piece of evidence as proof of a crime, they continue to believe a crime took place even when other information contradicts it, he said.

In 2000, then-Illinois Gov. George Ryan put a moratorium on executions, and his Commission on Capital Punishment concluded that tunnel vision played a significant role in most cases that wrongly sent 13 innocent people to death row.

The 2014 Texas State University study that examined 43 wrongful convictions found that confirmation bias played a role in four out of five cases where innocent people were sent to prison.

‘Gunshot wounds in the heart are frequent suicidal injuries’

A gun fired from less than an inch away, as in Young’s case, nearly always points to suicide. A study of 1,450 handgun deaths found that 96% of close-contact wounds were suicides and 3% were homicides. 

But that’s not what the deputy chief medical examiner for Mississippi at the time, Dr. Lisa Funte, who now goes by “Liam,” determined. Instead, the pathologist ruled it a homicide.

Funte did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Mississippi Today.

The autopsy report made no reference to an argument — only an altercation, which police typically use to refer to a physical fight.: “This individual was reportedly shot following an altercation with his girlfriend.”

Funte based that determination on the bullet’s pathway. The bullet, fired through the left center of Young’s chest, had no significant deviation to the left or right, the pathologist said. “It was pretty much straight back and down.”

Funte, who had three years’ experience as a pathologist at the time of the death, testified later that he had never seen a suicide case where a bullet took this pathway. Over a decade later, he told a court that as he has gained more experience, he has since encountered such suicide cases. In 2018, Funte began serving as the deputy chief medical examiner for Maine.

While more suicides involve firing at the temple (36%), the left chest is a common location (15%), according to a 2002 study of 624 gunshot autopsies. “Gunshot wounds in the heart are frequent suicidal injuries, especially in men,” a 2005 study said.

Funte had told jurors the death was a homicide because, if Young was going to shoot himself in the chest, it would be difficult to turn his hand completely around. That would cause the bullet to deviate to the left or right.

But the pathologist’s conclusion seemed to ignore that you don’t have to turn your hand around; you just have to turn the gun around and pull the trigger with your thumbs.

Funte failed to take into account other factors, including the rise in suicides among young Black men. In 2009, the suicide rate for Black men between 15 and 24 was 9.78 per 100,000 people — more than twice as high as it was in 1960. That trend has continued, prompting a 2019 report, “Ring the Alarm: The Crisis of Black Youth Suicide in America.”

At trial, the pathologist testified there was a lack of mental illness. But a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 54% of those who die by suicide suffer no such illness. 

The pathologist also mentioned the lack of previous suicide attempts. One study concluded that nearly two-thirds of men who commit suicide die on their first try.

At the time, Funte was unware of the upsetting argument Young had with his girlfriend or the apparent suicide note he wrote.

A study by the CDC with the University of Georgia found that 1 in 5 suicides is linked to intimate partner problems. For young adults, breakups are especially traumatic, resulting in a 25% increase in suicidal thoughts, according to another study.

In a 2022 hearing seeking a new trial for Shelton, Dr. Randall Frost, the medical examiner for Bexar County, Texas, testified he saw no evidence that would make him conclude Young’s death was a homicide. “It’s completely consistent with a self-inflicted wound,” he said.

Pathologists: Medical examiners must operate independently, “without any undue influence” from law enforcement agencies and prosecutors under National Association of Medical Examiners’ standards. Despite that, 70% of their members reported pressure to influence their findings. 

A 2025 editorial in “Forensic Science International” declared that forensic labs under law enforcement control “face pressure to support prosecution.” Independence is essential, but scientists who challenge “official narratives often experience professional retaliation,” the editorial says.

“When a medical examiner feels he or she is part of the prosecution team, that gives rise to a lot of wrong diagnoses,” said renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, one of the founding members.

“Forensic pathologists have to just say what the facts are and not be concerned if anyone is found guilty or innocent,” he said. “If they feel they work for police or their job depends on cooperating with police, then their opinions can be easily swayed.”

Shelton rejects plea bargain: ‘I’m not going to lie and go to hell’

After a grand jury indicted Shelton in 2011, she looked to hire a lawyer. Fearful a public defender might not represent her well, she visited former prosecutor Rod Ray, who agreed to take the case.

His fee was $50,000. According to a sworn statement from her family, they and their church managed to scrape together $43,000 to pay him.

After hearing her story and talking to authorities, Ray believed Shelton was innocent.

“Why would somebody call 911 and stay on the phone for, I think it was 17 minutes, begging people to come to the scene to talk to the one person in the world who could say who did or who did not do it?” he testified in the 2022 hearing.

In 2014, Shelton took a voice-stress test, which deputies turned into a two-hour questioning session on crime – all without her lawyer’s presence.

Her attorney told her that authorities had offered a plea bargain for manslaughter. She refused. Her position remained the same as when investigators first questioned her.

“I’ll tell the truth and go to jail,” Shelton recalled telling them. “But I’m not going to lie and go to hell.”

Prosecutors relied on erroneous testimony

Six years passed before prosecutors put Shelton on trial in 2015. When they finally did, they told the jury they didn’t have a motive for why she did it, and they didn’t need to provide one.

Instead, prosecutors hammered home that Young’s death was a homicide and used gunshot residue tests to support their case that Shelton shot him.

Gunshot residue tests were designed to determine if someone has fired a gun, handled a gun or been close to a weapon when it was fired, but experts say the tests can’t prove anything beyond that.

