Mukta Joshi

3 weeks ago | starherald.net | Mukta Joshi

A chance of showers and thunderstorms. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 81. South southwest wind around 0 mph. Chance of precipitation is 50%. New rainfall amounts less than a tenth of an inch possible.

3 weeks ago | mississippitoday.org | Mukta Joshi

Amid a national maelstrom of attacks on academic freedom, the fate of James Bowley, the former chair and professor of Religious Studies at Millsaps College, hinges on a 10-word email he sent to his class of three students the morning after the presidential election. Nearly a month after a grievance committee repudiated his subsequent termination over those 10 words, his status remains in flux.

1 month ago | mississippitoday.org | Mukta Joshi

Hezekiah Watkins was 13 when he was arrested in 1961 for entering a white-only Greyhound bus station in Jackson, sent to state prison and housed on death row. Watkins said Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest reminded him of his own experience.

1 month ago | mississippitoday.org | Steph Quinn |Mukta Joshi

The lawyer for Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey defended the sheriff’s use of trusties on his family’s chicken farm, saying it was part of an inmate work program authorized by statute. But four trusties who said they worked at the farm were released from the Rankin County Detention Center before 2021, when the only statute governing a work program for jail inmates was passed.

1 month ago | mississippitoday.org | Mukta Joshi |Steph Quinn

Anthony Burt still remembers the day he became a “blue suit.”When Burt was jailed in Rankin County in 2017 on methamphetamine possession charges, he said he had never heard of the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department’s lauded work program for trusted inmates, or “trusties.” But when an acquaintance in the program told Burt it could make his life in jail easier, he became determined to work his way to the top tier of male trusties, who wear blue uniforms and enjoy additional privileges in the jail.