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Family Dollar will pay $63 million to settle state and federal allegations that it routinely charged customers more at the register than the prices displayed on its shelves, website and mobile app.

The Federal Trade Commission and 17 states filed federal charges against the company Thursday and announced the proposed settlement the same day. The settlement must still be approved by a judge.

According to the FTC’s complaint, consumers from across the country have been reporting price discrepancies at Family Dollar for years. In January 2025, for example, consumers from at least seven states reported that Family Dollar refused to honor a “2 for $20” sale on a package of diapers, even though the price was advertised on its mobile app and on shelf tags.

One Michigan consumer took a picture of the “2 for $20” shelf tag and brought it to the register, but reported that the store manager said the price was wrong and quickly removed the shelf tag, the complaint said.

READ MORE: Mississippi joins lawsuit claiming Dollar General overcharged customers

Over the last five years, state and local regulators have cited Family Dollar for thousands of pricing violations, resulting in fines of more than $3 million, the complaint said. It has also entered into multiple settlements with state attorneys general and consumer protection agencies over inaccurate pricing.

Family Dollar said Friday it will work with the FTC and state agencies to meet the settlement’s requirements and provide clear information to customers about how the settlement could impact them.

“We take our responsibility to deliver a positive shopping experience seriously,” Family Dollar spokeswoman Janella Escobar said in a statement. “We remain focused on strengthening pricing accuracy across our stores and maintaining our customers’ trust.”

Family Dollar, which is privately owned and based in Chesapeake, Virginia, has more than 8,000 U.S. discount stores. It reported revenue of $13 billion in its most recent fiscal year, according to a company statement.

The case is similar to one the FTC and 20 states filed last month against Dollar General, a rival bargain chain. That case is ongoing.

Under the proposed settlement, Family Dollar will be required to establish a $40 million consumer redress fund payable to eligible consumers. The company must notify customers about the fund through notices in stores and on its digital platforms.

The settlement requires Family Dollar to establish a $20 million discount program for its customers and pay $3 million to the states involved in the case. Those states are: Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah and Wisconsin.

The settlement also requires Family Dollar to implement a pricing accuracy program that is independently assessed and annually certified.

The Jackson City Council could consider whether to censure Councilman Kenneth Stokes for remarks he made to two women during a heated debate over a moratorium on data centers.

A resolution censuring Stokes for his conduct at council meetings was listed Friday on the planned agenda for next Tuesday’s meeting. 

If adopted by the council, the censure would be a rare rebuke of Stokes, the longest-serving member in Jackson who has a history of making chaotic statements and insulting people who question him. 

City Council President Vernon Hartley did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Hartley had shared the proposed resolution with Stokes in a letter earlier this week, asking Stokes to apologize for his recent remarks. 

Stokes responded at a press conference Thursday in which his attorney, Dennis Sweet III, said the proposed resolution infringes on the councilman’s right to free speech and that Stokes will sue his colleagues if they censure him.

The potential reprimand comes after some residents pushed for the council to condemn comments from Stokes, the longest-serving member who represents Ward 3 in west-central Jackson. 

Jacksonians have voiced opposition during public comment periods to Stokes’ behavior. One woman who lives in Stokes’ neighborhood gathered nearly 100 signatures on a petition calling on the council to censure him.

On Nov. 3, the council recessed a meeting after Stokes said he would “cuss that bitch out” in response to an indirect comment a woman in the audience made about his mother. He then told another woman, Candace Abdul-Tawwab, who was wearing a hijab, to “take the rags out y’all hair, y’all not Muslim.”

Abdul-Tawwab, executive director of an organization called Mississippi For a Just World, attended the meeting to oppose Stokes’ effort to repeal the city’s moratorium on data centers. 

Stokes’ remarks drew swift condemnation from some in the audience, who chanted “kick him out,” and from some of Stokes’ fellow council members. Kevin Parkinson, who represents Ward 7 near downtown, immediately exited the chambers. 

“Quite frankly, this was not the first time,” Parkinson wrote in a statement he issued later that night. “I felt I couldn’t, in good conscience, sit through such behavior as though it were acceptable.”

This would not be the first time the council reprimanded Stokes.

In 2003, Stokes’ colleagues censured him after he claimed during a council meeting that an unnamed member had requested a bribe from a permit applicant, according to archival news reports. 

Stokes, known for wearing oversized suits and a hat emblazoned with his last name, was first elected to the city council in 1989. Throughout his nearly four decades on the city council, his comments have repeatedly made national news. His behavior has often drawn comparisons to President Donald Trump.

In 2004, Stokes threatened to slap then-Councilman Ben Allen during a heated argument at a council meeting.

In 2010, Stokes staged a protest outside The Clarion-Ledger building near City Hall after the newspaper questioned his use of taxpayer funds for trips to Chicago, New York and Washington. 

In a 2015 interview with WLBT, Stokes told viewers to throw “rocks and bricks and bottles” at police officers who chase suspects from neighboring jurisdictions into Jackson. The following year, he called previous Rankin County Undersheriff Raymond Duke a “hog headed lying bastard” when Duke referenced the comment in a Facebook post.

Last year, Stokes repeatedly accused his nephew, Daniel Cooper, of being a “dope dealer” after Cooper opened a food truck in the Georgetown neighborhood, on a plot of land to which Stokes  has a potential claim through heir property law.

Cooper denied the allegation, and Mississippi Today found no Jackson drug sale charges in Cooper’s history.

In September, Stokes called another councilman, Brian Grizzell, a “sissy” after Grizzell opposed an effort from Stokes to rename a street. 

