The Senate on Wednesday passed legislation to alter the county composition of Mississippi’s circuit and chancery court districts, a move that broke with decades of the state’s policy of leaving district boundaries unchanged.
The Republican-majority chamber approved the plan 32-13, and it will go back to the House for more debate. Only Democratic senators voted against the proposal.
The current court districts have largely remained unchanged for roughly 30 years, but Senate Judiciary A Committee Chairman Brice Wiggins told senators the Legislature should use population data and the number of active court cases in each district to redraw them and determine how many judges each district should receive.
The reason for making the changes, Wiggins said, is that some districts around the state hear thousands more cases than others, and judges receive the same taxpayer-funded salary, regardless of the number of cases they deal with.
“When we first started this process, we said the citizens deserve an efficient and fair access to their courts,” Wiggins, a Republican from Pascagoula, said. “The reality is … we have not had that.”
The plan would add three chancellors, bringing the total to 55 chancery court judges and remove two circuit judge positions leaving a total of 55. The maps would not go into effect until Jan. 1, 2027, which would give judges time to acclimate to the new boundaries.
Senate Minority Leader Derrick Simmons, D-Greenville, offered an amendment to essentially gut Wiggins’ proposal and leave the districts intact as they’re currently drawn, but the GOP-majority chamber rejected his amendment along partisan lines.
Simmons said his local judges and district attorneys, located in the majority-Black Delta region, oppose the measure.
“If you talk to your judges and talk to your DAs, they will support maintaining existing districts,” Simmons said.
Wiggins responded that he changed the districts in the Delta because the area has lost population, while other areas of the state, such as DeSoto County and the coastal counties, have grown.
Sen. Angela Turner Ford, a Democrat from West Point, also offered an amendment to change the judicial district that Webster County would be placed in, but the Senate, mostly along party lines, also rejected her amendment.
Some senators, however, were able to convince Wiggins to tweak the proposal from his initial plan that he introduced in a committee meeting last week.
Wiggins’ initial plan, for example, removed northeastern Mississippi’s Monroe County from the 1st circuit and chancery districts and placed it into a neighboring district because the district’s judges have a higher active caseload than other districts in the state.
But all four chancellors and all four circuit judges in the 1st district, nearly every county board of supervisors in the district and the area Community Development Foundation wrote a letter to Democratic Sen. Hob Bryan of Amory opposing the plan to remove Monroe County from the district.
Bryan, the chamber’s longest-serving member, said the overwhelming majority of elected officials, attorneys, and community leaders asked the Senate to leave the district unchanged and to “please leave us alone.”
“If our judges are overworked, we’re happy being overworked,” Bryan said. “But I don’t think we are overworked.”
Wiggins told reporters after the bill’s passage that he ultimately agreed to Bryan’s request after talking with lawmakers from the area and hearing there was local opposition to the plan, though he still believes the Legislature has an obligation to approach redistricting with a “statewide” mindset.
Wiggins’ plan is several steps away from becoming law.
He introduced the proposal in a House bill, so the measure will go back to the GOP-majority House for consideration. The Jackson County lawmaker told reporters after the vote that a final redistricting map will be hammered out with House leaders in a conference committee.
House Judiciary B Chairman Kevin Horan, a Republican from Grenada who is the main House negotiator on judicial redistricting, told Mississippi Today that he intends to release his own proposal, but does not yet have a timeline for when he intends to unveil the plan.
“I hope to get a plan out by the end of the session,” Horan said.
State law mandates the process be completed by the fifth year after the U.S. Census is administered. The last census was performed in 2020, meaning the Legislature’s deadline is 2025.
If the Legislature does not redraw the districts by the deadline, state law requires the chief justice of the state Supreme Court to modify the districts.
Chancery court, commonly called a “court of equity,” deals with estate, custody, and constitutional issues while circuit courts primarily deal with major civil and criminal cases.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Read original article by clicking here.