Flashing blue lights sliced through the night on a lonely backroad in Alcorn County, Mississippi, back in 2006. Tameka Drummer, a Black mom of four from Memphis, got pulled over because her license plate had expired. The tag was sitting right there in the backseat, but when the officers searched the car they found less than two ounces of marijuana. That one traffic stop flipped her entire world upside down.
Tameka was born April 25, 1974, so she was only 32 when it happened. Her baby was just four years old. Fast-forward to April 18, 2008, and an Alcorn County judge handed her life in prison without parole. Court papers and the Mississippi Department of Corrections still list the main charge as simple possession of marijuana back then a felony that normally carried up to three years for a first-timer. Today she’s 51, still locked up at Central Mississippi Correctional Facility (MDOC #138477). Latest update was January 24, 2026. She’s already done almost eighteen years.
A tweet from X.
What nailed her with that life sentence was Mississippi’s “big habitual offender” law Section 99-19-83. Once you’ve got two prior felonies on your record and at least one of them counts as violent, the judge has zero wiggle room: life, no parole, end of story. Tameka’s priors were voluntary manslaughter from 1992 and aggravated assault from 1998, both out of Shelby County, Tennessee. Then came the Mississippi marijuana case that pushed her over the line. The Court of Appeals upheld everything in 2009.
Plain and simple, the law says it doesn’t matter how small the latest offense is if the priors check the boxes, you’re done. The Mississippi Center for Public Policy put it bluntly in 2020:
“We are not safer because Drummer is in prison for rest of her life.”
A lot has changed since then. Mississippi voters passed medical cannabis in 2020; dispensaries opened in 2022. These days a little bit of weed is usually just a misdemeanor. But the new rules don’t reach backward. The 2021 Earned Parole Eligibility Act gave parole chances to thousands of non-habitual inmates yet it specifically shut the door on people serving life under the habitual statutes.
In 2020 her family asked Governor Tate Reeves for clemency. His answer was basically,
“I don’t know all the facts, but I’m not considering pardoning her or anyone else right now.”
Nothing’s changed publicly since. Her sister Charisma Warren told Mississippi Today in 2021,
“Giving people life sentences for non-violent charges is just ridiculous… She could have had probation and been home by now.”
Supporters call the sentence straight-up draconian. They point out Mississippi’s sky-high incarceration rate and how Black folks get hit hardest. Advocacy groups say roughly eighty people most of them Black are doing life without parole for non-violent stuff under these same habitual rules, according to reporting from the Clarion Ledger and Mississippi Today. The Change.org petition has racked up tens of thousands of signatures begging Reeves to pardon her, grant clemency, or at least commute the sentence so she doesn’t die in there.
On the other side, defenders of the law say it’s there for a reason: keep repeat offenders, especially ones with violent history, off the streets. The governor’s office keeps stressing public safety and wants the earlier 2014 and 2021 reforms fully in place before touching anything else.
As weed laws keep loosening across the country, Tameka’s story just sits there like a stubborn reminder. One mother is still behind bars for something that wouldn’t even get her jail time today. Old “tough-on-crime” sentences don’t automatically update when the laws finally do and right now she’s paying the price for all of it.