“If you see one, hit one,” Grizzell responded to Stokes. Grizzell, who represents Ward 4 in western Jackson, later apologized for the remark. Stokes has not apologized to Grizzell. 

This incident is why Norma Michael, who lives a few blocks from Stokes in Georgetown, organized the petition calling on the council to censure Stokes and fine him $500.

“He thinks he can do what he wants,” she said. 

Republican Secretary of State Michael Watson is facing criticism from voting rights advocates and lawmakers after his office applied error-filled consumer credit data to voter rolls, a move that led to a high number of Mississippians having to cast affidavit ballots on Election Day, or simply not voting. 

As the national press, election lawyers and voting rights groups flocked to Mississippi to watch a close U.S. Senate race between Democrat Scott Colom and Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, Watson caught the brunt of criticism as deficiencies in Mississippi’s election laws were exposed.

Four Republican legislators told Mississippi Today they were disappointed in Watson and thought his handling of the credit data was a dereliction of conservative leadership.

One GOP lawmaker, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about a powerful statewide official in the same political party, said he wasn’t angry with Watson, but believed the secretary’s idea to keep using the credit data was a poor decision “especially considering that clerks and commissioners have been saying for months that the data was not correct.” 

READ MORE:  Secretary of state ignored demands to reinstate voters inactivated by unverified Experian data days before midterms: ‘Harm is falling on eligible voters’

Watson defended the use of the credit data and said his agency the last two years had rolled out two pilot programs for local election workers to become acclimated to the data and that during that period they “didn’t hear a word” from the local leaders.

Laura Antonow, a Lafayette County election commissioner, previously told Mississippi Today that when Lafayette County became the first county to use the credit data, the commission informed Watson’s office that the data included incorrect information. 

The secretary of state speculated that the reason a firestorm has erupted over the credit data is because of the closeness of the U.S. Senate race. 

“We’ve got to have accurate data, and I don’t apologize for having clean voter rolls,” Watson told reporters Tuesday. 

When Watson was asked if he thought the credit company’s address data was still reliable, his communications director ended the interview, whisked the secretary away and said “we’re not getting into all of that.” 

Watson, in a later written statement, called the anonymous Republican legislators “weak-kneed” and he continued to stand behind his actions. 

“The same ‘Republican’ legislators who voted for election integrity are now against clean voter rolls?” Watson said. “You cannot simply walk the conservative side of the fence when it’s convenient for you. You’re either for election integrity or you’re not.” 

The Secretary of State’s Office spent $50,000 to run nearly 2 million checks of Experian’s commercial data against registered voters’ addresses, and for the first time this election cycle that data was used to maintain rolls in every county. In the contract, Experian said it could not guarantee the “accuracy or reliability” of its data, and Watson’s office signed off on that disclaimer. 

Mississippi Today published an analysis in March that found incorrect information mistakenly led to the inactivation of legitimate voters ahead of the primaries. Experian has faced years of legal challenges at the state and federal levels, including a now-settled 2014 lawsuit by Mississippi, over errors in the company’s credit reports – including incorrect addresses.

READ MORE: Inside the secretary of state’s $50,000 deal to use Experian’s unverified information that he said would ‘strengthen’ election integrity

Watson said Tuesday that his agency dropped Experian at some point this year and switched to IDI Data, a company that sells identity records to businesses and the government, because he thought the new company offered “a better product.” 

The secretary of state has also pointed out that local officials are legally required to verify voter information before changing registrations, and any decisions to place voters on an inactive status is the decision of the local election officials. 

If local officials place a voter on inactive status, those voters are not purged from the voter rolls. Inactive status voters are still eligible to cast an affidavit ballot. 

But several Republican critics have pointed to the fact that Watson’s office chose to put credit data in front of counties in the first place and wonder if voters who were wrongly flagged as inactive grew frustrated by not being on the poll books and left without casting a vote at all.  

The problems with Experian weren’t the only mishap by Watson’s office that drew criticism as the final votes were tallied in the nail-biting U.S. Senate race. 

READ MORE: DeSoto County moved more voters to inactive in the leadup to Election Day than any other.

In the days following the Nov. 3 election, as only hundreds of votes separated the candidates, it became clear that the outstanding affidavit ballots could determine the outcome of the race. 

Affidavit ballots are filled out when a person doesn’t bring a valid form of ID to the polls, or there’s a discrepancy with their voter records. These ballots can then be “cured” to ensure they’re accepted, which had to be done by Nov. 10. 

Voting rights groups, student organizers and community groups sprang into action ahead of the deadline. They repeatedly called election officials and even organized carpools to the offices of local circuit clerks.  

Amid the chaos, the nonprofit law firm Mississippi Center for Justice noticed that the secretary of state’s election calendar did not include a deadline for “pending” voters to provide proof of citizenship so that their affidavit ballots are counted. 

That requirement imposed on voters arose due to the Legislature’s 2026 passage of the SHIELD Act, a law that requires local election officials to verify voters’ citizenship using a federal immigration database and to audit voter rolls for potential noncitizens.

Watson said he he was “especially proud” of the Legislature for passing the measure. In the days following the closely watched U.S. Senate race, it became clear his office did not know how to interpret parts of the law. 

An attorney with the Center for Justice noticed the deadline was absent from the secretary of state’s election calendar and emailed Watson’s office to request that it be added. The center said voters who had their ballots rejected due to the citizenship proof requirement were left in the dark about the deadline for ensuring their votes counted. 