Prosecutors told jurors that gunpowder residue had been found on Shelton. One microscopic particle of residue was on the back of her hands and four particles were on her palms – a location that a defense expert said would match someone who handled a recently fired gun.

Shelton told deputies she had fired the gun earlier in the week to scare a bulldog chasing her nephew, but prosecutors said Shelton was just trying to cover up her crime.

Some deputies testified that from their recollection, Shelton repeatedly wiped her hands before they tested her hours later for gunshot residue at the station – a timeframe later proven wrong.

“She had hours, four hours to get rid of the evidence,” Assistant District Attorney Mark Jackson told the jury in 2015. “And man did she have the motive. She knows she shot him in cold blood. She has to get rid of whatever it is that Ramirez Williams is going to be looking for to pin this crime on her.”

Gunshot residue was also found on the back of Young’s hands. “Gunshot residue particles are typically found on the backs of the hands of the person who fired the weapon,” Bexar County forensic scientist Crystina Vachon testified in the 2022 hearing.

Prosecutors argued that because only five particles were found on Young, he didn’t fire the gun – a conclusion that defense experts questioned.

“You cannot make any determination about a shooter or a bystander or someone who just handled a weapon based on the number of particles,” Vachon said.

Gunshot residue tests: Experts say the public sometimes has a “CSI” view of gunshot residue — a test that definitively identifies the shooter or exonerates the innocent. But the truth is these tests fall short of such conclusions.

Residue generally reflects whether someone fired a gun, handled a gun or was close when a weapon was fired, but experts say problems exist with these tests. They can result in false positives because of contamination by officers or labs.

In many cases, tests fail to find residue even after someone fired a weapon. A study of 116 suicides determined that in half of these cases, no residue was found.

The FBI Lab stopped conducting these tests in 2006.

“Gunshot residue is notoriously unreliable,” said Chris Fabricant, author of “Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System.” “It’s hardly conclusive.”

Authorities ‘were grasping at straws’

After prosecutors in their opening statement accused Shelton of gunning down Young, defense lawyer Rod Ray delayed his opening statement until the defense presented its case.

When he later delivered his statement to jurors, he spoke fewer than 100 words, promising jurors they would “hear from the people that were in Mhoon Valley.”

The only witness they heard from was Tutton, who confirmed what she had told deputies.

Ray did not respond to repeated requests for comment from Mississippi Today.

The prosecution gave jurors no motive for why Shelton would have wanted to kill Young, but Ray helped them out by getting the chief investigator to share his theories on her motives.

Ray didn’t consult with or call experts on the manner of death or gunshot residue. He later testified in the 2022 hearing that his strategy was to focus on Shelton in the 911 call, when she hysterically pleaded for the ambulance to hurry.

“I knew from talking to the people involved that they (authorities) were grasping at straws. They didn’t know what had happened. They didn’t have a motive. She’d never been in trouble,” he testified. “It didn’t add up.”

Ray didn’t interview any experts or witnesses before the trial started, according to court records. 

But he later testified that he worked hard for his client. “I fought my guts out to win.”

‘These are my last words’

A month or so after Young’s death, Shelton found a note he wrote her, stuck inside her baby book. The note began, “Thank you for accepting me 4 who I was.” 

Not “who I am.” Who I was.

Shelton kept reading. Young thanked her for giving him advice and a place to lay his head. He asked her to keep watch over her baby sister.

“I love her 2 death. She’s my heart. I planned my life with her around her. I never planned 4 just me,” he wrote. “I have no life without her. These are my last words.”

He mentioned Shelton’s 5-month-old daughter, Treasure, and told Shelton to tell her oldest daughter, Trinity, “I said bye & be a good girl ok Tell Treasure about me one day. Bye Bye.”

Shelton shared the note with her family. They agreed it was a suicide note and sealed it in a plastic bag. When Shelton met with Ray, she shared the note, and he made a copy.

On the second day of the trial, Ray sent Shelton home to get the note. Nothing in the trial transcript indicates he ever tried to introduce it as evidence.

Lawyers who later represented Shelton on her post-conviction appeal accused Ray of a “complete lack of preparation. He had not prepared any witness who was familiar with Mr. Young’s handwriting to authenticate the note. … Mr. Ray had not retained a handwriting expert. He had not prepared Ms. Shelton to testify. He had not shared the note with counsel for the State in advance of the trial.”

Failure to share evidence prior to trial typically results in that evidence being excluded, legal experts say.

Ray later testified that he needed a witness to introduce the letter and that Shelton “chose not to testify.”

During the murder trial, Judge James T. Kitchens Jr. of Caledonia told Shelton it was her right as to whether she testified, but he urged her to “listen to what your attorney suggests.”

Shelton told Mississippi Today that Ray told her not to testify. She said she would have gladly testified if it meant the jury could read the note. 

As a result, jurors never knew about Young’s note to Shelton. 

“I have no life without her. These are my last words,” Young wrote. “Bye, bye.”

Mississippi Today shared the note with five jurors in Shelton’s murder trial. One of them, Robin Daniels, said that note would have absolutely made a difference in the deliberations.

A second juror, Patricia Glasson, said she believes the note creates reasonable doubt about Shelton’s guilt. A third juror, Chris Glover, said Shelton deserves a new trial. “And I would be willing to serve on the jury.”

