Michael Goldberg, Mississippi Today

Susie Balfour, diagnosed with terminal breast cancer two weeks before her release from prison, has died from the disease she alleged past and present prison health care providers failed to catch until it was too late.

The 64-year-old left the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in December 2021 after more than 30 years of incarceration. She died on Friday, a representative for her family confirmed.

Balfour is survived by family members and friends. News of her passing has led to an outpouring of condolences of support shared online from community members, including some she met in prison.

Instead of getting the chance to rebuild her life, Balfour was released with a death sentence, said Pauline Rogers, executive director of the RECH Foundation.

“Susie didn’t just survive prison, she came out fighting,” Rogers said in a statement. “She spent her final years demanding justice, not just for herself, but for the women still inside. She knew her time was limited, but her courage was limitless.”

Last year, Balfour filed a federal lawsuit against three private medical contractors for the prison system, alleging medical neglect. The lawsuit highlighted how she and other incarcerated women came into contact with raw industrial chemicals during cleaning duty. Some of the chemicals have been linked to an increased risk of cancer in some studies.

The companies contracted to provide health care to prisoners at the facility over the course of Balfour’s sentence — Wexford Health Sources, Centurion Health and VitalCore, the current medical provider — delayed or failed to schedule follow-up cancer screenings for Balfour even though they had been recommended by prison physicians, the lawsuit says.

“I just want everybody to be held accountable,” Balfour said of her lawsuit. “ … and I just want justice for myself and other ladies and men in there who are dealing with the same situation I am dealing with.”

Rep. Becky Currie, who chairs the House Corrections Committee, spoke to Balfour last week, just days before her death. Until the very end, Balfour was focused on ensuring her story would outlive her, that it would drive reforms protecting others from suffering the same fate, Currie said.

“She wanted to talk to me on her deathbed. She could hardly speak, but she wanted to make sure nobody goes through what she went through,” Currie said. “I told her she would be in a better place soon, and I told her I would do my best to make sure nobody else goes through this.”

During Mississippi’s 2025 legislative session, Balfour’s story inspired Rep. Justis Gibbs, a Democrat from Jackson, to introduce legislation requiring state prisons to provide inmates on work assignments with protective gear.

Gibbs said over 10 other Mississippi inmates have come down with cancer or become seriously ill after they were exposed to chemicals while on work assignments. In a statement on Monday, Gibbs said the bill was a critical step toward showing that Mississippi does not tolerate human rights abuses.

“It is sad to hear of multiple incarcerated individuals passing away this summer due to continued exposure of harsh chemicals,” Gibbs said. “We worked very hard last session to get this bill past the finish line. I am appreciative of Speaker Jason White and the House Corrections Committee for understanding how vital this bill is and passing it out of committee. Every one of my house colleagues voted yes. We cannot allow politics between chambers on unrelated matters to stop the passage of good common-sense legislation.”

The bill passed the House in a bipartisan vote before dying in the Senate. Currie told Mississippi Today on Monday that she plans on marshalling the bill through the House again next session.

Currie, a Republican from Brookhaven, said Balfour’s case shows that prison medical contractors don’t have strong enough incentives to offer preventive care or treat illnesses like cancer.

In response to an ongoing Mississippi Today investigation into prison health care and in comments on the House floor, Currie has said prisoners are sometimes denied life saving treatments. A high-ranking former corrections official also came forward and told the news outlet that Mississippi’s prison system is rife with medical neglect and mismanagement.

Mississippi Today also obtained text messages between current and former corrections department officials showing that the same year the state agreed to pay VitalCore $100 million in taxpayer funds to provide healthcare to people incarcerated in Mississippi prisons, a top official at the Department remarked that the company “sucks.”

Balfour was first convicted of murdering a police officer during a robbery in north Mississippi, and she was sentenced to death. The Mississippi Supreme Court reversed the conviction in 1992, finding that her constitutional rights were violated in trial. She reached a plea agreement for a lesser charge, her attorney said.

As of Monday, the lawsuit remains active, according to court records. Late last year Balfour’s attorneys asked for her to be able to give a deposition with the intent of preserving her testimony. She was scheduled to give one in Southaven in March.

Rogers said Balfour’s death is a tragic reminder of systemic failures in the prison system where routine medical care is denied, their labor is exploited and too many who are released die from conditions that went untreated while they were in state custody.

Her legacy is one RECH Foundation will honor by continuing to fight for justice, dignity and systemic reform, said Rogers, who was formerly incarcerated herself.

by Michael Goldberg, Mississippi Today

March 21, 2025

Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann's House counterparts took advantage of typos in a bill his Senate approved — bringing forth the most sweeping tax overhaul in modern Mississippi history.

