MS · state guide

Mississippi background screening law

How the courts here are organized

Mississippi runs two trial court systems with two separate sets of districts over the same counties, and that is the fact that decides where a record sits. The Circuit Court is organized into districts for criminal and civil litigation; the Chancery Court is organized into a different number of districts for equity, domestic, guardianship, probate and land matters. In the Judiciary's own words: "There are 23 Circuit Court districts and 57 Circuit Court judges. The number of Circuit Judges per district ranges from one to four." And, separately: "There are 20 Chancery Court districts and 52 Chancery Court judges."

The two systems do not divide by subject matter in the way the names suggest. The Circuit Courts "hear felony criminal prosecutions and civil lawsuits" and hear appeals from County, Justice and Municipal courts and from administrative boards. Chancery jurisdiction covers equity, adoptions, custody and divorce, guardianships, sanity hearings, wills, constitutional challenges and land records, and includes juvenile matters in counties which have no County Court. A felony prosecution is therefore a circuit matter, and the chancery district that a family or property matter sits in is a different geography from the circuit district the same address falls into. Neither is the county.

Below the two district systems sit four further courts. "Mississippi has 24 County Courts and 34 County Court judges", in Adams, Bolivar, Coahoma, DeSoto, Forrest, Hancock, Harrison, Hinds, Jackson, Jones, Lafayette, Lamar, Lauderdale, Lee, Leflore, Lowndes, Madison, Oktibbeha, Pearl River, Pike, Rankin, Warren, Washington and Yazoo counties, with jurisdiction to $200,000 and exclusive jurisdiction over eminent domain and juvenile matters, concurrent with the Justice Courts. "There are 82 Justice Courts with 198 judges", taking small claims of $3,500 or less, misdemeanors and traffic matters outside a municipality, and they are the only Mississippi judges elected in partisan races. "There are 239 Municipal Courts." Youth Courts sit in each county, and the Administrative Office of Courts reported 44 Intervention Courts and 6 Treatment Courts as of December 2025.

The appellate tier is two courts. The Supreme Court is the court of last resort, with nine justices elected from three districts for eight-year terms. The Court of Appeals was created by the Legislature, began hearing cases in 1995, and sits as an error-correction court with ten judges elected from five districts for eight-year terms. A matter that begins in a Justice or Municipal Court can reach the Circuit Court on appeal and then the appellate tier above it, and each of those steps leaves its own record with its own court.

The operational consequence is that a Mississippi search cannot be scoped by county and cannot be scoped by a single court level. A felony disposition sits with a Circuit Court in one of 23 districts, a misdemeanor may sit with a County, Justice or Municipal Court, and a domestic or probate matter sits with a Chancery Court in one of 20 districts that do not line up with the circuit districts. A search product that treats the county as the unit, or that assumes one district map, will report an incomplete history rather than a clear one.

The repository is the Criminal Information Center inside the Department of Public Safety's Bureau of Investigation, and it is also the state's link to the federal system. DPS states that the CIC "was established in March of 1998 in accordance with Miss. Code Ann. 45-27-5" and that it performs the duties set out in "Miss. Code Ann. 45-27-7, which includes maintaining the state's criminal records repository and providing fingerprint-based identification services to law enforcement and other criminal justice entities in the State of Mississippi and throughout the United States". A separate unit, the Mississippi Justice Information Center, is the state's NCIC and NLETS interface for wants, warrants and driver checks rather than the repository itself, and the Medical Cannabis Act names the MJIC rather than the CIC as the channel for its establishment checks.

Two divisions of the CIC matter to a screening file. Special Processing handles "pre-trial documents, expunction orders and court dispositions", and the expunction orders "are court orders that direct the criminal record technicians at CIC to remove criminal offenses from an offender's Mississippi rap sheet". Applicant Processing performs "fingerprint and name-based background checks used to clear certain classes of government workers for employment as well as teachers, healthcare workers, social services personnel, corrections personnel, elder care workers, nursing home workers, daycare workers, bankers, physician licensing, pharmacist licensing, nurse licensing, casino workers and other critical positions in industry". The repository is therefore both the place a court disposition lands and the place an order removing it is executed, which is why the expunction provisions are a repository question and not only a court question.

How a third party gets a record is set by the Department's own authorization form rather than by an open access rule. The form must be "completed, signed and printed legible", it warns that "All background checks may take up to 30 days to be completed", and it provides that "If the criminal background check results are to be released to a third party, you must provide the third-party name and mailing address in blocks 11, 12, 13, 14 & 15". The subject is therefore inside the transaction, and the release is named rather than general.