Inadequate Legal Defense: Many defense lawyers represent their clients well, but some fall short. They may neglect to fully investigate a case. They may not challenge questionable evidence. Or worse, they may fail to call possible witnesses or introduce evidence that would help clear their clients.

In some cases, these lawyers are overworked, burned out or lack the funding or resources that district attorneys have. In still others, these lawyers may fail to do their jobs.

The Mississippi Court of Appeals concluded that Shelton’s defense lawyer committed errors so grievous it deprived her of a fair trial. 

Despite their doubts, jurors vote to convict 

Jurors struggled to reach a unanimous decision, at one point asking the judge in a note, “Is accidental shooting ruled out already? Could this be considered?”

Judges aren’t permitted to give new instructions, so Kitchens pointed them back to the instructions he had already given.

Some time after his response, the jury returned a “guilty” verdict. 

When the circuit clerk polled the jurors, one juror gave no response, according to the court transcript. She later said in a sworn statement that she wasn’t convinced Shelton was guilty. The juror has since died.

Young’s twin sister, Dominique, told the judge, “I know nothing will bring him back, but this woman needs to feel our pain. I feel that she should get life in prison or the electric chair. She took an innocent man’s life so her life should be taken away.”

Young’s mother, Edith, said to Kitchens, “I’m thinking of him every day, crying, not able to control it. I’m a mother who lost a part of me, my child. He didn’t deserve to be killed like a dog shot down in cold blood.”

Young’s family did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Mississippi Today.

The judge sentenced Shelton to life in prison. When she turns 65 in 2043, she can petition the sentencing court for conditional release. It’s a request that lawyers say is rarely granted.

To the new DA, ‘The evidence sounded thin’

In the years following Shelton’s conviction, her family reached out to everyone they could, including to District Attorney Scott Colom in 2018. They told Colom that Young’s death was a suicide, not a homicide.

The wall of Colom’s office has a reminder to him about not rushing to judgment: a photo of Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks, two exonerated men who together spent a total of 30 years behind bars, including time on death row, for a murder they didn’t commit. 

Their prosecutor was Colom’s predecessor, Forrest Allgood, whose office saw six convicted people later have their convictions thrown out — the record for any district attorney in the state, according to a Mississippi Today analysis of data from the National Registry of Exonerations. 

Allgood said he did not recall the Shelton case, which other prosecutors tried. He said he and his staff never tried anyone they thought was innocent.

He defended Shelton’s defense lawyer, Ray, who previously worked for Allgood as a prosecutor. “He’s probably the premier defense lawyer in the district,” the former district attorney said. “There’s probably a very good reason he didn’t introduce the [apparent suicide] letter.”

Just because an appeals court dismisses a case doesn’t mean it’s right, he said. “Appeals courts are made up of fallible human beings.”

He said he disagreed with the term exoneration when a case is reversed because “there’s a bias toward the accused being innocent, even after a jury says otherwise.”

Colom said Brooks supported his campaign for district attorney and made him promise that if he ever had a case with questions about someone’s guilt, he would have people look into it.

After reading the 2017 Mississippi Supreme Court opinion upholding Shelton’s conviction, Colom began to have questions. “The evidence sounded thin,” he said. “There was not much motive.”

On top of that, he said, if Shelton were truly guilty of murder, “Why would she call 911?”

He reached out to the Mississippi Innocence Project to look into the case. And he later wrote a sworn statement in support of a hearing to determine if Shelton deserved a new trial.

In 2020, the Mississippi Supreme Court unanimously ordered such a hearing. The trial judge removed Colom from the case because of the statement he signed and had the attorney general’s office replace him.

Defense attorneys point to ‘false and misleading testimony from prosecution witnesses’

In 2021 and 2022, Judge Kitchens held three days of hearings.

At Shelton’s original trial, deputies testified that from their recollection, Shelton was wiping her hands to try and remove gunshot residue before they tested her at the station at about 1 a.m.

Her defense team, now including Jake Howard of the MacArthur Justice Center, slammed that testimony as false. A form from that night signed by chief investigator Ramirez Williams showed he had tested Shelton for gunshot residue at 9:51 p.m. — less than 30 minutes after Young was pronounced dead outside her trailer, and hours before she made it to the station.

But the jury never saw the form documenting the actual time.

This evidence “completely undermined the State’s theory that she had tried to rub away the evidence that she had fired the gun,” her new lawyers wrote. “The State secured its conviction against Tameshia Shelton by presenting, and failing to correct, false and misleading testimony from prosecution witnesses.”

After seeing additional materials regarding Young’s death during the hearings, Dr. Funte admitted in a sworn statement that his ruling that Young’s death was a homicide was an “error.” During a new hearing, Funte told the court that he lacked knowledge of any data or scientific studies that supported his original conclusion for Young’s manner of death — in fact, they contradicted it.

If Funte had the chance to rule again, the pathologist wrote to the court that he would deem the death undetermined but leaning toward suicide.

“Any bullet trajectory can occur in both homicides and suicides. I see no evidence at this point to support homicide,” Funte testified.

The judge told lawyers that cause of death in cases — gunshot, poisoning or otherwise — are more of an issue than manner of death, whether it be homicide, suicide or otherwise.

Former Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Oliver Diaz Jr., who was acquitted of bribery and tax evasion charges, said the cause of death in this case may be a gunshot wound, but the manner of death makes all the difference.