But after a day's silence on the issue, Hosemann on Friday acted as though he knew little about the snafu.

Hosemann outlined what he said were victories in the bill headed to Gov. Tate Reeves with the Senate's typos unfixed. Then he attempted to end the press conference after taking, but not really answering, one question from Mississippi Today about the errors. As statehouse reporters kept pressing, Hosemann said he hadn't "focused" on the typos and didn't know whether the House had intentionally passed the bill to back the Senate into a corner.

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"I don't know whether they knew it had a flaw," Hosemann said. "Nobody told me that."

Hosemann said his team spent "hundreds of hours" drafting its tax overhaul legislation and "an untold amount of allocations and computations" went into the process. But the thoroughness Hosemann described did not prevent a few errant decimal points from making it into the legislation the Senate ultimately approved by mistake.

The upshot is that a bill eliminating the income tax at a much faster clip than Hosemann and many senators wanted, a position they stuck to for months, is set to be signed into law thanks to a clerical error. The law that will be headed to the governor's desk would dramatically alter Mississippi's tax structure.

As confusion swirled throughout the Capitol late Thursday and early Friday, many lawmakers said they were unclear how quickly the income tax elimination would happen. The Senate when it voted on its plan intended it to take many years and hinge on economic growth “triggers” being met. But decimal point typos essentially removed the triggers, meaning hundreds of millions of dollars in income tax revenue will have to be cut even if there is growth of just a few million dollars.

At most, the Senate plan would eliminate the income tax over a little more than a decade — roughly the same timetable as House leaders had proposed. Senate leaders had called that approach unwise, and thought the counteroffer they sent to the House would have taken 20 years or more, dependent on growth.

The House, which along with Gov. Reeves has favored eliminating the income tax at a faster rate, ran with the Senate's mistake. They approved the bill on Thursday and on Friday disposed of a procedural motion that will send it to the governor's desk.

Opponents of the changes say the poorest state in the union can’t afford to slash a third of its budget and still provide services to citizens, and that a shift to “regressive” taxation with an increased gasoline tax will hit poor people and those of modest means the hardest. Proponents say the bill will bolster Mississippi's "consumption-based economy" by drawing corporate investment and letting workers keep more of their money.

House Speaker Jason White on Friday afternoon issued a brief statement but did not address the typos in the Senate bill or the bizarre way his chamber found a way to send the tax plan to the governor.

"As of today, we are Building Up Mississippi by eliminating the income tax to further our state's competitive advantage and award our workforce! HB 1 has crossed a historic hurdle and is heading to the Governor," White wrote.

White thanked Reeves and House and Ways Chairman Trey Lamar. He did not mention Hosemann.

But Hosemann indicated negotiations might not be over, pointing to another tax reform bill his chamber approved Friday morning. Other Senate leaders said little about the mistake and operated as if everything were normal. They voted to invite conference on a separate Senate tax cut bill that remains alive.

Hosemann said he hadn't seen the House's tax bill head to the governor's office yet, and that he hoped the other Senate-approved bill would be the final product.

"There may be some clarifications needed and these issues have come up this morning. And so we've done SB 3095 and sent it back down to the House to take a look at it," Hosemann said. "Hopefully the governor will sign the amended legislation the Senate sent back to the House."

But it is doubtful the Senate has any leverage to force the House back to the negotiating table since much of the House's plan is already headed to Reeves, who vowed on Friday to sign it into law.

White, in his Friday statement, suggested the Legislature could use the Senate's tax bill as a vehicle for changing the structure of the Public Employees Retirement System, which had been a key wedge issue between the chambers in their negotiations over tax reform.

"I'm encouraged that the Senate has invited conference on SB 3095 to establish a dedicated stream of revenue to fund PERS going forward," White wrote, referring to his chamber's preferred approach to fixing the system.

Before taking questions at Friday's press conference, Hosemann celebrated elements of the bill headed to Reeves, including lowering the sales tax on groceries from 7% to 5%, increasing infrastructure funding and cutting PERS benefits for future employees to help shore up the system financially.

"Today is about the biggest win we have had on these issues in the history of this state," Hosemann said. "Now, if we need to clarify something, they'll clarify it. But what's happened today, both on the grocery tax, the income tax, and PERS … I think we've done so many positives. I don't want to take any of the glow from the House or the Senate on the work that we did for a year."

The events of the past few days were a "team effort," Hosemann added.

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