Whether a consumer reporting agency can obtain CIC data as of right, and on what statutory footing, was not established by this pass. No provision was read that opens the repository to a screening firm ordering on an employer's behalf, and the sections of Title 45 that would carry the surrounding access rule could not be read because the code host is unreachable. The page therefore describes the access mechanics that DPS publishes and does not assert a commercial route.

Court-side searching is the other half of the routing question. The Judiciary's informational pages confirm the structure above, but courts.ms.gov returned HTTP 500 on every path tried from this environment and the individual trial-court pages have no archived copies, so whether the Judiciary operates a public case search, to whom it is open and at what fee is unverified. What does hold is structural: a Mississippi answer should say which court level produced it, because a Circuit Court disposition and a Justice Court disposition are different records held by different courts in different districts, and neither one is the county.

The federal baseline

Federal law sets the floor here as it does everywhere. It is at 15 U.S.C. §1681 et seq., it binds the agency and the employer separately, and it does not vary by state. The FCRA article covers it section by section, including the seven-year limits, the salary threshold and the adverse action sequence, so that this page does not restate any of it.

What follows is only the overlay: what Mississippi adds on top of that floor, and where it departs from it.

What Mississippi law adds

Reporting limits at a glance

Every figure below is against Mississippi law. Where a row says “federal only”, the state has set nothing and 15 U.S.C. §1681c governs.

Adverse action here

The federal sequence applies unchanged: pre-adverse action notice with a copy of the report and the summary of rights, a reasonable opportunity to dispute, then the adverse action notice with the agency’s details and a dispute route. The FCRA article sets it out in full.

Mississippi adds nothing to that sequence for a criminal-history report. There is no state pre-request notice, no state lookback rule and no state adverse-action notice duty. The federal sequence is the whole of the procedural requirement, and the state overlay is substantive rather than procedural.

Two substantive provisions change what a Mississippi adverse action can rest on. Section 99-19-71(3) provides that "The effect of the expunction order shall be to restore the person, in the contemplation of the law, to the status he occupied before any arrest or indictment for which convicted", and that the person may not afterwards be held "guilty of perjury or to have otherwise given a false statement by reason of his failure to recite or acknowledge such arrest, indictment or conviction" except as to the first-offender question. A candidate who denies a conviction that has been expunged is therefore not making a false statement, and an adverse action letter that treats the denial as dishonesty is resting on something the section does not support.

The same subsection leaves the employer's question open, and the two halves have to be read together. An employer may ask "if the employee has had an order of expunction entered on his behalf", so a truthful answer to that question is available and the person cannot be penalized for giving it. What the person cannot be penalized for is failing to volunteer the underlying conviction, because the section restores the status they held before it.

A positive cannabis test is a lawful basis for adverse action here, and the Act says so without qualification. Section 41-137-13 permits an employer to refuse to hire or to discipline "as a result, in whole or in part, of that individual's medical use of medical cannabis, regardless of the individual's impairment or lack of impairment", Section 41-137-19 permits discipline "for ingesting medical cannabis in the workplace or for working while under the influence", and Section 41-137-13 preserves the employer's ability to establish and enforce a drug-testing policy. A registry card is not an accommodation request in Mississippi and does not have to be treated as one.

One further consequence follows from the repository route. Because the Criminal Information Center keeps a nonpublic record of every expunction, and because DPS releases state check results to a third party only on the subject's signed authorization naming that recipient, a Mississippi dispute is often a question about which record was reached and on whose authorization rather than about what the record says. The file should be able to show that.