If the pathologist had ruled the manner of death a suicide or an accident, he asked, what proof would there be that a homicide took place? 

“If the manner of death didn’t matter,” Diaz said, “Tameshia Shelton wouldn’t be in prison.”

Phantom crimes: Nearly three-fourths of exonerated women were convicted of “phantom crimes” — crimes that never took place, according to data from the National Registry of Exonerations.

Through reviews or court appeals, authorities determined that what they first thought were crimes were really accidents, suicides or other acts misinterpreted as wrongdoing.

Nationwide, more than 300 women have had their convictions overturned over the past three decades. Although the reasons vary, many of these cases involve faulty forensic methods and conclusions.

Shelton lost because of the evidence, state maintains

Judge Kitchens took so long to rule on Shelton’s case that the Mississippi Supreme Court scolded him.

Nearly two years after the hearings, the judge finally ruled. He denied Shelton a new trial in a 15-page order.

After her lawyers appealed to the Mississippi Court of Appeals, Special Assistant Attorney General Barbara Byrd wrote to the court that Shelton had failed to show why she should be granted a new trial. Byrd stated that the defense “failed to show that the State’s witnesses testified falsely or that the prosecution knowingly elicited false testimony or that the jury relied on the allegedly-false testimony in rendering its verdict.” 

Shelton lost because of the evidence, not her defense lawyer’s performance, Byrd wrote. “Trial counsel challenged the State’s evidence at all stages of this case by filing and arguing pre-trial motions, making strategic objections at trial, by thoroughly examining witnesses, and by making a persuasive (though unsuccessful) closing argument.”

She called the apparent suicide note irrelevant as evidence.

Left: Sisters Tameshia, left, and Shenikia Shelton smile for a last photo together in 2015 before Tameshia was imprisoned after a Clay County jury convicted her of murder in the 2009 death of their youngest sister’s boyfriend, Danelle Young. Right: Shenikia Shelton, bottom, visits Tameshia Shelton in prison. Tameshia Shelton is serving a life sentence in the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Rankin County. Credit: Courtesy of Shenikia Shelton

But the appeals court disagreed. The judges ruled 7-3 in favor of a new trial for Shelton, citing Dr. Funte’s reversal on manner of death and the defense lawyer’s failure to introduce an apparent suicide note as evidence. “We find it difficult to conclude that its absence did not prejudice Shelton’s defense,” the appeals judges wrote.

The appeals court did acknowledge discrepancies in the officers’ testimony. But it rejected the defense’s argument that the testimony was false, ruling that the defense failed to show the officers intentionally lied.

In appealing the decision to the Mississippi Supreme Court, Byrd said the same studies that supposedly support the deputy medical examiner’s reversal “quantitatively showed that Dr. Funte’s original opinion was still the most probable manner of death.”

She cited one study that said only 36.4% of suicidal gunshot wounds were to the left chest, “meaning 63.6% did not.” And a later study showed that less than 15% of suicides involve chest wounds.

Byrd declared the defense’s failure to admit the apparent suicide note into evidence “does not establish prejudice. At most, it shows a possibility — not the reasonable probability — of a different result. That is insufficient.” (The attorney general’s office declined to comment further on the case.)

Shelton’s lawyers responded that “no competent medical examiner would rely on statistical probabilities to determine, to a reasonable degree of medical certainty, the manner of death” since “‘any bullet trajectory can occur in both homicides and suicides.’”

They wrote that “Young’s ‘These are my last words’ note … was relevant to Young’s state of mind where the asserted defense was suicide, as the Court of Appeals correctly holds.”

Mississippi Supreme Court justices have until July to decide if they will consider the case. If they don’t, the case would return to Colom’s office.

“It’s my job,” Colom told Mississippi Today, “to look at what the facts show and do justice.”

Undoing Wrongful Convictions:Overturning a wrongful conviction in a murder case borders on impossible in Mississippi.

The Mississippi Supreme Court has upheld convictions in more than 86% of appeals decided on merits over the past decade. Getting a circuit court judge to order a new trial in a murder case is even more difficult. 

Since 2021, the Mississippi Supreme Court has ordered 38 circuit court judges to review murder or capital murder cases to determine if new trials are warranted, according to a Westlaw search. Not a single one of those judges ordered a new trial.

Jackson lawyer Graham Carner has been fighting for a new trial for his client, Jeffrey Havard, since 2008. His case involves allegations of sexual assault, which even the state’s experts agree never happened, and a “shaken baby” syndrome that scientists have disproven.

“The system values finality more than reaching the right result,” he said. “Once there is a conviction, the system wants to just move along. And it’s almost impossible for the innocent to get justice. We need to do better.”

‘We didn’t get to grieve Danelle. We loved him.’

In the 11 years since Tameshia Shelton went to prison, weeds and trees have overtaken her trailer. Her prized black Mustang sits nearby with the vanity tag, “Truely” – shorthand for her phrase, “I’m truly a walking miracle.”

Her sister, Shenikia, said the pain runs deep, not just for the loss of her sister, but for the loss of the young man her children called “uncle.” She said the lead investigator advised them against attending Young’s funeral or reaching out to his family.

Because deputies believed Shelton had killed Young, “we didn’t get to grieve Danelle,” she said. “We loved him. He was family.”

