Mississippi’s failure to require inspections in jails bodes disaster, says the lawyer who oversaw jail and prison conditions for decades.
In 2017, state lawmakers stopped providing funds to the Mississippi Department of Health to carry out those inspections after a federal court stopped requiring such inspections under Gates v. Collier, the longtime lawsuit brought by state inmates.
Without those inspections, “there’s no check, there’s none,” said Jackson lawyer Ron Welch, who represented those inmates in Mississippi jails and prisons under the court order settling that case. “It’s giving sheriffs a free pass. They can do as they wish.”
He called county supervisors, who fund the sheriffs and jails, “willfully blind” accomplices.
An investigation by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting at Mississippi Today and The New York Times shows that in addition to this lack of inspections, there is a lack of oversight. No state regulator has the authority to fine a sheriff for endangering people in custody or for failing to train the staff who operate the jail.
David Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project, said this is a national problem as well. Unlike almost every other country, he said, the U.S. has “no independent oversight over what happens in prisons and jails.”
This lack of oversight contributes to the abuse of those held behind bars “that is entirely foreseeable,” he said. “Their lives are systematically devalued.”
After Mississippi stopped inspecting jails, allegations arose in 2020 that Noxubee County deputies coerced Elizabeth Layne Reed, a woman incarcerated at the jail, into having sex.
Her lawsuit said two deputies, Vance Phillips and Damon Clark, gave her a cellphone and other perks, including a sofa in her cell, so that she would have sexual encounters with them. She described the first encounters as taking place outside the jail, only to be followed by those in the interrogation room, in the evidence, even in her cell.
She said in an interview that she wanted the public to know what happened to her in the hope that others would come forward. “It made me terrified to trust anybody,” she said. “Women in jail and prison need to be protected.”
According to the lawsuit, the sheriff at the time, Terry Grassaree, knew all about his deputies’ “sexual contacts and shenanigans,” but did nothing to stop them. Instead, the lawsuit alleged, the sheriff “sexted” her and demanded that she use the phone the deputies had given her to send him “a continuous stream of explicit videos, photographs and texts” while she was in jail. She also alleged that Grassaree touched her in a “sexual manner.”
The lawsuit was settled for an undisclosed amount.
Grassaree is charged with bribery and lying to the FBI when he denied that he requested the nude photos and videos from Reed. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Juan Barnett, who chairs the Senate Corrections Committee, said he supports resumed funding for jail inspections to “help curb abuse. The more oversight, the better.”
Clay County Sheriff Eddie Scott, who serves on the executive board of the Mississippi Sheriffs’ Association, said he believes most sheriffs would support the return of state-funded inspections as long as they are reasonable. “We have to fight for our budgets to keep them up,” he said. “Oversight and reports have always helped me.”
Eight of Mississippi’s 82 sheriffs have jails that have been certified by the state Board on Law Enforcement Officer Standards and Training; the others haven’t been.
Scott said such certification reduces the cost of insurance and gives employees guidance on the best ways to run a jail.
He hopes to one day receive certification from the American Correctional Association, he said. “Getting state accredited puts me a leg up.”
Although Mississippi recently received a record $4 billion budget surplus, Welch said there’s no political will right now to aid those behind bars, despite the fact that Mississippi prides itself as being part of the Bible Belt.
“God taught us to love our neighbor,” he said. “The principle is ‘do not inflict needless pain on any person.’ That’s the heart of it.”
Donald Trump has not offered an endorsement in Mississippi’s Republican primary for lieutenant governor, but one of the candidates did have a recent fundraiser in what is essentially the former president’s home.
Incumbent Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who is being accused of being a closet Democrat by opponent Chris McDaniel, held a fundraiser earlier this month at the Mar-a-Lago resort, which is one of Trump’s more well-known properties and is also the property he now calls home.
In addition, Mar-a-Lago is the property raided by the FBI reportedly because of the former president’s alleged unwillingness to return classified documents.
In a statement to Mississippi Today, Casey Phillips, senior adviser to the Hosemann campaign, said, “Lt. Gov. Hosemann supports President Trump because his policies created higher wages, a growing economy, new jobs, low inflation, and a more secure border. We were happy to be invited to host a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago back in December and it turned out to be a great event.”
