Anna Wolfe

Just before we published this story, I reached out to the DA again for updates. He had received several more sheriff referrals for these cases since we spoke, but he decided after learning about our findings that his approach isn’t working, and said he won’t prosecute them anymore.

I cannot thank Brandy enough for being willing to share her story. She is the only reason we now know about what’s happening in Leake County. The impact she has already had on her community by speaking out will be felt for years to come:

Facing Decades in Prison, a Mississippi Mother Defied a Prosecutor and a Hazy Legal Theory A prosecutor had been threatening mothers who used drugs while pregnant with long sentences — until Brandy Moore fought the case against her.

Here’s my latest story for @mississippitoday.org, reported and published in partnership with @themarshallproject.org: mississippitoday.org/2024/12/12/m...

I told her about the other mothers I’d found currently serving prison time. I could hear the hurt in her voice. “I pray that they get as much of a chance to tell their story and their injustices like I have,” Brandy told me. “I just pray that there will be some help for them.”

Brandy said she cried in relief when she learned the case was over, but that she was also a little sad that she wouldn’t get her day in court, wouldn’t get to challenge the way local law enforcement is criminalizing pregnant women in her community.

Brandy’s case would have been the first known case of its kind to go to trial. But on that same call, the DA told me he’d decided to drop the charges against her. I waited for weeks to talk to Brandy again, until I knew the judge had signed the dismissal order.

When I spoke to Kilgore again by phone, I told him about the four incarcerated mothers from his district and he was silent on the other end of the line for a moment. He told me he didn’t know they were in prison. “It doesn't appear that this is working,” he said.

I researched the success rate of the intervention court in that district. It has the second-worst completion rate in the state with nearly one-in-five participants unsuccessful in 2023—a stat I had to calculate myself since the court does not do its own performance evaluation in its reports.

I read the rest of the files. Out of the ten cases, at least eight of the women violated drug court and six have served or are serving prison time. There are likely others we don’t know about.

I quickly searched the rest. Tentative release: 11/4/2038. Tentative release: 3/8/2042. A fourth is serving a 5-year sentence.

But when I flipped the page, I found a warrant for her arrest issued a year later for failing to conduct her weekly check-in. Before I even finished reading the files, I plugged her name into MDOC’s inmate search. She was there. Tentative release: 2/18/2039.

Sure enough, she’d been ordered to drug court, a rigorous intervention program. This was in 2019. To avoid her prison sentence, she’d need to comply with the program’s 22 strict conditions for five years.

As I read the first case, I noted the defendant had been given a suspended sentence, as the DA stated, but was surprised to see the length: the maximum of 20 years, which would be hanging over her head.

For the rest of the day, I drove around to the three county courthouses housing the records for these cases, copying the paper files as quickly as I could without closely examining them. It was late when I got home and actually started reading.

He gave me a list of 10 of these cases besides Brandy’s that he has prosecuted since 2013, assuring me he wasn’t sending these mothers to prison. It wasn’t a comprehensive list of all such cases, but the ones he could readily identify.

In mid-August, I visited Philadelphia, MS to speak with the local DA prosecuting Brandy. DA Steven Kilgore told me he wouldn’t take such a case to trial—that his goal is simply to force the women to plea and enter drug court to get help.

Brandy works as a daycare worker and is the primary caretaker of her children. If convicted, she faced the possibility of 20 years in prison.

We’d never found a case where the woman challenged the charge all the way to a trial. But Brandy was adamant about her innocence. “I'm not guilty and they're not gonna make me believe I'm guilty,” she told me.

Delivering Justice: Why a Mississippi county is prosecuting some pregnant women and new moms A Jones County prosecutor and a top sheriff's official found a new way to punish pregnant women suspected of using drugs. The duo believe their approach, which has resulted in 20 prosecutions in four ...

In all of these convictions we’ve found, each woman pleaded guilty, despite the case’s hazy legal theory, to avoid the risk of a jury verdict and long sentence. See this 2019 story about Jones County by @ehensley.bsky.social and @michelleliu.bsky.social: mississippitoday.org/2019/05/11/d...

But the four-county area where Brandy lives never came up in my search because, for one, that court’s records weren’t digitized until recently. And two, I was searching under the typical child abuse statute. Unusually, the local DA there is prosecuting under domestic violence.

They Were Prosecuted for Using Drugs While Pregnant. But It May Not Have Been a Crime Dozens of women in Mississippi have been charged with child abuse crimes that, based on existing state law, they may not have committed.

I’ve been looking into these cases statewide since early 2023 and have found 44 women arrested for felony child abuse or endangerment since 2015 for using drugs while pregnant, regardless of whether the baby was harmed. mississippitoday.org/2023/11/16/m...

Brandy had experienced a spiritual awakening during her pregnancy with Remi, decided against the abortion and kicked the meth. But five years later, Brandy stood accused of assaulting the girl when she was a fetus. “I'm being criminalized for deciding to keep my baby,” Brandy said.

I met Brandy’s alleged domestic violence victim — a blue-eyed, blonde haired 4-year-old named Remi. A lot of the kids I meet in the field are shy. Not Remi. She enthusiastically took me on a tour of her bedroom. She said she likes to read and play dress up with her best friend.

In June, I drove up to Sebastopol, MS to interview Brandy Moore, a mother of four who was recently arrested and facing a possible 20-year prison sentence. Her crime: using drugs while around 15-weeks pregnant in 2019. At the time, she was considering an abortion, which was still legal then.