In a Nov. 6 email to the center obtained by Mississippi Today, Laura Henderson-Courtney, an attorney with the secretary of state’s Elections Division, wrote that her office could not definitively state whether the deadline in the SHIELD Act was five calendar days or five business days. 

“Our office is not authorized to interpret statutes,” Henderson-Courtney wrote. “We intend to submit that issue for the Mississippi Attorney General’s office for review. Once we have some direction from the Mississippi Attorney General on this issue, we will be glad to move forward in the future with posting that to our calendar.”

That did not happen before the ballot curing deadline for voters, and state government officials still don’t have a clear answer. A person close to the situation in the AG’s office said on Thursday that they had no record of receiving anything from the secretary of state’s office. Watson told Mississippi Today on Friday that his office was still in the process of preparing the submission.

In a statement, Harya Tarekegn, director of advocacy and policy for the Mississippi Center for Justice, said Watson has made elections less accessible to Mississippians who can vote. She said he used “unreliable Experian data for months to prevent thousands of eligible Mississippians from casting a regular ballot” and “championed the SHIELD Act, then never determined or published the deadline for voters who would be forced to vote by affidavit ballot then cure.” 

“His focus has not been on ensuring Mississippi has secure elections that all eligible Mississippians can vote in,” Tarekegn said. “It has been on implementing unnecessary barriers through unreliable means and it continues to show.” 

Sen.-elect Colom said on Tuesday that Watson needs to conduct a press conference to “answer some tough questions” and apologize to Mississippians.

“Nobody has gotten a straight answer from him as to why he used Experian to verify these voter rolls,” Colom said. “He created chaos. He created this problem.” 

Colom also said he believes the Legislature should pass a law banning Watson’s office from using commercial credit data if Watson won’t stop using it voluntarily.  

Democratic state Rep. Zakiya Summers of Jackson, a former elections commissioner, told Mississippi Today that she plans to introduce such a bill next legislative session. 

The secretary of state could face political headwinds over the recent election. Watson announced in April that he is running as a Republican for lieutenant governor, and was largely viewed as a shoo-in for the seat. 

Now, several Republican politicians are speculating whether the scrutiny of Watson’s handling of the recent election will attract a primary challenger or give a Democrat enough ammunition to mount a general election campaign.  

But the 48-year-old Republican has a lengthy political resume, would likely have his home region of the Coast supporting him, and is sitting on more than $2.4 million in cash, according to campaign finance reports. 

In his statement to Mississippi Today, Watson commended the work of election workers and said his office worked with them to ensure the election was secure. 

“We have followed the law as passed by the Legislature and the only reason it has come under such scrutiny is because of the razor thin margin in our U.S. Senate race,” Watson said. “Nothing has changed. The process is working and the law is being followed.”

Madeline Nguyen contributed to this report.

BILOXI – The lion blinks its fur-lined, hand-painted eyes as it approaches a set of red benches, stacked two on two. Nervous, it makes a few practice jumps, bounding from side to side as its fabric body ripples. Then, it rears up to stand on its hind legs before leaping forward, four sequined paws landing onto the narrow wood. 

Off to the side, musicians play furiously. The drummer beats out a steady da-dum as the lion grows more confident, and the gong follows the drum. The crash of cymbals rings in the air.  

After returning to the ground, the dancers lift off their costume to reveal two young men, who drop into a quick bow before transforming back into the large cat. One dancer manipulates the lion head, the other, bent over at the waist, acts as the tail.

This is lion dance, a cultural performance art that originated from China over a thousand years ago. Now performed as a way to symbolically ward away evil and spread good fortune, it is practiced throughout eastern and southeastern Asia, and the global Asian diaspora. In Mississippi, a state with a less than 2% Asian population, it was pursued by a troupe of self-taught Vietnamese American youth from Biloxi. 

This Saturday, five months after festival organizers reached out to them, the White Tiger Lion Dance team will perform on their first Jackson stage during the 2026 National Folk Festival. They are Mississippi’s only year-round lion dance performance troupe. 

The origin story

The White Tiger Lion Dance team originated out of a church teacher’s suggestion at the Vietnamese Martyrs Catholic Church in Biloxi, said captain Andrew Dang. At 22, he’s both the oldest member of the team and the longest running, having been a part of the group’s 2019 founding. He recalls that his church class wasn’t interested in forming a soccer or football team, but when the teacher mentioned lion dance, everyone was intrigued. But unlike most lion dance teams that form out of martial arts schools with experienced instructors, the students taught themselves the playful and acrobatic “Hok San” dance style. 

“We really didn’t have anyone to teach us the proper way of doing things, so we kind of just went on YouTube,” Dang said. “We kept redoing moves until we got it right.”

Three times a week, the dozen-strong group of youth, ages 13 to 22, drives out to their training space – the parking lot behind the church. While White Tiger outgrew the church in 2022, they still maintain a close relationship and perform at its annual Lunar New Year, or Tết, celebrations. 

In the summer, outdoor practices mean hot evenings and mosquitoes. In the fall when night comes early, they practice under the lot’s shoebox lights. Dang said he’s on the hunt for an indoor space. For now, they set up benches on concrete and store their lion heads at a nearby nail salon owned by a team member’s parents.

The group keeps busy with local performances, with the money they earn going back into equipment and meals for the team. One weekend before the folk festival, the team’s first national stage performance, they gather to practice a routine they’re performing at a wedding the next day. Warmup is filled with chatter, punctuated by exclamations of “Bro, what?” When they start a run-through, they become focused and serious. 