Screening in Mississippi: what your process needs

• Do not plan a Mississippi process around a ban-the-box rule. There is none in either sector, twenty-two bills have failed since 2019, and record inquiry is governed by the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act alone.
• Do not treat a registry card as a protected status. Section 41-137-13 disclaims any duty to permit, accommodate or allow medical use, permits adverse action for medical use "regardless of the individual's impairment or lack of impairment", and preserves drug-testing policies.
• Do not assume a positive test has to be tied to impairment. The Act separates the two in terms, and Section 41-137-19 permits discipline for ingesting in the workplace or working under the influence without requiring proof of either.
• Remember that an employee who tested positive cannot sue the employer over it on the strength of the cannabis chapter. Section 41-137-15 provides that nothing in the chapter "shall be construed as to create a private right of action by an employee against an employer", and no employment protection was written into the Act.
• Do not rely on the cannabis chapter to reach an employer either. Section 41-137-15 protects an employer from being "penalized or denied any benefit under state law for enrolling, leasing to or employing a cardholder", which is a shield for the employer rather than a duty towards the employee.
• Check the expunction question before treating a denial as dishonesty. Section 99-19-71(3) restores the person to the status they held before the conviction and protects them from a false-statement charge for not acknowledging it, except in later first-offender proceedings.
• Do ask the expunction question if it matters to the role, because the statute leaves it open. The same subsection provides that "The existence of an order of expunction shall not preclude an employer from asking a prospective employee if the employee has had an order of expunction entered on his behalf."
• Do not expect an expunction to have removed the record from the state. The Criminal Information Center retains "a nonpublic record thereof" after the order is entered, and DPS describes its own process as removing offenses from the rap sheet the repository publishes.
• Check the waiting period against the current version. The felony waiting period is three years following the 2026 amendment, not five, and one felony expunction is available only where the conviction falls outside twelve excluded categories.
• Read Section 99-19-71(2)(a) before advising on eligibility. The excluded categories include crimes of violence, first degree arson, trafficking in controlled substances, third and subsequent driving under the influence, felon in possession of a firearm, failure to register as a sex offender, voyeurism, witness intimidation, abuse or exploitation of a vulnerable person, embezzlement, and since 2026 procuring and promoting prostitution.
• Route the state check through the subject. DPS releases results to a third party only where the signed authorization names that third party and its mailing address, and it publishes a turnaround of up to 30 days, so a Mississippi state check is not an instant product.
• Do not assume the repository is open to a screening firm. No provision was read that opens the Criminal Information Center to a consumer reporting agency ordering on an employer's behalf, and the page does not assert one. Confirm the access route before promising a state check.
• Scope a court search by court and district rather than by county. Mississippi runs 23 Circuit Court districts and 20 Chancery Court districts over the same counties, and the district a felony sits in is not the district a family or probate matter sits in.
• Cover the lower courts as well. Misdemeanors sit with 24 County Courts, 82 Justice Courts and 239 Municipal Courts, and a search that covers only the circuit file will miss them.
• Apply the Fresh Start Act to licensed occupations. No disqualification may rest "solely or in part" on a prior conviction unless the crime "directly relates to the duties and responsibilities for the licensed occupation", and the licensing authority carries the burden of proving the relationship.
• Use the petition route where a license decision is adverse. An individual may petition a licensing authority at any time for a determination of standing, the authority must reply within thirty days, and the fee is capped at $25.00.
• Do not rely on a Mississippi credit-check restriction. There is none, and no state notice duty attaches when a credit report is requested for employment purposes.
• Ask before you assume on salary history. Mississippi does not prohibit the question, and the Equal Pay for Equal Work Act lists salary history among the factors that justify a pay differential.

Related states

• Louisiana. Louisiana bars a private employer from requesting or considering an arrest or charge that did not result in a conviction, with no age limit on the bar and no salary exemption attached to it, and it gives the applicant a right on written request to the background check information that was used. Its felony line turns on whether an offense carries death or imprisonment at hard labor rather than on a maximum sentence, and the section creating its judicial districts states that there are forty-one and then creates a forty-second in the same text.
• Tennessee. Tennessee sells its own criminal history to anyone: the Bureau of Investigation offers a "Tennessee Only" check at "$29" with "FINGERPRINTS NOT REQUIRED", while the nationwide product is $50 and does require them, so the state report on a named person is the cheaper and more open of the two and no employment purpose has to be established to buy it. The expunction paragraph every summary quotes is gone: Public Chapter 268 of 2025, Senate Bill 1055, rewrote § 40-32-101 as a definitions section and re-enacted the "never occurred" rule and the bar on collateral consequences at § 40-32-110(b) and (c), so a page citing § 40-32-101(g) for the effect of an expunction is citing a paragraph that no longer exists. The mechanism is deletion rather than sealing, which is what separates a Tennessee expunction from a screening file built before the order: § 40-32-110(a) entitles the petitioner "to have all public records of the expunged conviction destroyed in the manner set forth in this chapter", and the bureau describes its own practice as "At TBI, the charges are actually deleted from the defendant’s record" and "we do not ’seal’ records". The courts are 95 counties run through 32 judicial districts, and General Sessions, which sits in every county, is where a misdemeanor is decided whenever the defendant waives the grand jury and the jury, so the tier that holds most misdemeanor dispositions is not the circuit file.
• Missouri. Missouri made it unlawful to keep reporting an arrest, a pending indictment or a conviction once a pardon, an expungement or a no-conviction outcome is learned, and then required its Highway Patrol to give consumer reporting agencies the data to delete the drug-offense expungements its central repository performs automatically. Section 610.143.1 provides that records "shall no longer be reported if at any time after a conviction it is learned that a full pardon or expungement has been granted for that conviction, or at any time after an arrest or indictment it is learned that a conviction did not result", and the Attorney General enforces it with damages of not more than one thousand dollars per violation and an injunction available to any aggrieved consumer. The automatic side runs without a petition: § 610.141.3 requires the central repository to screen its database "on a rolling basis, but not less than once per week" and to expunge qualifying drug offenses as a matter of law, and § 610.141.11 feeds those deletions to consumer reporting agencies under a signed agreement. There is no separate state consumer-reporting act, so the overlay on a screening file runs through chapter 610 and chapter 43.

