Mississippi legislators have enacted a law that would create a new judicial system covering the state’s capital city, Jackson, in place of the current county court system.
Set to take effect July 1, 2023, the move by a Republican-dominated legislature has been criticized by opponents as creating a “separate and unequal” court system that is not answerable to the majority-Black community it would seek to govern.
The rain was coming down in sheets the day Tiara Young Hudson won the Democratic primary for circuit court judge in the Alabama county she has long served as a public defender. Voters were undeterred.
When the ballots were counted in Jefferson County, the most populous and most diverse in the state, they showed that more than 31,000 people had braved the storm to vote in the primary on that day in May. Fifty-four percent of them chose Hudson.