An invitation circulated on social media for the April 5 Mar-a-Lago Club fundraiser at Palm Beach, Florida, lists all members of Mississippi’s Republican congressional delegation on a host committee, though, sources say none actually attended the event. The invitation highlighted a photo of Hosemann and of the new state flag that in 2020 replaced the flag that contained the Confederate battle emblem in its design.
Hosemann supported the flag change. McDaniel opposed the change, saying it should be decided by popular vote.
Hosemann was photographed at the event being endorsed by George Colella of the Born to Ride for 45, which is a pro Trump motorcycle group. A Confederate battle flag is displayed on Colella’s biker vest.
On social media, Colella posted, “Born to Ride for 45 proudly endorses Lt. Gov. Hosemann. He has an amazing track record and (is) an asset to state of Mississippi.”
McDaniel, a conservative state senator from Jones County, unsuccessfully sought Trump’s endorsement in 2018 when he challenged U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, who the then-president did endorse.
A pre-president Trump did voice support for McDaniel in his 2014 U.S. Senate race against Thad Cochran.
“Chris McDaniel looks like he will win in Mississippi – great news and victory for Tea Party,” Trump proclaimed on social media.
McDaniel, of course, did lead Cochran in the Republican primary in 2014, but did not garner the majority needed to avoid a runoff. In the runoff, Cochran defeated McDaniel.
As darkness fell on San Francisco, a young Black woman named Charlotte Brown walked a block from her home on Filbert Street and took a seat on the “whites-only” horse-drawn streetcar. She and her family had moved to California from Maryland, a part of the city’s burgeoning Black middle class. Her father, James E. Brown, was an anti-slavery crusader and was a partner in the Black newspaper, Mirror of the Times.
When the conductor came to collect tickets, she handed him the ticket she had purchased, only for him to refuse to take it. “He replied that colored persons were not allowed to ride,” she later testified. “I told him I had been in the habit of riding ever since the cars had been running. I answered that I had a great ways to go and I was later than I ought to be.”
The conductor asked her several times to leave. Each time she refused. When a white woman objected to her presence, the conductor grabbed her by the arm and forced her off the streetcar. She boarded twice more with the same result and sued. Two years later, a jury awarded her the huge sum of $500 in her day (streetcar tickets were just 5 cents), and a judge ruled that barring passengers on the basis of race was illegal. He wrote in his ruling that he had no desire to “perpetuate a relic of barbarism.”
Brown’s victories paved the way for the official end of racial discrimination on streetcars in San Francisco and beyond.
Mississippi Today political reporters Bobby Harrison and Geoff Pender talk with veteran Rep. Tommy Reynolds, D-Water Valley, about the rules changes that occurred in the 1980s making the Mississippi House more democratic. As a young member of the House, Reynolds played a key role in writing those rules.
In this episode of Mississippi Stories, Mississippi Today Sales and Marketing Director Candi Richardson travels to Cleveland, Miss. during the Music Tourism Convention to catch up with Poplarville-natives Chapel Hart. The trio is comprised of sisters Danica and Devynn Hart along with their cousin Trea Swindle. They discuss their Golden Buzzer performance and experience on America’s Got Talent, their music influences, their upcoming album and more.
Chapel Hart captured the attention of the nation and gained an international following after they received the second Golden Buzzer in show history during their audition performance for America’s Got Talent in 2022. CMT selected Chapel Hart as one of several artists for their 2021 “Next Women of Country” campaign, which promotes new and upcoming female country music artists. The group has released two studio albums and seven singles.
Sarah Stripp is the managing director of Jackson-based nonprofit Springboard to Opportunities, which supports low-income Mississippians. During the water crisis, when families couldn’t rely on clean water from their own pipes, Stripp’s organization was giving households $150 a month to buy bottled water. The group is best known for its guaranteed income program, Magnolia Mother’s Trust. Stripp sat down with reporter Sara DiNatale to talk about her work and what the group’s learned entering its fifth year of the income program.
The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Sara DiNatale: Well, first off, if you could just tell me a little bit about your nonprofit, Springboard to Opportunities, and all of the types of things you do and the type of gaps that you try to help fill for women in Jackson?
Stripp: So we are an organization that works with families who live in federally subsidized housing, and provide programs and services to help them meet their goals. So subsidized housing, particularly in Mississippi is like 99%, headed by single women and about 99% of those families are Black.