What we do

Mississippi is a state where the law is quiet and the repository is the story. There is no ban-the-box law in either sector and no state consumer reporting statute, so the screening rules are the federal ones; but the state does two things worth reading before a Mississippi process is designed. The Medical Cannabis Act of 2022 legalized cannabis for patients and then wrote the employment consequence out of the statute in terms, disclaiming any duty to accommodate, permitting adverse action for medical use "regardless of the individual's impairment or lack of impairment", preserving drug-testing policies and barring any right of action against an employer. And an expunction under § 99-19-71 is a status restoration rather than a bar on the question: the Criminal Information Center keeps a nonpublic record of the order, and the statute says in terms that the order "shall not preclude an employer from asking a prospective employee if the employee has had an order of expunction entered on his behalf". The courts decide how a search routes, with 23 Circuit Court districts and 20 Chancery Court districts over the same counties and 24 County, 82 Justice and 239 Municipal Courts beneath them. Our Mississippi work keeps the cannabis question and the expunction question apart from the record itself, checks the state check route through the subject's own authorization, and states which court produced what. If your current process assumes a state that protects cannabis patients, or assumes an expunction shuts the file, this is where that shows.

Sources

• Miss. Code § 99-19-71, expunction of criminal record, as amended by HB 1546 (2026 Reg. Sess.), read in the enrolled "As Sent to Governor" text on billstatus.ls.state.ms.us
• Mississippi Medical Cannabis Act, SB 2095 (2022 Reg. Sess.), "As Sent to Governor", read in full, including Sections 5, 7, 8 and 10 at §§ 41-137-9, -13, -15 and -19
• Miss. Code § 41-137-39, medical cannabis establishment background checks, as amended by SB 2857 (2024 Reg. Sess.)
• Miss. Code § 41-137-3, -5, -11, -17, -23, -35 and -37, as amended by SB 2748 (2025 Reg. Sess.), read for the section-number derivation recorded in the research file
• Fresh Start Act of 2019, SB 2781 (2019 Reg. Sess.), "As Sent to Governor", approved 16 April 2019, read in full
• Mississippi Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, HB 770 (2022 Reg. Sess.), "As Sent to Governor", approved 20 April 2022, read in full
• Miss. Code § 99-15-107, pretrial intervention eligibility, as amended by SB 2552 (2021 Reg. Sess.)
• Report of All Measures, 2019 to 2026 Regular Sessions, the Legislature's own index of every measure introduced with its final action, read session by session for the ban-the-box, consumer reporting, credit report and adult-use cannabis findings
• Mississippi Department of Public Safety, Criminal Information Center, including the Special Processing and Applicant Processing divisions and the statutory basis at Miss. Code Ann. 45-27-5 and 45-27-7
• Mississippi Department of Public Safety, Release Background Authorization Form, the third-party release condition and the published 30-day turnaround
• Mississippi Judiciary, About the Courts, read through the Internet Archive capture 20260814171124, and the source of the 23 circuit and 20 chancery district counts
• Route note: the Mississippi Code of 1972 is published under license and served from a vendor host. The link both the Legislature and the Judiciary give for it, lexisnexis.com/hottopics/mscode/, redirects to a JavaScript application that cannot be read from this environment, and mscode.com is a squatted site that is not the code. Every Code section cited on this page was read instead in the enrolled bill that enacted or last amended it, on billstatus.ls.state.ms.us, with the strike and underline markup inspected so that struck text is not mistaken for current text. courts.ms.gov returned HTTP 500 on every path tried and was read through archive replay; the individual trial-court pages have no archived snapshots. sos.ms.gov returns HTTP 403. The Internet Archive CDX endpoint is unreachable from this environment, so captures were found through the availability API and read with the id_ modifier and --compressed. No search engine was used. No Mississippi case law was read.

Last reviewed 23 September 2026. This page is checked on a quarterly cycle, because state screening law changes every legislative session. Nothing here is legal advice; see the terms of use.