An effort to create a statewide board to study domestic violence deaths to uncover trends and guide opportunities for intervention, support and policy unanimously passed both legislative bodies. 

Senate Bill 2886 by Brice Wiggins, R-Pascagoula, passed last week and House Bill 1551 by Fabian Nelson, D-Byram, passed Wednesday. Now both bills will head to the opposite chamber and are expected to be heard in committee. 

“When we see domestic violence incidents, they’re just counted as murder and the person is charged with murder and guess what? It’s not looked at any more, it’s not picked up to see what could we have done to stop it from getting here,” said Nelson on the House floor before the bill passed. 

The idea behind the legislation came through the Mississippi Coalition Against Domestic Violence, which represents survivors, shelters and advocates. 

Supporters have said data from a review board can help shelters and other providers see gaps in services and find ways to decrease and prevent domestic violence fatalities. They also see it as a way to encourage collaboration among shelters, the medical system, law enforcement, courts and other systems. 

The board could look at information from a number of sources including whether the victim had any domestic abuse protection orders and whether law enforcement was called multiple times to a location, well as medical and mental health records, court documents and prison records on parole and probation.  

“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. 

Passage of the bills come after a year where nearly 100 Mississippians died in domestic violence homicides, according to data compiled by Mississippi Today. 

After the 2024 legislative session, Mississippi Today began to track domestic violence fatalities similar to the way the review board would do. The organization’s compilation of data found 80 incidents that resulted in at least 100 deaths.

Victims were mostly women killed by male partners, which is in line with national statistics and trends about intimate partner violence. Other victims included men – victims and perpetrators – and a few children. Domestic incidents were also family violence between children, parents, grandparents and other members. 

Most of the compiled deaths involved a firearm, which research has shown is involved in more than half of homicides committed by an intimate partner. 

Both bills this session would create a board with appointed members with backgrounds in domestic violence, health and criminal justice – people who interact with victims and survivors. 

The Senate version would place the board under the Department of Public Safety, while the House version would place the board in the State Department of Health, which has similar boards that review child and maternal deaths. 

Last year, a bill that would have created the review board did not make it out of committee. 

Mississippi is one of several states without a domestic violence fatality review board, and without collecting information about fatalities, advocates say it’s difficult to know how many deaths and injuries there are in the state in any year. 

Meanwhile, several other domestic violence bills did not advance out of committee this session, including ones that proposed making second domestic violence conviction a felony, allowing judges to hold people charged with domestic violence for at least 24 hours, letting certain courts issue temporary protection orders and establishing domestic abuse court programs.