Long-sought domestic violence bill heads to governor’s desk
Mississippi lawmakers negotiated and passed legislation to create a statewide board to study domestic violence deaths during the final, seemingly chaotic days of the 2025 session. The bill now heads to the governor’s desk.
Senate Bill 2886 by Sen. Brice Wiggins, R-Pascagoula, would establish the Domestic Violence Fatality Review Board to study deaths and near-fatal incidents, suicides and other domestic violence matters. The goal is to learn how a death happened – the lead up, actions taken, what community resources were available and existing laws and policies.
And from this study, the goal would be for the board to learn how to prevent domestic violence through early intervention and the improvement of how people and institutions respond to domestic violence.
“We have to keep people alive, but to do that, we have to have the infrastructure as a system to appropriately respond to these things,” Stacey Riley, executive director of the Gulf Coast Center for Nonviolence and a board member of the Mississippi Coalition Against Domestic Violence, told Mississippi Today earlier in the legislative session.
Conference committee members for the bill included Wiggins and Rep. Fabian Nelson, a Democrat who proposed a House version of the bill.
Advocates have told Mississippi Today that it’s difficult to know how many domestic violence deaths and injuries there are in any given year because there isn’t data collected at the state level.
An analysis by Mississippi Today found at least 300 people – victims, abusers and collateral victims in the form of children and law enforcement – died from domestic violence between 2020 and 2024.
Information was gathered from local news stories, the Gun Violence Archive, the National Gun Violence Memorial, law enforcement and court documents to track locations of incidents, demographics of victims and perpetrators and information about court cases tied to the deaths.
Last year when a similar bill was proposed but didn’t make it out of committee, Mississippi Today started tracking the number of domestic violence fatalities, demographics and outcomes similar to how a review board would.
The statewide board would be established under the Department of Public Safety and include appointed members from the criminal justice system and others who interact with domestic violence survivors and victims.
The House version of the bill would have placed the board under the Department of Health, which has similar boards to review child deaths and maternal mortality. Nelson was the only member of the conference committee not to sign the report to withdraw the House’s amendment to place the board in the Department of Health.
Under SB 2886, circuit judges can form a review board based in their circuit court district. Those teams would work with local and state domestic violence centers, local law enforcement and judicial officers including prosecutors and public defenders.
The bill also directs the membership of a team to be inclusive and reflect the racial, geographic, urban, rural and economic diversity of the state or circuit court district.
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This story was originally published by Mississippi Today and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.