While routines on the ground can be challenging enough under heavy costumes and limited visibility under the lion head, the elevated benches add an additional level of difficulty. For today’s bench routine, William Van Lai performs as the animal’s tail while his lion dance partner, Minh Tran, is the head. To complete one common move called the head sit, Tran jumps while his tail dancer grabs a belt tied around his waist and lifts him into the air. Tran lands in a sitting position on Lai’s head, making it look as though the lion is standing. 

It takes time to build confidence in a partner, both to land the move and to keep each other safe, 18-year-old Lai said. 

“Especially when we do tricks like this, you have to trust your teammate,” he said. Lai started lion dancing during elementary school in the Gulf Coast, when members of a local Buddhist temple performed for Lunar New Year. Four years ago, he joined White Tiger. 

“I always loved lion dance,” he said. “It’s always in my heart.”

A family of lion dancers

For Tran, the team became a place to build community. He immigrated from Vietnam at age 12, and his parents were initially wary about letting him join the group as a sophomore in D’Iberville high school. Now, seeing the hardworking character of the team, they encourage him.

“My friends right here, I don’t really see them as teammates,” Tran said, watching the group practice a ground routine with two lions. “I definitely see them as a family.”

Other members described the team as a brotherhood, borne out of their shared love of lion dance and desire to spread the art form in Mississippi. 

When they offer public performances, even in Biloxi, people will come up to them saying that they loved the dance and have never seen it before, Dang said. That feedback helps motivate the team to improve their skills and create new routines each year. 

Dang remembers watching lion dance performances as a kid and being amazed at the spectacle of lions jumping into the sky paired with percussive music. As he got older, he realized that practicing allowed him to stay connected with his culture. 

“My people, they do this back in Vietnam. They do it probably a lot better than us,” he said. “I was like, ‘OK, I’ve got to bring this tradition to Biloxi.’”

Crowded together after practice, the team expressed their eagerness to perform for a national audience at the folk festival. They plan to perform their ground routine and send lions out to interact with the crowd, blinking and flicking their ears and showing another corner of the world what it means to be a lion dancer.

This story was produced with support from the Sarah Yelena Haselhorst Fund for Health Journalism.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Thursday heaped praise on Mississippi’s Sen.-elect Scott Colom for courting some of his hardcore MAGA supporters in the final days of the midterm election campaign, a rare example of the Republican president showing admiration for a Democrat.

When the president traveled to Corinth, Mississippi, last month to campaign for incumbent Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, Trump denigrated Colom as a “Marxist radical,” a “fake” and a “shameless phony who pretends to be a moderate.”

But on Thursday, during an appearance on Stephen A. Smith’s “Straight Shooter” podcast, Trump acknowledged that Colom demonstrated chutzpah by showing up to the Trump rally to mingle with some of the Republican president’s staunchest “Make America Great Again” supporters.

“I heard it the other day, where I had a rally there, and we had lines that went 10 miles long, and he campaigned on that line, telling everybody on the line what a good job he did,” Trump said of Colom, a 43-year-old local prosecutor who capitalized on the electorate’s discontent with the economy in his successful underdog campaign. “I give him a lot of credit for that.”

Colom had walked along the lineup of Trump supporters waiting to get into the Corinth rally, introducing himself and asking about their concerns.

The move gained widespread media attention, stealing the spotlight from Trump’s barnstorming in Mississippi, a state Republicans had expected to easily win.

It also tracked with Colom’s strategy throughout the campaign of criticizing Trump’s policies — especially the Iran war that drove up gas prices and tariffs that caused headaches for Mississippi farmers — without taking personal jabs at the president or people who voted for him. Colom had sought to portray Hyde-Smith as a nonentity in Washington, while vowing that he would look out for the interests of people in his state.

The Associated Press called the tight race in Colom’s favor on Wednesday after local officials spent several days processing absentee and provisional ballots, which are called affidavit ballots in Mississippi.

With the win, Colom will become the state’s first Black U.S. senator since post-Civil War Reconstruction.

The parents of a Tennessee man nearly stabbed to death at a north Mississippi restaurant in 2019 are speaking out as the U.S. Supreme Court weighs this week whether to take on the defendant’s case, potentially halting a scheduled retrial. 

In 2023, a judge acquitted Lane Mitchell, who stabbed Russell Rogers at Tallahatchie Gourmet in New Albany, of attempted murder before the jury could deliberate. The state’s appeal led to a close decision by the Mississippi Court of Appeals. However, that decision was ultimately left standing by the state Supreme Court, paving the way for the retrial set for March 2027 in Union County. 

Mitchell’s attorneys asked the nation’s high court in October to hear his case, arguing that the state appeals court decision violated their client’s protection from double jeopardy. Typically, the U.S. Supreme Court accepts few petitions requesting review. 

Bob and Maridonna Rogers say the petition contains misstatements. These include the description of their son’s stabbing and the repeated assertion that Russell refused to show up or was intentionally kept from trial to testify, even though a Tennessee probate court ruled he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the attack and was unable to testify. The judge used the victim’s absence as a basis for the acquittal. 

The couple had hoped the state would file its own brief to correct the record, as it did in the appeal. Instead, they said they were shocked to find that the attorney general’s office filed a two-page waiver saying it would not respond. 

“How can you (the court) make an informed decision when the information you’re being given is misinformation?” asked Maridonna Rogers, the victim’s mother. 

A spokesperson from the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office declined to comment, saying the office does not comment on active cases. 

