Jackson Free Press

There's never a slow news week in Jackson, Miss., and last week was no exception. Here are the local stories JFP reporters brought you in case you missed them:

1. Mississippians who live in the Hinds County School District lines, including Bolton, Byram, Edwards, Raymond, Terry and Utica, will vote to approve or disapprove a bond issue for their public schools on Tuesday, Aug. 15.
2. Former Mississippi House Speaker Pro Tem Robert Clark was honored on the 50th anniversary of becoming the first African American Mississippian elected to the Legislature since Reconstruction.
3. Hinds County Senior Circuit Court Judge Tomie Green says Hinds County has had to piecemeal a sort of mental-health court together because the wait at the state hospital for evaluations is so long.
4. The legal fight over who controls the Jackson airport continues outside the courtroom for now after U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves dismissed three of the city of Jackson's initial claims this July.
5. Heroin was involved in 24.0 percent (35 cases) of all opioid-related overdose death in 2015, data from the Mississippi Department of Health show. John Dowdy, director of the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics, says the amount of heroin in Mississippi has increased significantly.
6. Late Tuesday, a jury found Hinds County District Attorney Robert Shuler Smith "not guilty" on three counts, including for hindering the prosecution of Christopher Butler after deliberating about four hours.
7. A new policy report from the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative shows that single, working mothers in Mississippi make far less than other types of families and still have to pay for child care.
8. Sanford Knott, the former attorney for Christopher Butler, dropped a bombshell in Hinds District Attorney Robert Shuler Smith’s trial when he confirmed on cross-examination that the DA’s actions to help Butler avoid trial was “hindering"—the crime Smith is trying to prove he did not commit.
9. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including civil-rights leader Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., and the Mississippi Legislative Black Caucus have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear Mississippi attorney Carlos Moore's state flag case.
10. The State argued that Hinds County District Attorney Robert Shuler Smith did not even have to take an action to be guilty of conspiracy in the trial against him, with witnesses explaining on the stand late in the trial that an individual only has to make a plan to act unlawfully under Mississippi's conspiracy law.

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