So while technically, our mission is to reach families, and affordable housing, it tends to be Black mothers who are kind of like the main recipients of our work. We really started in 2013 as a resident-service provider. We were basically contracted by private developers to come and provide additional services to families in affordable housing. So that could be everything from providing housing stability, helping folks if they’re behind on rent and trying to figure out some different resources, or making sure that they’re able to keep up their apartments. Then, having things they need for that, too, like helping folks get childcare or providing after school programs, workforce support programs or different things like that.
And so we work really closely with community members themselves to actually tell us what it is that they need, as opposed to coming in and deciding for them what they need. Because we believe families know better than anybody else what it is that they need in order to thrive and meet their goals.
DiNatale: So, what do they need? And how has that turned into programs that you offer?
Stripp: As we would design programming, we would do that hand-in-hand with community members and do our best to make sure that it was lining up with what they were asking for. And at the same time, we also really recognize that programming can only do so much. And at the end of the day, if there’s not good policies to support families, nothing’s going to change.
It was through some of that work, and through conversations that we were having with families, where we kept hearing them say:‘You know, what I actually need to reach my goal is not like another program or another thing that I have to attend, right? It’s cash … Food stamps are only going to cover food. My housing voucher only covers housing. I also need diapers; I also need transportation; I also need childcare. I need all these other things. If I’m trying to do that, I need the freedom to be able to spend cash in the way that I see fit for me and my family, as opposed to in the way that a government voucher has decided I should spend it.’
So from that, we wanted to really honor our mission and who we are as an organization and said, ‘OK, so let’s figure out how we’re going to do that.’ So we started a small pilot in 2018, with 20 black mothers called the Magnolia Mother’s Trust, which was really the first guaranteed income program … that launched in the country.
DiNatale: So how does the program work and what did you see start to happen?
Stripp: We were working at that point (in 2018) with just 20 moms who received $1,000 a month for 12 months with no strings attached … to see what would happen. And just to kind of put it out there … When moms get money, they spend it to support their families.
Whether that was being able to go back to school or move to a higher paying job, moving out of affordable housing, being able to take their kids to see their grandfather for the first time or some families went down to the beach for the first time and were able to take vacations. One mom bought her son a tuba so that he could be in the marching band. (It was) these little things that moms have always wanted to provide for their kids.
We were able to get some really good traction from that early pilot. And then we were able to expand that in the next year to about 110 moms. Actually, each year since, we’ve had about 100 moms go through a cohort of getting $1,000 a month for 12 months. And then we’ve added in, in addition to that, a $1,000 deposit and in a 529 (college) savings account for their kids so that they’re having the opportunity to build some wealth for their children.
We also have this opportunity to make sure that the stories of our moms are being put out there. We knew nothing was going to be able to change at a federal or state policy level if we continue to operate with … whatever these kind of nasty narratives around moms who are on welfare, that they’re going to abuse the system or that they don’t know what they’re doing with their money.
DiNatale: What are some of the expectations that you had going into the pilot? Were those met, exceeded or different than what the actual outcome was? What did you really wind up learning?
Stripp: We didn’t have a whole lot of expectations, because we wanted to leave the doors open. We were really asking questions around: When you give moms cash do they have the breathing room and the space to be able to actually think about their goals and what they want to do?
They have time to step back and take some time to go back to school and work on the career that they really wanted, as opposed to running between three part-time jobs just trying to make ends meet … People are able to save some of this money and move out of affordable housing or move into a higher paying career.
I think everything got really complicated with the second cohort because COVID came in, and it changed everything. On top of COVID, we just kind of have these compounding crises – the water crisis – and folks losing jobs because of that, because they’ve had to stay home with their kids (when classes went remote online).
But at the same time, I think what we really have seen … particularly in the second, third, and now we’re just about to wrap up our fourth cohort, what’s come out and all of the different kinds of evaluations and pieces that we’ve done has been a really increased sense of parental efficacy. So, moms feeling like they’re able to be the moms that they want to be for the first time. It’s a really big growth in their own sense of agency and their own sense of self-confidence.
DiNatale: I know a report is coming out later this month that covers more deeply what you’ve learned through this process. But with that work done, and lessons learned, is the plan to continue this program?