In her victim’s impact statement, Maridonna Rogers said her son was given less than a 1% chance of survival. He had emergency surgery to repair a severed carotid artery and experienced a stroke. 

Months after the stabbing, Russell Rogers was placed under a conservatorship, which is a court-approved agreement for someone who is unable to care for their own personal affairs due to factors including illness. The court appointed his father, Bob, the conservator, in 2020 and that conservatorship overseeing medical matters remains in place today. 

Before the stabbing, Rogers had studied international relations in Washington, D.C., traveled to China and immersed himself in the language. Rogers left an international relations program in 2013 to take care of his father who had suffered a minor stroke and help his mother at home in Collierville, Tennessee. He stayed as his father experienced other health complications. 

An outdoorsman, Rogers liked to hike in north Mississippi, often bringing him to the New Albany area where he frequently ate at the restaurant. 

Today, he has ongoing symptoms of PTSD and sensory triggers that make him relive the stabbing, along with nightmares and hyper-vigilance, according to his parents. 

Their son also lives with the fear that the stabber will find him and try to kill him, his mother wrote in a victim impact statement. 

“He took my son’s life,” she said. 

Differing descriptions of the stabbing in court records and video

A 42-minute silent surveillance video from the restaurant from Feb. 9, 2019, shows interactions between restaurant staff and customers and the events that led up to the stabbing.  

In their petition, Mitchell’s attorneys state that Rogers had been drinking the afternoon and evening of the attack. 

About half an hour before the attack, video shows Rogers talking to three women at a table near the back of the restaurant. At trial, they testified that Rogers did not seem intoxicated and court transcripts show they did not feel threatened by him starting a conversation with them. 

Later in their petition, the defense states that Rogers “corner(ed) a frightened teenaged server.” 

The server testified that she was 21 when Rogers was attacked, according to the trial transcript and local reporting. Prior to the attack, video showed Rogers attempting to talk with the woman.

The defense wrote that Rogers, who was told multiple times by restaurant staff to leave, became enraged and “charged aggressively at the bartender, (the) petitioner’s father.” 

The entire stabbing sequence happens in two minutes, video shows: 

The waitress, seen earlier offering Mitchell a hug, speaks with Rogers at a corner table as Mitchell watches.  

Mitchell, 18 at the time, takes a knife from the bar and holds it behind his back, keeping his eyes on Rogers and the waitress. A woman seated at the bar grabs the back of Mitchell’s t-shirt, but he stands and stops a few steps away from Rogers and the waitress. 

During the conversation, Rogers leans in, causing the woman to step back and lean away. She turns to go behind the bar, passing Mitchell’s dad, Torrey Mitchell, the bartender. Rogers takes a step to follow her, and Torrey Mitchell stops him, grabbing his arms. 

At that moment, Lane Mitchell takes four steps toward Rogers from behind and sinks the knife into Rogers’ neck three times, dazing him. Torrey Mitchell pushes his son out of the way and wraps his arms around Rogers, holding him in place. 

Still holding Rogers around the abdomen, he walks them toward another end of the restaurant and eases Rogers to the ground. Video shows stains on the front of his pants and splatters of what is likely blood. Lane Mitchell and a customer peer at Rogers. Within two minutes, police officers arrive and tend to him: One gets a towel for the blood, another tries CPR. 

The defense states that Mitchell acted in self defense “believing Rogers to be armed and seeing him charge at his father” and “to prevent any harm befalling his father, himself and any other patrons or employees at the Tallahatchie Gourmet restaurant.”  

Video shows that minutes earlier, Rogers had left the restaurant, prompting Mitchell, his father and the waitress to exchange looks. At trial, witnesses and Mitchell said they believed he retrieved a gun, according to court records. Court filings show a firearm was never found on Rogers. 

A representative from Mitchell’s legal team did not respond to a request for comment.

Victim’s absence at court argued as violation of defendant’s rights

Mitchell’s attorneys highlighted the trial judge’s order to support its argument to convince the U.S. Supreme Court to review his case. 

Union County Circuit Judge Kent Smith said Russell Rogers had never appeared at court hearings, spoke with law enforcement or communicated with the prosecution. The judge and both sides viewed him as a material witness and expected him to testify, with the defense issuing a subpoena to take Rogers into custody in Tennessee and bring him to Mississippi. 

Ultimately, his father acting as conservator, petitioned the Shelby County Probate Court, which oversees Rogers’ conservatorship. A judge quashed the subpoena, finding that Rogers was unable to testify due to his mental health. 

In lieu of Rogers, prosecutors called his mother as a witness, asking her about his injuries and recovery, according to the trial transcript. 

Rogers’ absence at trial meant the defense was not able to cross examine Rogers, which the defense argued was a violation of Mitchell’s Sixth Amendment right to confront a witness. Smith agreed. 

“(Rogers) is the complaining victim. Both the State of Mississippi and the defense announced their desire and intent to call Rogers as a witness at trial,” Smith wrote. “Nevertheless, he appears to be intentionally unavailable even though the Court is of the opinion that Mitchell has a fundamental right to call Rogers as a witness at trial and to examine him at trial in the presence of the jury.”

The state denied that characterization in its successful 2024 appeal. In the majority written by Judge John Emfinger, the court noted that the conservator acted accordingly when he stepped in to challenge the defense’s subpoena, even if it “may well have been at odds with the state’s interest in proceeding with the prosecution of the case.”

In its appeal, the attorney general’s office asked for a different judge or venue for the retrial, but the Court of Appeals did not order that, sending the case back to Smith.

