A Hinds County chancery judge has removed the brother of Dau Mabil from a lawsuit filed against the man's widow that would have allowed him to gain access to his brother's body for an independent autopsy. 

Judge Dewayne Thomas issued two orders Thursday morning several days after a hearing in a lawsuit between Bul Mabil and Karissa Bowley, along with state investigators, about what will happen to Dau Mabil's remains. 

In the hearing and court filings, Bowley said she will allow an independent autopsy to be conducted. 

“I do feel relief that this part of things is over and we can move on to what we were doing before, which is continue to dig for information,” she said Thursday after the judge's orders were released. 

On March 25, the 33-year-old Belhaven resident went on a walk in his usual area without his phone. He was seen on video surveillance on Jefferson Street between Fortification and High Street, and at one point went to the Museum Trail in Belhaven Heights to check on corn he planted. 

About three weeks later, a fisherman spotted a body floating in the Pearl River near Lawrence County, more than 50 miles away. By April 18, a preliminary autopsy revealed the body belonged to Mabil. The Lawrence County sheriff said there was no evidence of foul play.

In his order, Thomas imposed safeguards proposed by Bowley and the Department of Public Safety for the independent autopsy: It needs to be conducted after the state finishes its investigation and be conducted by someone who is a qualified pathologist with a certain medical degree and certification. 

After the state finishes its investigation, official autopsy results shall be released only with consent of Bowley, as the surviving spouse and next of kin, according to the court order. 

Bowley is awaiting the report from the first autopsy to shed more light on what happened and whether anyone from the public knows anything or has any video from the day Mabil disappeared, including video Bul Mabil's attorney mentioned that supposedly shows people at the Museum Trail moving that appears to be a body into a truck around the time Mabil was at there. 

The Department of Public Safety will hold Mabil's remains for 30 days after the state finishes its death investigation so the independent autopsy can be done. 

Bul Mabil filed the lawsuit the night before his brother's body was identified because he believes it is the only way to know whether there was foul play in his brother's death. U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson has asked the Justice Department to investigate.

In a separate order, Thomas agreed that Bowley, as Mabil's surviving spouse, is Mabil's next of kin and the one who can direct what happens with his remains. 

He dismissed Bul Mabil as a plaintiff because he lacked standing in the matter. 

At a Tuesday hearing, his attorney, Lisa Ross, argued that he should be Dau Mabil's next of kin because his brother and Bowley had a strained relationship leading up to his disappearance. Ross said Mississippi has no existing case law that defines who is a surviving spouse, but referenced a New York case in which a wife separated from her husband was not allowed to cremate his body and interfere with the mother's request for an autopsy. 

He has also argued in court records that he should remain in the case because he is the next of kin for Dau's child. 

Ross could not be reached about whether she plans to appeal. 

The lawsuit has been renamed to reflect the new parties: Bowley v. Mississippi Department of Public Safety. 

Now that the judge has written the orders, Bowley said she feels relieved and has more freedom to grieve her husband, including visiting places around the city where they went together. 

One of those is the patch along the Museum Trail where Mabil planted corn. Bowley said she's returned there to water the plants and see them grow. 

“It's a nice place to be reminded of him along with many others,” she said.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Following an apparent Republican breakdown of Medicaid expansion negotiations late Wednesday night, the House Democratic leader walked onto the Senate floor Thursday to deliver a new proposal to Senate Republican leaders.

Rep. Robert Johnson III, the House Democratic leader whose caucus stalled a vote on an earlier Republican plan to expand Medicaid, offered an idea to Republican Senate Medicaid Chairman Kevin Blackwell Thursday morning — just hours before a final deadline that would end expansion negotiations altogether.

Johnson told Blackwell that he could promise more than 30 Democratic House “yea” votes if Senate Republicans could agree to a slight tweak of one provision in their expansion plan. The Democratic leader said his proposal seemed to be well met by Blackwell and later Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, offering hope that expansion talks were not yet dead.

“We are all closer on a final plan than I think they realized,” Johnson said shortly after talking with Blackwell and Hosemann. “We just wanted them to know we think there's a true path forward for compromise here and we can leave here this weekend with Medicaid expansion on the books. The Senate can have almost precisely what they wanted all along, and I believe there are more than enough votes in the House for it.”

READ MORE: Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann shuts down House Republican idea to let voters decide Medicaid expansion

Senate Republicans have long demanded that any expansion program include a stringent work requirement for Medicaid recipients — a provision the federal government has shot down for the 13 other states. House Republicans and Democrats also wanted to pass a plan that included work requirement language, though their proposal was pragmatic with federal policy and would have allowed an expansion program to go into effect even if the federal government did not allow it. 

Senate Republicans held firm against that idea, though, which led to the impasse that threatened to kill the entire negotiations late Wednesday night and into Thursday.

But Johnson, aiming to revive the expansion negotiations ahead of a Thursday at 8 p.m. deadline, approached Blackwell on the Senate floor Thursday late morning and a few minutes later met with Hosemann inside the Senate chamber to propose a tweak to the original Senate bill.

The Senate, in its most recent plan, wanted the state to request a federal waiver to implement a work requirement every year until it was approved. With an understanding that the federal government was likely to not approve that waiver, Johnson asked the Senate Republicans on Thursday to mandate the state apply for the waiver just one year rather than every year indefinitely.

“We just want the Legislature to come back and have a conversation next year if the federal government doesn't approve the work requirement. It's as simple as that,” Johnson said shortly after walking off the Senate floor. “He (Blackwell) said he didn't think that was necessarily a bad idea and that he'd take it to the lieutenant governor (Hosemann).”

Shortly after Johnson spoke with Blackwell and Hosemann, Hosemann told reporters he and his colleagues were willing to listen to any proposals, but as of Thursday at noon, “we haven't gotten anything on paper.” Hosemann would not commit to supporting Johnson's idea, but Johnson said Blackwell and Hosemann sounded receptive to the idea.

“We'll look at anything between now and the deadline,” Hosemann said. “That's something we just heard and we'll talk it over. But we do think our original plan was a strong compromise, and it was unfortunate it wasn't accepted.”

Johnson said he would take the morning conversations to House Republican leaders, who have remained close with Johnson throughout the course of the Medicaid expansion negotiations.

READ MORE: Lawmakers buy one more day to reach Medicaid expansion compromise

It is exceedingly rare for any Democrat to be in a position of influence in the supermajority Republican Legislature. But Medicaid expansion plan requires a three-fifths vote for passage and likely will need a two-thirds majority vote to override an expected veto from Gov. Tate Reeves, who has long opposed expansion. Those vote thresholds place Democrats in a position of power with many Republicans still unwilling to support Medicaid expansion.

“There's been a lot of noise in this building, and I wish we could do everything we want to do,” Johnson said. “But the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of everyone here — Senate Republicans, House Republicans, Senate Democrats, House Democrats — want to help provide health coverage to a state that desperately needs it. We're close. We just have to keep talking.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

May 2, 1964

Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, two 19-year-old Black Americans, were simply trying to get a ride back home. Instead, Klansmen abducted them, took them to the Homochitto National Forest, where they beat the pair and then drowned them in the Mississippi River. 

When their bodies were found in an old part of the river, FBI agents initially thought they had found the bodies of three missing civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. 

Thanks to the work of Moore's brother, Thomas, and Canadian filmmaker David Ridgen, federal authorities reopened the case in 2005. Two years later, a federal jury convicted James Ford Seale. He received three life sentences and died in prison. 

Ridgen did a podcast on the case for the CBC series, “Somebody Knows Something.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.