From prison, Shelton told Mississippi Today that despite being behind bars, she maintains “an optimistic outlook and a positive mindset. My trust and my faith is in God.”

Putting innocent people behind bars does more than hurt a single individual, she said. “My family is hurting, the community is hurting, my kids are hurting. It’s like a domino effect.”

Her children have grown up without her. Her now-17-year-old daughter, Treasure, has battled depression and suicidal thoughts in the past, Shelton said. “If I was there, my kids wouldn’t be going through counseling. If I was there, my sister wouldn’t have to sit there and play the mom role.”

Left: Tameshia Shelton’s black Mustang, pictured April 27, 2026, sits parked in Mhoon Valley by where her trailer once stood before she went to prison in 2015. Right: The forest has overtaken Tameshia Shelton’s abandoned trailer, pictured April 27, 2026, in Mhoon Valley over the 11 years that she’s been in prison on a murder conviction in the 2009 death of her sister’s boyfriend, Danelle Young. Credit: Madeline Nguyen/Mississippi Today

If she is freed, she plans to spend the rest of her life helping those in similar circumstances, she said. “I don’t want this to happen to other people.”

Shelton said she would like for Young’s family to know that “we weren’t the ones that pulled the trigger. We did not do any harm to him. We never did anything to him besides treat him like family.”

She expressed sympathy to his family for their loss. “I know how his family feels because my daughter tried to kill herself,” she said. “I am truly sorry that they suffered that loss. Being in here, I feel the pain. I honestly feel the pain.”

Madeline Nguyen is a Roy Howard Fellow at Mississippi Today. Ilyssa Daly is an investigative reporter who previously worked with Mississippi Today to help investigate this case.

This story was published with the support of a grant from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights, in conjunction with Arnold Ventures.

Illustrations by Bethany Atkinson. Layout and interactive elements by Dennis Dean.

Some folks believe the recent U.S. Supreme Court redistricting decision in Louisiana v. Callais gives elected officials the authority to discriminate against Black people – to draw political districts with the express purpose of preventing them from being in the majority.

In Mississippi, Gov. Tate Reeves and state Auditor Shad White and other Republicans seem to be of that belief. They advocate, but disagree on timing, redrawing the 2nd Congressional District currently represented by Democrat Bennie Thompson, who is only the second Black Mississippian to serve in the U.S. House since the 1800s, to ensure it is not a majority-Black district.

Court decisions can be difficult to comprehend. Often, attorneys are needed to make sense of the rulings, and if five attorneys look at the same decision, they might all come to nuanced, different interpretations.

Some would argue such vagueness keeps members of the legal profession employed. 

Despite all the pontification and analysis of the landmark Callais redistricting decision, there seems to remain one central question that the high court needs to answer.

Is it OK for elected leaders to draw political districts – congressional, state legislative or local city and county districts – with the intent of preventing majority-Black districts?

Weakening the Voting Rights Act

For decades, the 1965 Voting Rights Act has been used by the courts to prevent the dilution of Black voter strength and to ensure majority-minority districts under certain circumstances. Those circumstances included, for instance, could a majority-minority district be drawn that was reasonably compact without dividing communities of interest, such as cities and counties.

In weakening the Voting Rights Act, the Supreme Court seemed to say in the Callais decision that districts could not be drawn for the sole purpose of creating majority-Black districts.

But on the flip side, can districts be drawn with the sole intent of preventing majority-Black districts from being created?

Reeves, White and others are arguing that even though Mississippi’s population is nearly 40% Black, it is OK for districts to be drawn to prevent one of four congressional districts from being majority-Black.

Is that a bridge too far even for the conservative U.S. Supreme Court?

Should there be some type of proportional representation awarded to large minority populations, such as Black people in the South or Hispanics in Texas, California and multiple other states?

The courts have long said that districts did not have to be proportional, such as one-fourth of the districts being majority-Black if 25% of the state was Black. But should proportionality be totally ignored?

Perhaps that question will be answered when the Supreme Court addresses a redistricting effort in Alabama.

Despite the Callais decision, a three-judge federal panel, including two appointees of President Donald Trump, recently rejected a redistricting plan developed by the Alabama Legislature saying it was “tainted by intentional race-based discrimination.”

The rejected plan in Alabama had reduced that state’s number of majority-Black districts from two to one. The Black population in Alabama is 30%, and the state has seven congressional districts. Some would argue that there is a natural, compact area in the state where another district that’s majority-Black or close to it could be created.

Communities of interest are divided

Perhaps the most obvious effort since the Callais decision to draw districts with the sole intent of preventing a majority-Black district occurred in Tennessee. The Tennessee Legislature worked overtime  to divide Memphis, one of the Blackest big cities in the country, into three congressional districts.

Memphis was previously incorporated into a small compact congressional district in southwest Tennessee. Now, one of the districts incorporating Memphis runs along the southern border of Tennessee for about 200 miles before jutting north to pick up parts of suburban Nashville, while another runs north along the western Tennessee border before turning eastward for about 200 miles. In the middle of those two long and winding districts is the third district that includes Memphians. 

The question is simple. Is it OK to gerrymander to ensure Black people do not have districts where they are the majority population? Is it legal and constitutional? And is it moral?

At one point, politicians across the aisle believed creating such majority-minority districts was the right thing to do. Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress voted on multiple occasions to renew the Voting Rights Act and even to strengthen it to ensure minorities could have a chance to elect representatives of their choice.

