The House is expected on Thursday to take up a measure to overhaul the state’s youth court system, after the Senate passed it late Wednesday night in a special session of the Mississippi Legislature called by Gov. Tate Reeves.
The legislation would add more full-time judges and open youth court proceedings to the public, and lawmakers are also proposing to provide $29.5 million in new spending for the system.
The 52-member Senate passed the youth court overhaul 25-10 after much debate, with several members absent or not voting. The House is expected to take it up on Thursday.
Despite lawmakers only having hours to review the nearly 200 page proposal, Senate Judiciary A Chairman Brice Wiggins, a Republican from Pascagoula, told senators to approve the bill to improve the lives of kids who appear in youth court.
“We were sent here by our districts to do what’s best for the interests of the state and our state’s children,” Wiggins said.
READ MORE: Reeves: Special session will overhaul Mississippi’s ‘fragmented’ youth court system. Here’s how
READ MORE: Youth court special session has lawmakers meeting at new, and old, capitol buildings. See photos
Lawmakers don’t normally meet during the summer, but Gov. Tate Reeves called them into a special legislative session to consider youth court changes and to keep the system running after enabling and funding legislation had sunsetted and lawmakers failed to address it in their regular session early this year.
The governor caught legislators off guard by quickly announcing the special session on Tuesday afternoon, giving them only 24 hours to come to Jackson.
The hurried nature of the session drew bipartisan rebuke from lawmakers who said they didn’t have an opportunity to read the far-reaching bill before the session convened at 3 p.m. on Wednesday.
Sen. Hob Bryan, a Democrat from Amory, supported the intent of the bill, but he criticized the process and described the Senate’s actions as rubber stamping the governor’s request instead of deliberating as a separate branch of government.
Democratic Sen. Hob Bryan of Amory addresses the Mississippi Senate during a special legislative session at the Capitol in Jackson on Wednesday, July 15, 2026. Credit: Richard Lake/Mississippi Today“I don’t know what the rest of you said when you ran for public office but I didn’t run on a platform of ‘I’ll do what I’m told.’” Bryan said.
The goal of the bill is to scrap Mississippi’s current disjointed youth court system. Only 24 of Mississippi’s 82 counties have a full-time judge handling youth court cases. In most of these instances, county court judges handle youth court matters. But not every county has a county court.
In the remaining counties, these matters are handled by “part-time referees,” which is a part of chancery court. The proposal passed by the Senate would do away with referees and replace them with full-time chancery court judges.
The governor will appoint the new chancery court judges, but they will later have to run for election.
Youth court proceedings were thrown into confusion when lawmakers during their regular 2026 session mistakenly let state laws that outline how confidential youth court records can be shared between courts, state agencies, attorneys and law enforcement expire.
When a repealer, or sunset clause, is included in a state law, the law or a section goes away on a specified date unless the Legislature votes to reenact it. Because the Legislature didn’t pass a measure extending the repealer, those confidentiality measures and other youth court laws and funding expired.
After the confidentiality measures expired, three individual youth court judges entered their own local orders for how confidential youth court records can be shared.
This prompted Child Protection Services to file an emergency request with the Mississippi Supreme Court asking the state’s highest court to block those local orders from going into effect because the state agency argued the local judges did not have the power to issue them.
The Supreme Court unanimously granted the request, blocked lower courts from issuing their own local orders and established temporary rules for confidentiality.
The Senate proposal would revive the state law on confidentiality and allows it to sunset July 2029.
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