{"id":30947,"date":"2021-04-05T13:18:04","date_gmt":"2021-04-05T13:18:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/?p=30947"},"modified":"2021-04-05T13:18:13","modified_gmt":"2021-04-05T13:18:13","slug":"law-enforcement-groups-again-poised-to-kill-criminal-justice-reform-in-mississippi-legislature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/?p=30947","title":{"rendered":"“Law Enforcement Groups Again Poised to Kill Criminal Justice Reform in Mississippi Legislature”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

MS Free Press<\/a>: “Criminal-justice reform for Mississippi is on life support, with only one bill left alive out of a slate of ambitious proposals to reduce the state\u2019s prison population. As the last days of the 2021 legislative session quickly expire, long-sought efforts to achieve criminal-justice reform through the softening of stiff automatic penalties and expansions in parole eligibility look less and less likely to pass due largely to the late-hour dissension of the state\u2019s law-enforcement organizations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\u00a0surviving parole reform bill<\/a>\u00a0has been the centerpiece of that effort, but with opposition emerging from the same law-enforcement organizations that killed it in 2020, Gov. Tate Reeves may be poised to close the book on another legislative session without meaningful progress toward reform that many across parties say Mississippi\u2019s system seriously needs….<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Already dead is a House effort intended to revise the state\u2019s habitual-offender laws. Currently, anyone convicted of three consecutive, unrelated felonies\u2014with any one of those felonies being a crime of violence\u2014triggers the state\u2019s strict habitual-offender laws, carrying an automatic life sentence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

House Bill 796 would have introduced a time limit on those penalties, requiring all three unrelated crimes to have taken place in the same 15-year period. Originally, the bill further restricted the trigger for the habitual-offender penalties, requiring the final felony that carried the life sentence to itself be a crime of violence<\/a>, from an extensive list of offenses, including indirect forms of violence and sexual crimes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But parole reform\u2014contained in Senate Bill 2795, still lives, at least for the moment. The key reforms in S.B. 2795 would add a 10-year cap on parole eligibility for non-violent offenders, meaning they would be eligible for parole hearings at 10 years of incarceration or 25% of their sentence, whichever is less.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Additionally, the core of the debate over the bill lies in the expansion of parole eligibility to certain violent crimes, allowing incarcerated Mississippians guilty of specific violent offenses the opportunity for parole at 60% of their time served.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meantime, nearly all of the neighboring southern states, in fact, allow parole eligibility for people convicted of serious and violent offenses. For example,\u00a0FWD.us reports<\/a>, \u201cpeople convicted of serious and violent offenses in\u00a0Arkansas<\/a>\u00a0become eligible for parole after serving between 33% and 70% of their sentence. In\u00a0Texas<\/a>, those individuals become eligible for a parole hearing after serving 50% of their sentence or 30 years, whichever comes first.\u201d”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MS Free Press: “Criminal-justice reform for Mississippi is on life support, with only one bill left alive out of a slate of ambitious proposals to reduce the state\u2019s prison population. As the last days of the 2021 legislative session quickly expire, long-sought efforts to achieve criminal-justice reform through the softening of stiff automatic penalties and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30947"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30948,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30947\/revisions\/30948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}