Perhaps the Supreme Court might want to reevaluate the Callais decision or at least answer an important question.

BATON ROUGE, La. — In what looks like a souped-up high school chemistry lab, with high-tech equipment and carefully labeled specimen jars, Mariano Carossino points to a piece of deer brain.

He and the lab technicians select samples of brain stem and lymph nodes donated by hunters to test for chronic wasting disease, the infection spreading fast among deer, elk and moose nationwide. 

The small, squishy pieces of organs are taken from a medical sample container and examined by lab technicians with long metal tweezers to make sure they are intact enough to be tested for disease. The samples are encased in wax before being thinly sliced and colored with ink. 

Under a microscope, Carossino, a pathologist at the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine, and the lab techs at the Louisiana Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory can tell whether the deer was diseased, alerted to the problem by little pink dots visible microscopically on their computer monitor.

“You can kind of tell from eyesight, but you really want to look at it microscopically because you can’t always see everything from the eye,” said Carossino. “If there’s red color in the right areas of the tissue, then the result will be a positive detection.”

Chronic wasting disease, sometimes known as “zombie deer disease,” has no cure. It has spread into 36 states, including northern parishes of Louisiana, 18 counties in Mississippi (most in the northern most part of the state) and five Canadian provinces since it was first detected in captive deer in the 1960s and in the wild in the 1980s. It has also been detected in deer farm herds in South Korea and among wild reindeer and moose in Scandinavia.

Detecting the disease is essential for containment efforts. Carossino  works in the diagnostic lab to test for cases of the illness in individual deer. 

The lab housed at LSU, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Animal Health Laboratory Network, is one of 31 in the country approved to test for chronic wasting disease. During hunting season, the lab tests up to 120 samples a day, working in rotating 12-hour shifts, testing cases from across the Southeast. 

When a case comes up positive, it spurs wildlife officials into action to try to contain the spread.

According to to the CWD Alliance, as of Oct. 16, 2025, there have been 447 positive tests since 2018 in Mississippi. About 270,000 deer are harvested each year in the state from a deer population estimated at 1.75 million, according to the Mississippi State University Extension Service.

Many states, including Louisiana, have adopted policies aimed at stopping healthy deer from coming into contact with infected deer and environments. But those efforts could soon be dialed back at the will of state legislators, worrying scientists who study the disease and its expansion. 

It’s the latest sign of rising antagonism toward practices meant to stop the spread of chronic wasting disease. Because the illness is not thought to be contagious to humans, some argue that efforts to control it have gone too far.

In Missouri, the state’s top wildlife official had to suspend culling of deer in areas rife with the disease. He issued an open letter pledging to work with hunters and landowners on a new approach.

Meanwhile, researchers working in Illinois have found hunters in counties where chronic wasting disease is prevalent are less likely to say the disease poses a risk. They also put less trust in wildlife officials.

Even Ted Nugent, ‘70s rockstar turned conservative activist, got involved in the political squall of chronic wasting disease as a representative of the libertarian hunting rights group Hunter Nation. 

“I’ve had enough of CWD and the one-size-fits-all rules that come with it,” Nugent said in a prerecorded video played during a Louisiana legislative committee meeting. “The left and the misinformed have used CWD scare tactics for far too long to purposely destroy our hunting lifestyle and heritage.”

How is chronic wasting disease spread? 

The signs of an outbreak of chronic wasting disease often start with deer, elk and other cervids infected with this contagious illness looking starved, disoriented and drooling excessively.

They excrete the proteins that cause the disease, known as prions, into the environment. Healthy deer that come into contact with infected deer or prions are likely to catch the disease as well. It always results in death. 

“It’s a misfolded protein that the cell machinery cannot turn over,” said Carossino. “The cell starts to malfunction, and this is when the disease develops.”

In Louisiana, baiting and feeding deer are generally legal, but wildlife officials have marked areas where the disease has been detected as “enhanced mitigation zones,” There, baiting and feeding are not allowed to prevent healthy deer from being drawn to infected areas.

“Prions concentrate in the saliva, which is one of the more infectious bodily fluids, so bait piles can quickly become hotspots for transmission,” said Noelle Thompson, a wildlife health specialist and chronic wasting disease researcher based in the Western United States. 

Thompson said prions also remain infectious in the soil for years, if not decades, so even if bait piles and food plots are removed, the area can still pass on disease to healthy creatures for a long time. 

“Once you do detect an animal, the landscape has probably been contaminated for at least many months, more likely years, and you’re just now playing catch up,” said Mark Zabel, a professor with the Colorado State University College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

Previously in Louisiana, officials within the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries and its regulatory commission could restrict baiting and feeding in land adjacent to the control areas where no disease has yet been detected  — labeled as “buffer zones.” This was done at officials’ discretion, generally based on advice from scientists involved with tracking the disease. 

But this is now changing.

Political pushback

A resolution in the Louisiana Senate changed control areas to be based more on disease prevalence, rather than proximity.  

The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries will now establish management zones within five and 15 miles from a confirmed case of chronic wasting disease discovered during annual surveillance seasons.

From July 1 to June 30, the department will collect samples from dead deer to check for the disease, with up to 300 deer to be tested. If sampling points to disease levels in less than 2.5% of the area’s population, baiting and feeding will be allowed.