Stripp: We’re committed to at least having one more cohort that will start later this fall. I think there might be some pieces that look a little bit different based on things that we’ve learned, but we’re still kind of fleshing out a lot of those details. We want to at least do it once more. What we had committed to, at the beginning, was five years.
Ultimately, what we know is that we are a drop in the bucket. We are providing something for a subset of moms here in Jackson. And that’s important, but it’s not enough. And even the length of the program that we’re able to do is not enough. And I think all of these pilots that we’re seeing, a lot of people are using (American Rescue Plan Act) funds and other things to be able to do these (types of programs) in different cities, that’s great. But again, it’s never going to be totally what we want to see.
Our goal has always been, and what we’ve always said from the beginning, was to actually change federal policy and be able to see something come out of this — where we are creating more cash and trust-based benefits for families as opposed to limited vouchers or a social safety net that’s really easy to fall through.
DiNatale: So your goal, really, is changing the way America treats welfare and assistance programs. With the situation of the Mississippi welfare scandal in mind – the alleged misuse of $77 million in TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) funds – have you seen the conversation change at all about welfare dollar use?
Stripp: I would say no, not on a community level. Before we actually started doing the Magnolia Mother’s Trust, we had done an ad before the welfare scandal…came out, and in about 2017, we did a paper with (public policy think tank) New America, and interviewed a lot of our moms to talk about TANF…And I think, at that point, that was when less than 2% of applications were even being seen. And when we talked to moms about TANF and welfare their response was always like, ‘Oh, I don’t even bother with that; it’s not even worth my time.’ They had either applied before or tired before and it just never made sense. So most of them felt so kind of disillusioned by the system to begin with.
DiNatale: What about state leadership? Has anyone responded to the idea of changing how assistance works?
Stripp: I would say in Mississippi, no. The players at the table who we know would be into this are into it, and the players who are not into it are not interested. The (Mississippi) Democratic Caucus has been really supportive. We had moms come and testify, like the TANF legislative hearings … We’ve tried to have some conversations with the Department of Human Services that haven’t really gone anywhere.
Jackie Robinson broke through the color barrier in Major League Baseball, becoming the first Black player in the 20th century.
Born in Cairo, Georgia, Robinson lettered in four sports at UCLA – football, basketball, baseball and track. After time in the military, he played for the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro Leagues. After his success there, Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey signed Robinson, and the legendary baseball player started for Montreal, where he integrated the International League.
In addition to his Hall of Fame career, he was active in the civil rights movement and became the first Black TV analyst in Major League Baseball and the first Black vice president of a major American corporation. In recognition of his achievements, Robinson was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. Major League Baseball has retired his number “42,” which became the title of the movie about his breakthrough.
Ken Burns’ four-hour documentary reveals that Robinson did more than just break the color barrier — he became a leader for equal rights for all Americans.
After granting the Holly Springs hospital a special designation aimed at helping small, rural hospitals stay afloat, the federal government is now “reviewing” Alliance Healthcare System’s status as such, the hospital CEO says.
The hang-up is the hospital’s proximity to Memphis, Tenn., about 50 miles away from Holly Springs.
Mississippi Today previously reported that the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services rescinded the hospital’s rural emergency hospital designation after State Health Officer Dr. Dan Edney said at a state board of health meeting that the federal government was “pulling” the designation mere days after awarding it to the hospital.
However, Edney expanded on his statement later to Mississippi Today and said that CMS made the hospital aware they need “further clarification.”
Alliance Healthcare System was named one of the country’s first rural emergency hospitals in March. The designation requires hospitals to end inpatient services and transfer patients in its emergency room to larger hospitals within 24 hours in exchange for higher reimbursement rates and monthly payments from the government.
The new designation is meant to ease financial stress for hospitals on the brink of closure.
Alliance CEO Dr. Kenneth Williams said there are differing definitions of “rural hospitals” among various federal organizations. He’s now trying to convince CMS that his hospital is truly rural, despite it being an hour drive to Memphis, Tenn.
“I firmly believe that it is no question that this is a rural community and a rural hospital,” he said.
He blames the confusion on how new the hospital category is.
Williams has been talking to representatives from CMS for the past week. He said he’s expecting a final answer within the next few days. As far as Williams is aware, the hospital is still considered a rural emergency hospital, unless CMS rules otherwise.
CMS did not respond to questions by press time.