New attorneys have not reached out about retrial

The attorney general’s office has been part of the case since 2021, after District Attorney Ben Creekmore recused himself due to undisclosed conflicts. Multiple attorneys from the office worked on the case, including new attorneys now assigned to handle the retrial.

One of those attorneys is Special Assistant Attorney General Luke Williamson, who this year handled the cases of two former Capitol Police officers charged with manslaughter in the shooting death of Jaylen Lewis in a traffic stop in downtown Jackson. The jury deadlocked on whether to convict one, Michael Rhinehalt, while acquitting his co-defendant, Stephen Frederick, allowing both to walk free when the attorney general’s office announced it would not retry Rhinehalt. 

Bob and Maridonna Rogers said they had a positive experience communicating with Danielle Love Burks from the attorney general’s office who headed the appeal and took care in writing the appeal brief, but have not heard from Williamson or other attorneys assigned to the case. They said they learned about recent updates by reading Mississippi Today or by checking court dockets on their own to access new filings. 

A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office did not respond to Mississippi Today’s questions about its communication with the Rogers family.  

Democratic challenger Scott Colom’s upset win over Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, in red, red Mississippi of all places, will be studied by Deep South politicos from both major parties for years to come. 

I predict it will be a blueprint, a road map for Democrats and a bogeyman of what not to do for Republicans.

So what did Colom’s campaign get right? Well, pretty much everything, it would appear as the dust settles.

First, and foremost, he worked. He campaigned hard, while Hyde-Smith hardly campaigned, at least until the homestretch.

Colom crisscrossed the state nonstop, shook every hand and kissed every baby, so to speak (and he didn’t get the two mixed up, lol). He met the voters where they were, and he listened to them. That’s becoming more and more rare, in the age of big-money campaigns.

Colom adopted a clear message, and he stuck to it: It’s affordability, stupid. When you get a gift from Republicans, don’t overthink it. He expanded his messaging here and there, but he kept the main thing the main thing.

READ MORE: Turns out, Mississippi voters were paying attention in the Colom, Hyde-Smith Senate race

Speaking of money, Colom had little to start with, and national Democratic interests had, as usual, written Mississippi off as too Republican to bother with.

But what resources he did secure early on, he deployed wisely. If he and his crew ever want a new career, they could start an ad agency. The don’t pick another protein/pick another senator, and other ads drew national attention and campaign donations. 

His wise use of resources and sticktoitiveness helped convince national Democrats to sink resources into his campaign. It was kind of late in the game, but he was ready and seized on it.

In Mississippi, even before national resources flowed in, Colom didn’t try to reinvent the wheel. He relied on decades of others’ organizing work before him, and he united many different groups that helped organize and get-out-the-vote. If there was infighting, it didn’t spill out into the public or slow the campaign’s momentum. That is a feat.

Colom also appeared to keep his own counsel. He most certainly was advised to follow some conventional Mississippi Democratic campaign wisdom, and appeared to often ignore it. For many years, some statewide Democratic candidates have tried to keep the national party and its leaders at arm’s length. I recall one time many years ago when a Democratic candidate tried to keep it under wraps that the chair of the Democratic National Committee was coming to Mississippi, and their campaign folks got a little perturbed when news of it leaked to the media.

Colom read the tea leaves correctly: Americans wanted change from the current GOP led by President Donald Trump, including those in Mississippi. He embraced support from his party. He reportedly shrugged off advice to not have former Vice President Kamala Harris campaign for him. He embraced a who’s who of national party leaders past and present.

But Colom also appeared to get a sizeable amount of crossover votes. It’s hard to say exactly how many, but he overperformed other Democratic candidates by more than 25,000 votes. That wasn’t all just turning out Democrats.

He campaigned in Republican strongholds, didn’t write them off. For God’s sake, the man gladhanded with folks in line for a Trump rally in Corinth. Hyde-Smith, by the way, didn’t.

He flipped seven counties from R to D, including some big ‘uns. DeSoto County, which Hyde-Smith had previously won by 16 points, saw a well over 20-point swing, with Colom winning the normally GOP stronghold. He thwarted Hyde-Smith from running up big numbers on the Coast. 

Colom won in many of the suburbs, including Madison County and the aforementioned DeSoto, and he did well in college communities in Lafayette, Forrest and Oktibbeha counties. He held his own in many rural Republican areas, and he amped up turnout in the Delta and other rural Democratic areas.

Over many years in Mississippi, we’ve seen many Democrats play the woulda-shoulda-couda game and do some fingerpointing after (or even during) elections, even ones where they lost by fairly narrow margins. I think we’ll be seeing a good bit of that from Republicans now, although most of their fingers could point to President Trump.

It would appear Colom, of course building on the work of others over many years, helped solidify some infrastructure for the state Democratic Party and get the national party’s attention and resources, the lack of which Mississippi Democrats have long lamented. 

Will it last? Time will tell, but having a Democratic U.S. senator from Mississippi, and a blueprint that worked in the Deep South, will help.  

When Scott Colom takes the oath of office for the U.S. Senate in January, he will not be the first Black senator from Mississippi to make history. But he will be the first in nearly 150 years and the first chosen by voters rather than state lawmakers.

Colom, a Democrat, was declared the winner Wednesday over Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith.

Here are some things to know about the two previous Black senators from Mississippi, Hiram Rhodes Revels and Blanche Kelso Bruce.

The first Black member of the U.S. Congress

Revels became the first African American to serve in either chamber of Congress when he took his Senate seat on Feb. 25, 1870.