If the rate is higher than 2.5%, state officials can restrict baiting and feeding in the 5- and 15-mile zones for future surveillance seasons. And, if disease prevalence is higher than 20% of the projected population, baiting and feeding is allowed. 

Meanwhile, another measure would legalize the rehabilitation of injured or orphaned white-tailed deer in the state. 

An advocate for the rehabilitation bill, Louisiana resident Kimberly Graham, told lawmakers the story of a fawn she kept after she’d found its mother had been hit by a car. Graham named the fawn Baby Belle. 

But when state Wildlife and Fisheries agents found out she’d kept it, Baby Belle was euthanized, in accordance with law and internal policy against keeping white-tailed deer in captivity.

“When the baby was thriving under my care, wildlife agents came to me, confiscated and killed her,” Graham said during a legislative committee meeting. “It broke my heart, and this just can’t continue.”

The deer rehabilitation bill includes specific provisions to try to protect against the spread of chronic wasting disease, bringing state officials tentatively on board with the legislation. 

But, when paired with the large changes to the way chronic wasting disease is contained, experts are concerned. 

Disease steadily spreads

The first case of chronic wasting disease was detected in Louisiana in 2022. Since then, it has slowly but steadily crept across the state, with just over 50 cases detected in four parishes in the northern part of the state. 

Thompson said that allowing the rehabilitation of white-tailed deer “will certainly increase geographic spread of CWD” and goes against best management practices for containing the disease, like those the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies published in 2018.

“It is just harder to detect the disease in fawns,” said Thompson, adding that there are more studies emerging to show that mother deer can more commonly pass chronic wasting disease to their babies than previously thought.   

Zabel said that deer with the disease have an increased likelihood of being hit by cars or injured “because they get disoriented.”

“You could have that fawn be positive but not showing any symptoms,” said Zabel, “It’s highly likely that, even if they are infected, they’re not going to show any signs” for up to one year. 

In the rehabilitation bill, deer suspected of having chronic wasting disease would need to be reported, euthanized and sent for testing. In the case of a positive result, any other deer being rehabilitated at the same facility would also need to be put down, with the rehab unable to take on any deer cases in the future.

Zabel recommended adding testing of urine, blood or feces samples taken from seemingly infected live deer. These are less definitive than lymph node or brain tissue tests but at least act as some sort of mechanism to prevent the disease from spreading, he said.

“It’s likely that it’s OK that you’re rehabilitating these animals, especially orphaned animals, but if there’s any way to do at least some kind of testing before they’re released, that would be good,” said Zabel. 

“These are all considerations everybody across the country dealing with CWD has to consider,” he added.

Zabel said he understands the attempt to reach a compromise among the hunting industry, wildlife rehab advocates, scientists and state officials. But the disease won’t stop spreading while they look for middle ground, and Zabel warned that the changes won’t help.

“In five or 10 years, they’re gonna look back and say, ‘Oh man. Yeah, this didn’t work.’”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation. 

Mississippi Today contributed to this report.

BATON ROUGE, La. — Louisiana lawmakers passed a new congressional map Friday designed to help Republicans pick up a seat while eliminating one of the state’s two majority-Black House districts, both of which are represented by Democrats.

Approval of the new House map came a month after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the state’s current map as an illegal racial gerrymander, weakening the landmark 1965 federal Voting Rights Act. That decision intensified a national redistricting battle fueled by President Donald Trump’s efforts to protect the Republicans’ slim House majority in the midterm elections. Louisiana is one of several Southern states now redrawing their maps to help Republicans.

Louisiana Republicans had considered drawing a map giving the party a shot at winning all six of the state’s U.S. House seats. But that would have required adding more Black voters to Republican-held districts, potentially backfiring with GOP losses.

READ MORE: ‘We’re ready to fight’: Thousands protest Mississippi redistricting and rally for voting rights

READ MORE: Redistricting affects millions of Americans. Here’s what’s happening across states

South Carolina Senate rejects Trump’s call for congressional redistricting before midterm elections

The map approved Friday in a 28-10 state Senate vote reflected Republican arguments that a 5-1 map is safer for the GOP and better protects U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson from facing a difficult reelection. Republicans currently hold four of Louisiana’s six congressional seats.

A half-hour Senate debate revolved around Democrats contending that the proposed map is racially gerrymandered to squeeze more Black voters — who tend to be registered Democrats — into a single district.

The bill’s sponsor, Republican state Sen. Jay Morris, repeatedly insisted that party affiliation, not race, drove district boundaries.

“I purposely put more Democrats into District 2 to make the remaining districts better performing for Republicans,” Morris said at one point.

Morris said he told the map demographers to avoid including any data on race or including those statistics in information shared with lawmakers before the vote.

Democratic state Sen. Sam Jenkins told Morris, “I think it’s a racially gerrymandered district that’s going to get us into a lot of trouble here.”

“Agree to disagree,” Morris told Jenkins.

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry is expected to sign the new map into law.

Louisiana is currently using a court-ordered map drawn in 2024 to comply with the Voting Rights Act by including a second district with a majority-Black population.

That map, however, was challenged in court, and the Supreme Court responded on April 30 by striking it down as an illegal racial gerrymander.

Landry postponed the state’s closed U.S. House primary slated for May 16. He later signed a law making the U.S. primary open and shifted the date to Nov. 3 to allow time for Republican lawmakers to draw and pass a new map. All candidates, regardless of party affiliation, will be on the ballot for voters in their district.