The Holly Springs hospital has been consistently losing money for years, particularly since the pandemic, its leaders say.
And if the hospital can’t maintain rural emergency hospital status, the situation will be dire, Williams said.
Legislation awaiting Gov. Tate Reeves’ signature would set mandatory minimum sentences for carjacking and fleeing law enforcement – a move that criminal justice advocates say will increase the prison population and not help public safety.
FWD.us State Director Alesha Judkins said mandatory minimums add to the state’s growing prison population and limit judges from using discretion in sentencing.
“Mississippi is not in the position to handle a situation where we will be sending more people to prison for longer,” she said.
The state has the highest imprisonment rate in the nation and its rate is higher than some countries. Mississippi’s prison population has hovered above 19,000 for several months – numbers the state hasn’t seen since before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to data from the Department of Corrections.
Senate Bill 2101, proposed by Joey Fillingane, R-Sumrall, and passed by both chambers, would increase the current mandatory minimum prison sentence for carjacking from three to five years and the sentence for carjackings that result in serious injury or death from seven to 10 years.
The bill also sets minimum sentences for when people fail to stop and flee from law enforcement: a 10-year minimum for fleeing and operating a vehicle in a reckless manner, a five-year minimum for fleeing that results in injury and a seven-year minimum for fleeing that results in death.
Even without mandatory minimums, Mississippi is running out of space in its prisons, Judkins said. The entire prison system has a capacity of about 22,000, according to Department of Corrections records.
In January, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, announced three bills including SB 2101 that would set or raise minimum sentences. The other bills, which proposed minimum sentences for motor vehicle theft and receiving stolen property, did not pass.
Hosemann spokesperson Brittney Davis said the legislation was in response to incidents of violent crime.
“The legislation is intended to act as a deterrent by mandating a certain sentence or raising penalties,” she said in a Thursday statement. “While we are invested in issues like education, rehabilitation, and mental health, which prevent crime, Lt. Governor Hosemann also believes those who commit violent crimes should serve time.”
In a Jan. 5 interview with Supertalk, Hosemann said information he receives from the Administrative Office of Courts indicates that judges are suspending sentences for people convicted of carjacking, meaning the convicted would serve less than the mandatory minimum prison sentence.
Fillingane echoed this point about suspended sentences during a Jan. 26 Judiciary B Committee hearing. The senator said sentence suspensions are especially prevalent in the Jackson metro area.
“It’s basically a warning and I think the thought being this is such a violent type situation and it’s become so prevalent in this area that we don’t want judges to completely suspend the sentence,” he said.
Language in the bill specifies that minimum sentences cannot be reduced or suspended and that defendants would not be eligible for electronic monitoring or house arrest.
During committee meetings, Fillingane was asked about the basis and supporting data to justify the need for the bill. Sen. Angela Turner-Ford, D-West Point, asked how increasing the current carjacking minimum sentence would change judges’ ability to suspend sentences and deter crime. Fillingane said he didn’t have the answer.
“That’s the explanation I’ve been given,” he said.
Fillingane did not respond to a request for comment.
In January as the committee hearings were going on, State Public Defender Andre De Gruy fact checked claims Fillingane made in committee meetings by reviewing carjacking convictions for Hinds County.
He looked through four years worth of reports and found five carjacking convictions. From there, he looked up the cases in the Mississippi Electronic Courts system and found two cases with suspended sentences.
Half of all counties in the state aren’t on the electronic court system, so the ability to access case information for individuals charged with criminal charges such as carjackings in non-participating courts would need to be done in person.
Lawmakers haven’t specified what court information they reviewed to introduce the legislation. But De Gruy said if they were referring to the Administrative Office of Courts reports, it is possible to misinterpret them.
He noted that he tailored his search to carjacking convictions because the reports would include more dispositions such as dismissed and remanded cases for people who haven’t been convicted.
DeGruy said Wednesday that when the next Administrative Office of Courts report is available in July, he expects to see carjacking convictions and sentence suspensions for Hinds County to remain about the same.
Through a records request with MDOC, FWD.us found that as of July 2022, the average sentence statewide for carjacking was nearly 12 years and 17 years for armed carjacking – evidence that judges are sentencing more than the mandatory minimum.
