The former mayor of Mississippi's capital city and the former City Council president have pleaded guilty in a bribery scheme one week before they were set to face trial.

Former Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba and former Jackson City Council President Aaron Banks pleaded guilty Monday to one count of conspiracy. Their pleas came after Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens pleaded guilty last week and resigned. All three are Democrats.

Two other people — Angelique Lee, the Democratic former vice president of the Jackson City Council, and Sherik Marve Smith, a businessman and relative of Owens — had already pleaded guilty to bribery charges.

A November 2024 indictment accused Owens of taking at least $115,000 from two FBI agents posing as real estate developers and facilitating more than $80,000 in bribe payments to Banks, Lumumba and Lee in exchange for their help greenlighting a development project.

Lumumba, Banks and Owens could be sentenced to up to five years in prison. Their sentencing hearings are set for Oct. 15.

Lumumba, who previously called the charges a political prosecution, lost his reelection bid last year. His lawyers did not immediately respond to The Associated Press' requests for comment.

The National Conference of Black Lawyers, which has supported Lumumbat throughout his prosecution, has raised concerns about whether the FBI and prosecutors unjustly targeted Black elected officials.

"Our history tells us that it is necessary for us to have a very healthy skepticism about who, how and why certain people, certain geographical areas are focused upon," said Mawuli Davis, an attorney with the NCBL. "We've never not been targeted."

Davis said the NCBL intends to attend Lumumba's sentencing hearing and advocate for the judge to consider Lumumba's contributions to the community.

Banks' lawyer declined to comment.

Malik Beasley's lawyer said the indicted former NBA star "wants to move on with his life" after pleading not guilty Wednesday to charges that he altered his play in certain games in 2024 to enrich sports bettors and ease his own debts.

Beasley, the latest big name caught up in a sweeping federal gambling investigation, said little at his arraignment in Brooklyn federal court. He answered a judge's questions with "yes, your honor" but let his lawyer, Jason Goldman, enter his plea on his behalf.

Afterward, the 6-foot-4 (1.92 meter) shooting guard stood quietly as Goldman spoke to reporters outside the courthouse, demurring when one asked if he had anything to say to his fans. Beasley, who played for six NBA teams in nine years, missed the most recent season because he was under investigation. Instead, he played for a Puerto Rican team co-owned by the rapper Bad Bunny.

"He looks forward to fighting. He's fought every day," Goldman said. "He's presumed innocent and that has to mean something still, obviously."

Beasley, 29, and sports agent Paolo Zamorano, who also pleaded not guilty on Wednesday, were among six people charged in an indictment unsealed this week.

They are the newest defendants in a gambling sweep that has netted more than three dozen arrests, including former Miami Heat star Terry Rozier, who was accused of conspiring with friends to help them win bets, and Basketball Hall of Famer Chauncey Billups, who was accused of conspiring to fix high-stakes poker games.

Zamorano, 39, formerly represented another co-defendant, ex-NBA player Ed Davis, who had loaned money to Beasley and is accused of acting as his "gatekeeper" in the alleged scheme.

"We look forward to our day in court," Zamorano's lawyer, Kenneth Breen, told reporters.

Beasley and Zamorano were both released on bond. They're due back in court for a status conference on Aug. 6. Beasley is accused of fixing or trying to fix his performance in at least four games while playing for the Milwaukee Bucks in 2024 by under or overperforming bookmakers' expectations. In exchange, the indictment said, the bettors bribed Beasley and his debts to Davis were reduced or eliminated.

"Only way you can beat Vegas is sports betting," Davis told Beasley in a Jan. 26, 2024, text message, according to the indictment. "Everything else they got the edge."

In one example, according to the indictment, Beasley told Davis that he would try to outperform the 3.5 line that sportsbooks had set for his rebound total in Milwaukee's game against the Los Angeles Clippers on March 10, 2024.

With a second left, and the Bucks up by seven points, Beasley challenged a Clippers shot and dashed past four players to grab his fourth rebound and securing a win for the bettors as the horn sounded.

One bettor made a $3,252 profit on a $2,838 wager, the indictment said, and another made a $2,107 profit on wagers totaling $2,400. Other bettors missed out and lost money, mistakenly placing wagers on Beasley to underperform the rebound total because of an apparent miscommunication, the indictment said.

"What's funny is after he got it he had a big sigh of relief," a co-conspirator said in a text message, according to the indictment.

Beasley borrowed money from Davis, a former teammate, after racking up millions of dollars in gambling losses. His widely reported financial problems include disputes with a Detroit landlord, a Milwaukee barber and a Minnesota dentist. A 2025 lawsuit from a sports marketing agency resulted in a $1 million default judgment against him.

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that states can count ballots that arrive after Election Day, a persistent target of President Donald Trump.

The 5-4 decision rejected a Republican-led attack on laws in more than half the states and the District of Columbia that permit mailed ballots to arrive and be counted some number of days after the election, provided they are postmarked by Election Day. The outcome spares officials the headache of changing their ballot rules just a few months before the 2026 midterm congressional elections.

In just over half those states, the more forgiving deadlines apply only to ballots cast by military and overseas voters.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the court's majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the three liberal justices.

Federal laws setting a single Election Day "leave open when those votes must be received," Barrett wrote.

Congress could change the law, she said. "If varied deadlines for ballot receipt similarly call for a national solution, the American people must choose it through their elected representatives," Barrett wrote.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the dissent for four justices. "Not only is today's decision inconsistent with statutory text, legal context, historical practice, and precedent; it also threatens to produce lamentable consequences," Alito wrote. "The majority's holding spawns a slurry of troubling election-law questions and risks further undermining Americans' confidence in election integrity."

The legal challenge was part of Trump's broader attack on most mail balloting, which he has said breeds fraud despite strong evidence to the contrary and years of experience in numerous states. Trump has repeatedly claimed that his loss to Joe Biden in 2020 resulted from fraud even though more than 60 court decisions and his own attorney general said that argument had no merit.

Trump called the court ruling a "tremendous loss" and renewed his call for Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which has made it through the House of Representatives but not the Senate.

The court heard arguments in March in a case from Mississippi pitting the state against Trump's Republican administration and the Republican and Libertarian parties. At issue was whether federal law sets a single Election Day that requires ballots to be both cast by voters and received by state officials.

The federal appeals court in New Orleans struck down a Mississippi law allowing ballots to be counted if they arrive within five business days of the election and are postmarked by Election Day.

The outcome is a "sigh of relief" for a lot of election administrators, said Stephen Richer, a Republican and the former top election administrator in Arizona's Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix.

A ruling in favor of the Republican National Committee "would have created a whole host of administrative challenges for the affected states," said Richer, who is now a legal fellow at the Cato Institute.