The proposed map redraws Democratic U.S. Rep. Cleo Fields’ district, clustering it around predominantly white communities in the Baton Rouge area and southern Louisiana. It also adds part of Baton Rouge to a heavily Democratic, majority-Black district based in New Orleans currently represented by Democratic U.S. Rep. Troy Carter.

More lawsuits were expected over the new map.

Democrats say the proposed map could draw a lawsuit over racial gerrymandering. Meanwhile, the plaintiffs in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision criticized the Legislature’s map earlier this week for leaving a majority-Black district in place.

“From the beginning of the process, I said we’re building a house on a broken foundation — now it feels more like quicksand,” Democratic state Sen. Royce Duplessis said during floor debate. “I’m really, really troubled by the fact that we’re going to continue to lead the charge in this race to the bottom.”

In the weeks following the Supreme Court’s decision, several other Republican-controlled Southern states have seized upon a weakened federal Voting Rights Act to try to redraw their own congressional districts.

So far, Republicans are winning the redistricting contest. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they will win a narrowly divided U.S. House in November. Republicans think they could gain as many as 15 seats from their redistricting efforts so far, while Democrats think they could gain six seats from new districts in California and Utah.

Florida’s Legislature passed new congressional districts just hours after the ruling, completing a redrawing that was in the works in anticipation of the decision. It could yield Republicans as many as four additional seats in the midterm elections.

Tennessee adopted new U.S. House districts a week after the ruling, carving up a majority-Black district based in Memphis in a Republican attempt to win an additional seat.

In Alabama, Republicans are attempting to pick up another seat by redrawing two districts where Black residents compose a majority or close to it. Democrats hold both seats, and the proposal is mired in a court battle.

South Carolina’s Senate, meanwhile, decided against redistricting, despite pressure from Trump.

___

Levy reported from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Mississippi Today Ideas is a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share their ideas about our state’s past, present and future. Opinions expressed in guest essays are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of Mississippi Today. You can read more about the section here. 

When Mississippi releases the A–F school and district grades for the 2025-2026 school year, the results may catch people off guard. It is possible that fewer schools will earn As and Bs even though more students are achieving proficiency and making learning gains. That may raise both eyebrows and questions, but it is necessary to ensure Mississippi student performance continues to improve and remain the focus of education. 

More than a decade ago, Mississippi policymakers planned for this. They wrote a state law requiring expectations to be raised once 75% of students reach proficiency or 65% of schools earn a “B” or higher. 

This past fall, the state Board of Education through the Mississippi Department of Education took this requirement seriously and convened a panel of Mississippi educators and national experts to make recommendations for a new more rigorous A-F grading scale.  After reviewing data and discussing past successes, the panel confidently made a recommendation to raise the bar to an aspirational, yet attainable level – and the state Board approved it.

Mississippi is raising the bar to avoid the mistake seen in other states of becoming complacent and resting on their laurels.  While more students are exceeding expectations, not all students are set for success, and raising the bar prompts us to keep our foot on the gas. 

Mississippi has already shown what happens when it takes high expectations seriously. Over the past decade, the state has made real improvements on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, moving from one of the lowest-performing states for fourth grade reading in 2013 to the ninth best state in 2025. Math scores also improved, making Mississippi one of the only states to see improvement in all four major NAEP categories.  

Most importantly, Mississippi policymakers recognize the work is not done. Just this year, lawmakers appropriated more than $9 million to support and improve adolescent literacy, including banning the harmful reading instructional practice of three-cueing or using available information to determine what unknown words are and instead Mississippi is requiring evidence-based literacy practices.

Mississippi leaders are also investing $3.48 million to better fund the Math Act which supports multiple policy solutions we support at ExcelinEd including: access to math coaches, establishing a K-5 universal math screener and requiring districts to adopt high-quality instructional materials.   

Fortunately, Mississippi’s strong state leadership and commitment to students sets it apart from many states that are lowering accountability expectations. The honest, transparent measurement of school performance ensures Mississippi students won’t fall through the cracks or miss out on critical academic intervention. Meeting these higher expectations ensures  students progress through the K-12 system obtaining the proper foundation for whatever they choose to pursue post-graduation, ultimately positively impacting Mississippi’s workforce and economic prosperity.  

When the new Mississippi letter grades come out, the headlines may focus on how many As and Bs disappeared. There likely will be some frustration, especially in communities where those grades drop. That reaction is understandable but misplaced. We all know educators are working hard to support students. These new ratings simply mean that there’s still room to grow.  

Mississippi has made real progress by doing the hard work. Raising expectations is a continuation of that effort, not a departure from it.

In the end, the goal isn’t to protect the appearance of success. It’s to persist and build upon it. That is what Mississippi has been doing since 2013. That is why student performance has improved and there is no reason to stop now.

Christy Hovanetz is a senior policy fellow for ExcelinEd focusing on school accountability and math policies. She served as the assistant commissioner at the Minnesota Department of Education and assistant deputy commissioner at the Florida Department of Education. Hovanetz graduated summa cum laude from St. Cloud State University and is a certified teacher in the state of Minnesota. She earned her Master of Public Administration at the University of Minnesota and a Doctor of Philosophy in Public Administration and Policy at Florida State University. ExcelinEd is a national nonprofit formed by former Florida Gov Jeb Bush to work with states on education improvement efforts.