Mississippi Today
Grenada officers can be sued in jail death, judge rules
Grenada officers can be sued in jail death, judge rules
A federal judge rejected the claim that Grenada police officers should be protected by qualified immunity in the 2018 death of Robert Loggins in the local jail.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge Sharion Aycock moves the case one step closer to trial in Mississippi.
“The court’s decision is an important milestone in the family’s quest for justice, and they are prepared to fight for as long as it takes,” said Jacob Jordan of the Levy Konigsberg LLP law firm, the attorney for Loggins’ family.
A video obtained by the Mississippi Center of Investigative Reporting at Mississippi Today shows Loggins rolling when officers and jailers piled on top of him inside the Grenada County Jail. It also shows officer kneeling on his neck.
Three and a half minutes later, they got off of him. He never moved again. More than six minutes passed before anyone checked his pulse or breathing.
Despite that, the state of Mississippi concluded Loggins’ death was an “accident.” The alleged culprit? Methamphetamine toxicity.
After viewing the video as well as the autopsy report and the photos, renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden concluded the death was a homicide. “They killed him by piling on top of him,” he said. “He absolutely died from some kind of asphyxia.”
Loggins’ death came two years before the 2020 murder of George Floyd. All the officers who played a role in Floyd’s homicide were fired and convicted on criminal charges.
Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd’s neck, was sentenced to two decades behind bars. Three other officers were each sentenced to between two and a half and three and a half years in prison, including one officer who kept bystanders away.
The Grenada officer who kneeled on Loggins’ neck has never faced any criminal charges, nor has any other officer.
Baden considers the officers’ actions in the Loggins’ case much worse. “The intentional brutality inflicted on Loggins,” he said, “who was in an acute mental crisis, having done nothing criminal, makes his death — and many, many others — so much more criminal than Floyd’s.”
Baden compared the Loggins’ case to the Jan. 10 death of Tyre Nichols, whom five Memphis police officers pepper-sprayed, kicked, punched and shocked with a Taser. A grand jury has indicted the now-fired officers on second-degree murder and other charges.
The pathologist said Loggins’ death is “more typical of the thousands of police custody deaths of unarmed persons that have occurred without much notice.”
Since 2000, at least 342 deaths have taken place across the country after police restrained people, according to FatalEncounters.org. Many of those deaths were due to asphyxia.
In some of those deaths, officers used restraints condemned by the U.S. Department of Justice. The agency, along with the International Association of Chiefs of Police, warned officers that keeping restrained people face down increases the risk of death from asphyxia.
“As soon as the suspect is handcuffed, get him off his stomach,” the memo advises.
At 5:40 a.m. on Nov. 29, 2018, a woman in Grenada telephoned 911, saying, “Someone’s in the back of my house calling for help. Please hurry.”
Five members of the Grenada Police Department responded: Capt. Justin Gammage, Sgt. Reggie Woodall, Cpl. Edwin Merriman, Patrolman Michael Jones and Patrolman Albert Deane Tilley.
They found a Black man face down with his arms tucked beneath his body. One officer recognized Loggins, who had battled both mental issues and a drug problem.
“Although Loggins was likely guilty of trespassing and disturbing the peace, there is no real contention that he had committed any offense more serious than those,” the judge wrote. “In fact, according to the call to Grenada Police Department, Loggins was screaming for help, which would undercut any argument that he was attempting to commit some sort of serious crime under cover of night.”