Born to free parents in North Carolina in September 1827, he traveled throughout the country as an adult doing religious work and educating other Black people, according to biographies on National Park Service and U.S. Senate websites. After the Civil War, he settled in Natchez, Mississippi, where he served as presiding elder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Revels was elected as a Natchez alderman in 1868 and was one of 35 Black men elected to the state legislature the next year. Mississippi’s U.S. Senate seats had been vacant since the state seceded from the Union in January 1861. Revels was selected by his fellow state legislators to fill one of the seats, and a white man was chosen for the other.

“An opportunity of electing a Republican to the United States Senate, to fill an unexpired term occurred, and the colored members, after consulting together on the subject, agreed to give their influence and votes for one of their own race for that position, as it would in their judgement be a weakening blow against color line prejudice,” Revels later recalled, according to a U.S. Senate website.

Revels was seated two days after Mississippi was readmitted to the Union and served just over a year, until March 3, 1871, when his term ended.

The last Black senator from Mississippi

The Mississippi legislature chose Bruce to be the first African American to serve a full term in the U.S. Senate. He was seated in 1875 and became the first Black man to preside over the Senate in 1879. Born into slavery in 1841 — his father was a white man who owned his mother — Bruce was the only formerly enslaved person to serve in the U.S. Senate, according to the Senate and National Park Service websites.

Bruce was born in Virginia and his father moved his plantation operation to Mississippi, where Bruce began picking cotton at age 8. He escaped to Kansas early in the Civil War, established a school for Black children in Missouri in 1864 and attended Oberlin College in Ohio for two years before a lack of funds caused him to withdraw.

He returned to Mississippi, where he became a wealthy businessman and landowner and held several positions in local government before he was elected to the U.S. Senate by state lawmakers. He served in the Senate from 1875 to 1881.

Unlike Colom, Mississippi’s previous Black senators were Republicans

Reconstruction, the 12-year period after the Civil War from 1865 to 1877, was when the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments were adopted, abolishing slavery, establishing birthright citizenship and prohibiting denial of the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

The Republican Party was the party of President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. He issued the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, declaring all enslaved people in rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.”

A total of 17 Black men served in the U.S. Congress during Reconstruction, 15 in the House of Representatives and Revels and Bruce in the Senate. The Senate wouldn’t have another Black member until 1967, when Sen. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts took office as the first Black person to be popularly elected to that body.

Earlier this week, Mississippi entrepreneurs and investors gathered in Jackson for the annual startup conference put on by Innovate Mississippi. There are two pitch competitions as part of the event, one for early stage startups and another for later stage companies. 

The later stage competition featured 10 Mississippi companies pitching their goods and services to a panel of investors. The winner, receiving $15,000 plus attention from investors, was LOA Carbon, which recently relocated from New York to Mississippi. 

“We thought we were likely to land in either Texas or Alabama, and we didn’t really even pay attention to Mississippi,” said Ryan Shearman, the company’s CEO. But the research and development at the state’s universities, the manufacturing capacity, labor market and programs such as Innovate ultimately pushed them to choose Mississippi.

SpaceXSI Updates

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company with an ever-changing name, SpaceXSI, formerly SpaceXAI, formerly xAI, said that it expects to invest $45 billion in Mississippi, double its original announcement.

According to Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality records, SpaceXSI began construction in Southaven before it received proper permits. It now faces fines of up to $6 million.

But in a separate matter, a federal judge in an NAACP lawsuit against the company found that MDEQ misinterpreted federal clean air statutes around the company’s temporary natural gas turbines it is currently using to power its data centers.

This week, the MDEQ permit board rejected an appeal of its decision to approve an air permit for SpaceXSI’s permanent power plant. Among the permanent turbines are eight converted jet engines. It appears to be the first power plant using converted engines that has come before the permit board. 

Other news:

• The Mississippi Council on Economic Education held its annual forum to celebrate personal finance and economic education in the state.
• A mechanical and electrical fabrication contractor is investing $4.25 million to expand its operations in Greene County.
• The city of Madison approved a tax increment financing plan for a $60-million mixed use development, called the Gallery. It approved up to $11.74 million in borrowing to help pay for public infrastructure for the development. Property taxes are higher in a TIF district with the excess money going to repay the bonds, as well as sales tax revenue from within the development. Madison County may also join.
• Trustmark announced Thursday that it will merge with Hancock Whitney in a deal estimated to be valued at $3.2 billion. Together the two Mississippi headquartered banks will create a $58-billion in assets bank across six Southeastern states and an $8.9-billion market cap that the companies said would be the “premier Gulf South bank.” The deal is estimated to close in the first quarter of 2027.

Mississippi is again working to build a statewide system that will help hospitals, health providers, pharmacies, laboratories and emergency medical services securely share patient health data.

“We’re creating the infrastructure to improve care coordination, to support emergency preparedness, to strengthen public health decision making and to give healthcare professionals the information that they need to deliver even better care,” Gov. Tate Reeves told reporters at an Oct. 21 press conference.

The exchange will initially be funded by the federal Rural Health Transformation Program, a $50 billion, five-year program to spur innovation in rural healthcare and offset cuts to Medicaid that was signed into law in 2025 by President Donald Trump. Reeves has called the health information exchange the “backbone” of the state’s plan for the funds. 

Health information networks help to create a “person-centric” health record system, where health records are linked to a patient rather than a hospital or clinic, according to Dr. David Kendrick, chair of the medical informatics department at the University of Oklahoma School of Community Medicine. 

