Mina Corpuz, 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.

U.S. Supreme Court may be death row inmate’s last chance to avoid execution

by Mina Corpuz, Mississippi Today
June 12, 2025

Less than two weeks from the scheduled execution of Richard Jordan, the Mississippi Supreme Court said it will not reconsider the death row inmate’s appeal, but the federal high court is expected to discuss his case next week.

Jordan, at 79, the state’s oldest and longest-serving death row inmate, was first convicted in 1976 for kidnapping and killing Edwina Marter in Harrison County. He had four trials until a death sentence was handed down in 1998.

On Thursday, eight of the nine justices of the Mississippi Supreme Court declined to rehear an order to set Jordan’s execution date. Justice Leslie King was the lone person who wanted to grant a rehearing.

This decision comes about a week after Jordan’s attorney, Krissy Nobile of the Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel, wrote to the court to emphasize that her client has not yet exhausted federal remedies and an execution could not be set.

The U.S. Supreme Court distributed Jordan’s petition for a writ of certiorari at a May 29 conference and is expected to discuss it again at a June 18 conference – a week before the execution.

Meanwhile, Jordan’s attorneys filed an emergency application for a stay of execution with Justice Samuel Alito Jr. pending the court’s disposition on the case.

They argue there is a reasonable prospect that the court will grant certiorari and reverse the Mississippi Supreme Court’s decision, and that Jordan will suffer irreparable harm if a stay is not ordered.

In its response, the state argues Jordan has been trying to avoid his death sentence for almost 50 years and that he is repeating baseless arguments in his pending petition for certiorari.

His attorneys argue Jordan’s death sentence is not valid because in 1976, when the murder was committed and Jordan was sentenced, Mississippi and all other states had ceased executions based on a 1972 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Furman v. Georgia that capital punishment was unconstitutional.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The Mississippi Attorney General’s office declined to prosecute and cleared law enforcement officers for their use of force in a third of all the officer shooting cases it resolved between 2023 and 2024.

There have been 65 officer shootings statewide since 2023, according to records maintained by the Department of Public Safety. That number can change through the end of the year if there are additional shootings or earlier ones are found not to be officer-involved.

The attorney general’s office resolved about 40% of those cases, most of which have been declined prosecution.

A spokesperson said the remaining cases are in various stages of review or the office hasn’t received the case file from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, which is responsible for looking into the cases.

“Each case is different, including the complexity of the fact pattern, number of parties involved, and available evidence, and each case is reviewed thoroughly and independently,” spokesperson MaryAsa Lee said in a statement. “We seek to have a complete picture of the incident, considering all relevant facts and evidence.”

At least 30 people have died and at least 30 were injured, according to the DPS data, press releases by the agency and local news reporting.

Most of the deaths and injuries since 2023 were of people who were the subject of a police call, but three law enforcement officers also died as well as two other victims.

In nearly two years, 68 law enforcement agencies were involved in shootings, including police departments, sheriff’s offices, state agencies and federal agencies.

The Jackson and Biloxi police departments each had four officer-involved shootings in 2023 and 2024, according to the data. Other departments and agencies across the state had two or one officer shooting.

Details shared from press releases and local news reporting show several common themes in the shootings, including while officers respond to calls for help, during crimes in progress, while serving warrants and when a person shows a weapon.

MBI has closed 40 of the cases between 2023 and 2024, according to the records by the DPS, the agency that oversees the bureau.

For cases MBI closed, the average time between the shooting and submission of the case to the attorney general’s office is about 181 days, or nearly 5 ½ months.

Twenty-four cases remain open by MBI, most of which are from shootings that happened in late 2023 or this year.

Once cases are closed, they are submitted to the attorney general’s office, which handles prosecution and reviews use of force by officers who were involved in the shooting.

From there, it can take additional time for Fitch’s office to review the incident and determine whether the law enforcement officer’s use of force was justified. The office was given exclusive responsibility to prosecute law enforcement shootings starting in July 2022.

“All of these cases are incredibly important, not only for the parties involved but also for the confidence of the public,” Lee, of the attorney general’s office, said. “Ultimately, by seeking truth and justice, we hope to bolster the credibility of our legal system and trust between the men and women of law enforcement and the communities in which they serve.”

The attorney general’s office declined to prosecute for 20 cases, meaning that the officers were justified in their use of force.

Between 2023 and 2024, Fitch’s office brought one case to a grand jury: the case of an Indianola police officer accused of shooting an 11-year-old boy during a domestic incident in May 2023. Officers came to the boy’s home to help his mother with a former partner who became irate.

In December 2023, a Sunflower County grand jury decided not to indict the officer, Sgt. Greg Capers.

The attorney general’s office also presented another case to a grand jury in 2022, and that jury declined to indict. In that case, a Gulfport officer shot a 15-year-old outside a Family Dollar Store. Police and the family have offered varying accounts of events, and DPS released dashboard and body camera footage from the shooting from multiple points of view.

Since 2023, Fitch’s office was able to secure one conviction: sentences for five former Rankin County sheriff’s deputies and a former Richland Police Department officer who called themselves the Goon Squad and tortured two Black men in January 2023. The officers pleaded guilty to state and federal charges and are incarcerated in federal prisons around the country.

Indictments and convictions of law enforcement officers whose use of force results in death or injury are not common in Mississippi or around the country.