In bodycam footage obtained by MCIR, officers repeatedly asked Loggins to put his hands behind his back. He refused.
“My soul belongs to Jesus Christ, my savior, my protector,” he told officers.
“Your ass belongs to us now,” one of them replied.
The judge concluded that “any fears the officers may have had must have subsided quickly. Loggins was screaming incoherently, never attempted to exert any force against them, never brandished a weapon and never even threatened to harm them.”
She wrote that Loggins refused to put his hands behind his back, which may have been because he was in an altered state.
Gammage and Woodall shocked Loggins with a Taser at least 10 times, and Woodall struck Loggins with a flashlight nine times — a degree of force that “was not justifiable under the circumstances,” the judge wrote.
After handcuffing the 5-foot-8, 190-pound man, officers carried him to a carport, where a report by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation claims that “Loggins’ disorderly behavior” kept emergency personnel from conducting “a full medical assessment.”
But bodycam video paints a different picture. As officers carry Loggins, an EMT can be heard saying, “He looks fine to me.”
Jail videoshows that at 5:59 a.m. officers carried Loggins upside down into the lobby of the jail. They left him face down on the floor, handcuffed.
He seemed to be in distress, rolling from side to side, the shift supervisor, Sgt. Edna Clark, told the investigations bureau. “To me, he was trying to gasp for breath because he couldn’t breathe.”
She said she asked officers to take Loggins tothe hospitalbut was waved off.
After Tilley reportedly said he needed his handcuffs back, at least four officers and jailers piled on top of Loggins at 6:04 a.m. to remove the cuffs from his wrists, the video shows. When they got off Loggins more than three minutes later, he didn’t move.
Clark noticed that he was bleeding and called 911. The dispatcher replied that EMTs had previously checked him.
“He’s bleeding from his mouth. He’s bleeding from his legs,” she told the dispatcher. “I’m not going to take him.”
At 6:14 a.m., Clark checked Loggins’ pulse and his breathing. She called 911 again.
“This man has got no heartbeat, and he’s not breathing. I want them officers back over here. I want an ambulance,” she said. “Get them over here now.”
A few minutes later, medical personnel arrived. They pounded on Loggins’ chest hoping to revive him, and when they couldn’t, they airlifted him to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
In 2020, Loggins’ wife, Rika Jones, filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court, accusing the officers of assault and the medical personnel and the private jail operator of failing to provide him with proper medical treatment.
Tilley’s lawyer insists his client didn’t cause Loggins’ death or act with excessive force and is shielded by qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that says government workers can’t be held liable for what they do on the job, except in rare circumstances.
Other officers have also denied any wrongdoing, insisting that Loggins’ constitutional rights were never violated.
The judge, however, disagreed, concluding that officers used “excessive force” and weren’t entitled to immunity from litigation.
In its response, the private jail operator, Corrections Management Services, said its staff acted in good faith, with Clark advising police “multiple times that Loggins would not be accepted into the jail and that he needed medical attention.” Medical personnel have denied the suit’s allegations of failure to provide proper treatment.
When Loggins died, he was 26 — seven years younger than his mother was when she died.
Debbie Loggins died in police custody after being hogtied, another restraint that the Justice Department has condemned.

The late pathologist who conducted her autopsy, Dr. Steven Hayne, ruled out trauma, drugs and alcohol, concluding that she died because of advanced heatstroke, even though the sun hadn’t risen when she was arrested, the temperature was in the 70s, and officers transported her in an air-conditioned car.
Instead, Hayne — whose autopsies have beencalled into question— concluded her death was an accident, blaming her “excessive exertional activity.”
Loggins’ father, Robert Ford, still passes by the jail where his son breathed his last. Sometimes, he stops outside and thinks about his son.
He believes his son deserves justice. “He was murdered,” he said. “You can see it in the video.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
On this day in 1848

Feb. 15, 1848

Sarah Roberts, a 5-year-old Black American, entered an all-white school in Boston, only to be turned away. She wound up entering four more white schools, and each time she was shown the door. And so she found herself walking from home, passing five all-white schools on the way to an all-black school the city of Boston was forcing her to attend.
This angered her father, Benjamin, one of the nation’s first Black American printers, and he sued the city. Robert Morris, one of the nation’s first Black lawyers, took up the case.
“Any child unlawfully excluded from public school shall recover damages therefore against the city or town by which such public instruction is supported,” Morris wrote.
He and co-counsel Charles Sumner argued that the Constitution of Massachusetts held all are equal before the law, regardless of race, and that the laws creating public schools made no distinctions.
Sumner wrote, “Prejudice is the child of ignorance … sure to prevail where people do not know each other.”
In 1850, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld the racial segregation of public schools. The attorneys brought the issue to state lawmakers. In 1855, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts banned segregated schools — the first law barring segregated schools in the U.S.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
State, MS Power extend life of coal unit to energize data centers

Last week, the state Public Service Commission unanimously approved a special contract that will extend the life of a Mississippi Power coal unit in order to meet energy demands for a recently announced data center project in Meridian.

Gov. Tate Reeves announced last month a $10 billion investment from Compass Datacenters. The Dallas-based company will build eight centers, and in exchange will receive multiple tax exemptions, Mississippi Today reported. The project will be located within the Mississippi Power service area. The utility, a subsidiary of Southern Company, serves 192,000 customers in the southern and eastern parts of the state.
Following a 2020 directive from the PSC to get rid of excess generation capacity, Mississippi Power initially planned to close the two coal-powered units at Plant Victor J. Daniel — in Jackson County, about 10 miles north of Moss Point — by 2027. In 2023, though, the utility pushed the retirement date back a year in order to support demand needs for its sibling company, Georgia Power, Grist reported.
Then on Jan. 9, Mississippi Power informed the PSC that, in order to power the Compass Datacenter facilities, it would have to delay closure of at least one of the coal units, as well as “potentially other fossil steam units,” until the mid-2030s.
Central District Public Service Commissioner De’Keither Stamps told Mississippi Today that the PSC’s job is to meet demand, and that until Mississippi Power has the option to include nuclear power in its arsenal, “we’re going to need all the power we can get in that service area.”
“We can’t stop economic development because we’ve got to wait, you know, 15 years for some nuclear power in the service area,” Stamps said.