“It should be expected that patients have their full medical story with them throughout life,” said Kendrick, who is also the the founder and former CEO of MyHealth Access Network, Oklahoma’s statewide health information exchange. 

This is not the first time Mississippi has worked to develop such a system. The Mississippi Health Information Network was funded with a federal grant and established by state lawmakers in 2010. It was growing until the state Legislature declined to renew it in 2019 — an abrupt decision stakeholders said came as a surprise.

Other health statewide exchanges emerged to fill the gap around the time the state network shut down, including the Mississippi Hospital Association’s IntelliTrue and the Mississippi Health Access eXchange, a physician-led network established in partnership with the Mississippi State Medical Association.

The federal government has pushed states to improve healthcare data sharing among providers for decades. The efforts can help bridge parts of a fragmented healthcare system and improve patients’ health, allowing clinicians across systems to spot dangerous prescription drug interactions and reducing duplicate services.

But despite the benefits for patients, health information exchanges, or HIEs, often face challenges with funding and incentivizing providers to participate, said Julia Adler-Milstein, a professor of medicine at the University of California-San Francisco.

“Building a successful HIE requires not just technical infrastructure, but governance, incentives, and a lot of pieces that have to come together and align for an exchange to be successful,” Adler-Milstein said.

In some states, expanded health data sharing has raised questions about patient privacy, in particular because of cases in which patient data has been used by immigration and law enforcement agencies. 

Mississippi’s application for a vendor to create and operate a new health information exchange, with services expected to begin in January, closed on Nov. 3. 

The contractor is expected to build and operate an exchange that “aggregates, enhances, and distributes health data as a public good,” according to a request for proposals. Core goals are to improve care coordination in trauma response, access to clinical information and centralized imaging services. Beyond serving individual patients and providers, it will also support the state’s study of public health. 

“It’s a game changer for those of us studying population health outcomes,” State Health Officer Dr. Dan Edney said at an Oct. 14 Board of Health meeting. 

How Katrina spurred Mississippi’s first exchange

Plans for a statewide health information exchange in Mississippi were spurred in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina, which damaged paper-based medical records and left thousands of patients unable to access them.

In 2007, then-Gov. Haley Barbour established a task force to plan for a statewide health data exchange. The group recommended a pilot network in the six-county area along the Gulf Coast most heavily affected by Katrina to lay the groundwork for a potential statewide network. 

State lawmakers authorized the Mississippi Health Information Network in 2010. That year, Mississippi received about $10.4 million in funding through a federal program to help states build health information exchanges.

Mississippi’s network generated a repository of patient data and sent real-time alerts to providers when patients were admitted, discharged or transferred to or from emergency departments or hospitals. It also supported public health reporting and disease surveillance efforts, said Mike Garcia, the network’s former interim executive director who was involved in the project from its early days and has since retired. 

By 2014, the system included 13 hospitals, 39 clinics and more than 600,000 patients, according to a report from the Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review.

But as it grew, the system struggled to achieve buy-in from some key stakeholders. Like many health information exchanges, providers paid a user fee to participate, with the expectation that the network would one day become self-sustaining. Hospitals were charged $100 per bed to participate, according to budget documents for the 2017 fiscal year. That year, the agency collected roughly $660,000 in user fees. Federal funding ran dry and legislative appropriations declined over time. 

Sen. David Blount, a Democrat from Jackson, authored the bill necessary to reauthorize the network in 2019 — what he believed would be a “routine matter on something important and needed.” 

The Senate passed the bill, but it died without a vote by the full House.

“To me, it was a needless failure, and I was puzzled by it at the time,” Blount said. 

When the Mississippi Health Information Network lapsed, it had roughly 30 million patient records, Garcia said. He said the records were stored in a vault and immediately began to lose their value.

“It was all very anticlimactic,” Garcia said. 

Building demand before infrastructure

The challenges Mississippi faced in keeping a health information exchange alive — including funding and participation — mirror those faced by similar networks across the nation. 

Although data networks can help improve the quality of patient care, hospitals aren’t always incentivized to share information, because patient data is a key asset that ties patients to hospitals, said Adler-Milstein.

For an exchange to succeed, it must also create value for providers, such as helping them meet quality metrics tied to payments and motivate them to participate. 

“There aren’t really strong incentives to share patient data across competing health systems,” Adler-Milstein said. “So you really have to build the demand, and then build infrastructure that supports it.”

Exchanges also need sustainable funding models, Garcia said. He said he believes government support should incentivize providers to participate without making them pay to participate, particularly because they are already contributing value by supplying data. 

“The burden can’t be put on the users,” Garcia said. 

Under some Mississippi Rural Health Transformation Program grants, providers receiving funding are required to participate in the exchange. State officials have not explained how the system will be funded after the federal funds, which must be spent by 2032, are expended.

Shelby Wilcher, a spokesperson for Reeves, whose office is overseeing the plan, did not respond to a request for comment about the state’s long-term plans to fund the exchange.

During the application period for vendors, one potential contractor asked whether the Mississippi State Department of Health or the Division of Medicaid would require or incentivize providers to participate, and whether funds would cover the providers’ onboarding costs. 

In response, the state Health Department, which oversaw the procurement process, said it “can not speak for RHTP requirements.” 

Beyond funding and incentives, experts said, a successful exchange requires buy-in from stakeholders across the health system — including those who receive, deliver and pay for care. Those stakeholders must first come together to establish a shared vision for the exchange and ensure it provides value to everyone involved to ensure sustainability. 

“Governance is what comes first, and that means convening actual people that live in the community to do the work,” Kendrick said.