Many Mississippi courts have no records of search warrants, concealing an important key to monitoring police work

The site of a no-knock warrant in Greenville, Miss.
(Photo by Rory Doyle/ProPublica, via Daily Journal)

Over a third of Mississippi's courts are breaking record-keeping rules that require them to to keep all search warrant records, reports Caleb Bedillion for Tupelo's Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal in partnership with ProPublica. The news organizations surveyed the state's 82 county justice courts in the state and the municipal courts in the 10 largest cities, and found that 15 courts had no search warrants among their records and 16 only had partial records, essentially blocking public access to them.

The problem of missing records becomes more acute when trying to track down no-knock search warrants — which hand officers the ability to search a residence without announcing themselves. The practice has attracted widespread national scrutiny, most recently after Breonna Taylor was killed by Louisville police in 2020 during a no-knock raid that has resulted in the indictment of three officers.

Merrill Nordstrom, a Mississippi public defender, found that many of the warrants being issued in Greenville were no-knocks. Yet the warrants, which had been signed by a local judge and should have been returned to the court after the search, were not in the court's possession. Instead the local police department kept them, and they were "hidden from view because law enforcement agencies, unlike the courts, can claim a broad public-records exemption over records in their possession," Bedillon reports.