Throughout the last couple decades, the country has moved away from coal as an energy source because of its contribution to global warming but also because of air and water pollution associated with coal-burning facilities. A 2023 study from George Mason University, the University of Texas and Harvard University found that exposure to fine particulate pollutants known as PM2.5 from coal plants contributed to 460,000 deaths around the country between 1999 and 2020, twice the mortality rate of PM2.5 exposure from other sources.
Sen. Jeremy England, R-Vancleave, whose district includes Plant Daniel, called the facility a “fixture of our community” because of the jobs and tax revenue it provides. He said he wasn’t aware of any health concerns related to air emissions from the plant.
“I don’t hear from any constituents that say, ‘Hey, we don’t want this here,’” England said.
England added that Plant Daniel retiring units could potentially hurt its tax assessment, meaning less revenue for public needs like the local school district. He also pointed to emission “scrubbers” that Plant Daniel and other coal facilities have added in recent years. The same 2023 study found that scrubbers have dramatically decreased sulfur dioxide emissions as well as air pollution-related deaths.
In addition to Compass Datacenters, Mississippi Power also entered into a special contract to supply power for a plywood manufacturer, owned by Hood Industries, in Beaumont, Mississippi.
The two deals, a spokesperson for Mississippi Power said, necessitate keeping the coal and other units set for retirement alive.
“We are committed to keeping the Mississippi Public Service Commission and our customers up to date and will present additional details in our upcoming 2025 Mid-Point Supply-Side Update,” spokesperson Jeff Shepard said via email. “These incredible economic development projects will create a significant number of jobs and bring billions of dollars of investment to southeast Mississippi.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Legislation to license midwifery clears another hurdle

A bill that would establish a clear pathway for Mississippians seeking to become professional midwives passed the House after dying in committee several years in a row.
“Midwives play an important role in our state, especially in areas where maternal health care is scarce,” said Rep. Dana McLean, R-Columbus and author of the bill. “I’m happy that House Bill 927 passed the House yesterday and urge our senators to join us in passing this much-needed legislation.”
Despite the legislation imposing regulations on the profession and mandating formalized training, many midwives have voiced their support of the bill. They say it will help them care more holistically for women and allow them new privileges like the ability to administer certain labor medications – and will open the door to insurance reimbursement in the future.
“We have so few midwives integrated in the system and so few midwives practicing in the state,” explained Amanda Smith, a midwife in Hattiesburg who went out of state to receive her professional midwifery license. “We believe that licensure really will help create a clear pathway so people know exactly how to become a midwife in Mississippi.”
It isn’t guaranteed that the bill would make midwifery more accessible to low-income women. But licensure makes it more likely.
Currently, neither Medicaid nor private insurance reimburse for unlicensed midwifery services. Licensing professional midwifery wouldn’t necessarily mean that insurance companies would immediately start reimbursing for the services, but it’s the only way they might.
A new federal program is seeking to make midwifery reimbursable by Medicaid.
Mississippi is one of 15 states chosen by the federal government to participate in a new grant program called the Transforming Maternal Health Model, which began in January 2025 and will work to expand access and reimbursement for services – including licensed midwifery.
The bill has historically faced opposition both from those who think it does too much, as well as those who think it does too little.
To those who think it overregulates the profession, McLean says her loyalty lies with her constituents and making sure they have the most transparency when seeking birth options. Currently, anyone can operate under the title midwife in the state of Mississippi – with no required standard of training.
“We are legitimizing (professional midwifery) … As a legislator, it’s my duty to try to protect the citizens of Mississippi,” McLean said. “And by putting this legislation forward, it helps to inform those clients that would want the services of a midwife but don’t know how to choose.”
As for those who think it does too little, McLean says the bill would leave the details up to a board – established by the bill and made up mostly of midwives – who would be able to decide requirements for professional midwifery better than a room full of lawmakers.
“There’s a lot of men in here that know a lot about birthing babies,” McLean said during a lively floor debate Thursday.
The bill now advances to the Senate.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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