Forget “the Hospitality State” and “Birthplace of America’s Music:” DeSoto County DA’s billboard subverts conventional welcome sign

Travelers entering Mississippi on southbound I-55 from the Memphis metropolitan area now receive a different kind of welcome—one directed not at tourists or commuters but at potential criminals.

It is, in many ways, a sign of the times: Dispensing with hospitality in favor of a threatening message, in this case, that convicted criminals are subject to being shot to death by the state.

Though criminals are the intended targets, the wording of the message could also prompt others to think twice when entering the state.

Mississippi has authorized execution by firing squad since 2018, when state lawmakers added the method to the Mississippi Code as a backup to lethal injection. In the seven years since, the state has not used it once. Yet DeSoto County District Attorney Matthew Barton is now advertising it on a public billboard.

Barton, the first Republican district attorney in DeSoto County’s history, announced the billboard this week. Its text reads: “Welcome to Mississippi. Where the firing squad is legal. Think twice.” Barton has framed the campaign as a deterrent message directed at people considering crossing the Mississippi-Tennessee state line to commit crimes in DeSoto County, the state’s third most populous county and a Memphis suburb.

It is not clear who paid for the billboard, whether it was the DA’s office or a political campaign. Barton’s office did not return phone calls or respond to messages through its Facebook page.

The Mississippi reality the billboard claims to reflect is more complicated than the slogan suggests.

For starters, the Supreme Court has ruled that it is unconstitutional to impose the death penalty for any offense other than homicide.

Mississippi is one of five U.S. states that currently authorize the firing squad as a method of execution. The others are Idaho, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah. Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah authorize the method only as a backup if lethal injection is unavailable or has been ruled unconstitutional. South Carolina authorizes it as one of three methods that death row inmates may select. In March 2025, Idaho became the first state to designate the firing squad as the primary execution method. No prisoner has been executed by firing squad in Mississippi at any point in the state’s history.

The most recent firing squad executions in the United States have all occurred in South Carolina. Brad Sigmon was executed on March 7, 2025, the first U.S. firing squad execution in 15 years. Mikal Mahdi followed on April 11, 2025. Stephen Corey Bryant was the third, on Nov. 14, 2025. The Mahdi execution went wrong. An autopsy completed after the execution found that the three shooters missed the inmate’s heart, with rounds striking his liver and other internal organs while his heart continued beating. Mahdi’s lawyers say he died of internal bleeding over a period that exceeded the 10 to 15 seconds of expected pain South Carolina’s Supreme Court had cited in upholding the method’s constitutionality. The South Carolina court had qualified that assurance with the phrase “unless there is a massive botch.” Mahdi’s lawyers say the autopsy documents a massive botch.

Barton’s billboard arrives two weeks after the U.S. Department of Justice announced on April 24 that the federal government will authorize execution by firing squad as a method available for federal capital cases, the first such authorization in the federal system’s history. Three people currently sit on federal death row: Dylann Roof, who killed nine Black parishioners at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston in 2015; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing; and Robert Bowers, convicted in the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting. The federal authorization signals that firing squad is being normalized as an execution method in U.S. policy discourse, which is also reflected in a Mississippi DA’s choice to make it the center of a public deterrent campaign.

Mississippi has executed 23 people since reinstating capital punishment in 1976, all by lethal injection. The state has not carried out an execution by any method since 2022. There are currently 36 people on Mississippi’s death row at the State Penitentiary at Parchman. Under current Mississippi law, none of them can be executed by firing squad unless the state demonstrates that lethal injection is unavailable or has been held unconstitutional. The billboard’s implicit claim of imminent firing squad use is not supported by any pending Mississippi execution, any pending challenge to lethal injection in the state, or any announced policy change by Mississippi authorities.

Barton’s office did not respond to questions about whether the campaign was coordinated with the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office, the Governor’s Office or the Mississippi Department of Corrections; whether the office is advocating that Mississippi actually use the firing squad in current or future capital cases; or how the office assesses the deterrent value of execution by firing squad relative to execution by lethal injection. The Mississippi Attorney General’s Office and the Mississippi Department of Corrections likewise did not respond to similar requests for comment.

State Sen. Theresa Gillespie Isom, a Democrat who represents DeSoto and Tunica counties as part of District 2, told The Mississippi Independent that she has not heard from many constituents about the billboard.

“So far people are not saying much,” Isom told The Mississippi Independent. The one constituent comment she had received expressed agreement with the billboard’s deterrent framing. Isom’s November 2025 special-election victory helped break the Republican supermajority in the Mississippi Senate and made her the first African American and the first woman to represent DeSoto County in the upper chamber.

Asked how she reads the alignment between Mississippi’s 2018 firing-squad authorization and the federal Department of Justice’s late-April 2026 decision to authorize the method at the federal level, Isom placed both developments inside what she described as the broader direction of the current Mississippi legislative session. “When we were in session, bills were presented that took crimes that had minimal sentences and increased them,” she said. “This climate we are in right now has no or little room for humanity.”

Barton took office in January 2024 as the first Republican district attorney in DeSoto County’s history, after defeating Robert Morris III in the 2023 Republican primary and running unopposed in the general election. His official biography identifies him as a member of the Federalist Society, the Mississippi Bar, the Mississippi Prosecutor’s Association and the National Rifle Association. His campaign foregrounded what he called a tough, conservative agenda and an intent to stem the flow of crime from north of the Mississippi-Tennessee state line. The billboard campaign sits inside that framing. Mississippi’s death penalty status, its execution methods and the federal DOJ’s recent firing-squad authorization are not subjects on which a local district attorney holds operational authority. Decisions about which method to use in a Mississippi execution rest with the Mississippi Department of Corrections under statutory authority. Decisions about whether to seek the death penalty in a Mississippi capital case rest with the district attorney prosecuting it.

Barton has not announced an intention to seek the death penalty in any specific DeSoto County case using firing squad as the requested method. Nor has he announced coordination with Mississippi Department of Corrections on protocols for an execution Mississippi has authorized but not yet carried out.

---

Image: DeSoto DA’s billboard (via the office’s Facebook page)