While lawmakers have raised concern about judge’s ability to suspend sentences, suspension is something they are allowed to do through judicial discretion.
Criminal justice advocacy groups including FWD and conservative group Empower Mississippi have spoken out against the mandatory minimum bills and the effect they would have on discretion.
“This means the Legislature would be mandating a one-size-fits-all sentence instead of allowing local judges to consider the circumstances and perhaps, in some cases, issue a punishment that would be more effective and less expensive than prison,” Empower Senior Adviser Forest Thigpen said in a March 26 statement.
Judkins wants more people to consider other costs of incarceration, such as the amount taxpayers spend on the prison system and the impact on incarcerated people and their families.
Taxpayers spend over $360 million annually on the prison system, according to a November report by FWD.us. Mississippians also face longer prison sentences than the national average for a range of offenses.
Judkins said incarcerating people under mandatory minimums can affect people’s sense of hope and access to the opportunities like rehabilitative programs that make prisons safer for the people who live and work there, as well as help reduce recidivism.
Poor defendants in Mississippi are routinely jailed for months, and sometimes even years, without being appointed an attorney due to the state’s notoriously dysfunctional public defender system. The Mississippi Supreme Court now says this practice must end.
Across the state, defendants facing felony charges lose their appointed attorneys after their initial court appearances, where a judge rules whether they can be released from jail before trial. In many counties, defendants aren’t appointed new lawyers until they’re indicted, a process that can take years. Justice system reformers call this gap the “dead zone.”
In the Mississippi Delta’s Coahoma County, Duane Lake spent almost two years behind bars without bond and without an attorney while waiting to be indicted on triple murder charges following a brutal killing. After he was indicted, he spent four more years in jail before he was acquitted at trial in November 2021.
There are others like him, trapped in a system that leaves defendants who can’t afford their own attorneys with no advocate to ask a judge to reduce their bonds or dismiss their cases as they wait in jail to be indicted. Meanwhile, prosecutors face no deadlines to bring cases before a grand jury.
“There is no other state where a defendant can be sitting in jail without an attorney for months or years while charging decisions are made,” said David Carroll, executive director of the Sixth Amendment Center, which studies how states provide indigent criminal defense.
Several years ago, at the request of a task force appointed by the Mississippi Legislature, the Sixth Amendment Center evaluated the state’s indigent defense services. In a highly critical report, the group proposed a number of reforms, including stronger state oversight of how local governments provide public defenders.
The Legislature shelved the report and the task force’s recommendations, even as criminal justice reformers identified defendants like Lake who sat in jail for years facing charges that didn’t hold up.
Duane Lake stands for a portrait outside the abandoned Coahoma County Jail in Clarksdale, Mississippi on Jan. 10, 2022. He spent six years in jailfor a crime in didn’t commit. The case against him was dismissed. Credit: Rory Doyle/MCIR
But in February, a three-member committee of the Mississippi Supreme Court requested public comments on a proposed change to the state’s rules of criminal procedure. It would require that defendants who can’t afford their own attorneys be represented the entire time they’re awaiting indictment.
The Supreme Court approved the rule change Thursday. It takes effect in July.
“This landmark change in Mississippi’s public defense system marks the end of the dead zone and is a huge step toward a criminal legal system that doesn’t unfairly punish people who are unable to afford an attorney,” said Cliff Johnson, who as director of the MacArthur Justice Center’s Mississippi office has long argued for such a change.
But researchers like Pam Metzger, director of the Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center at Southern Methodist University in Texas, say simply requiring the assignment of an attorney will do little to improve legal representation for poor defendants.
“It’s giving you a warm body and briefcase,” she said of the rule. “But it doesn’t deal with what in my view is the real problem,” which is that people spend too long in jail before they’re indicted.
Current and former public defenders have also cautioned that Mississippi’s decentralized justice system will make it hard to implement the Supreme Court’s new rule.
The amended rule prevents an appointed attorney representing an indigent client at any stage of criminal proceedings from withdrawing until another attorney is appointed. Right now, this provision applies only after an indictment.
It was proposed in May by Russ Latino, who was then executive director of the conservative think tank Empower Mississippi. His request sat for nearly 10 months until the Supreme Court’s criminal procedure committee invited feedback and set a March 15 deadline for responses.
A raft of ideologically diverse legal activists, attorneys and policy advocates responded by urging the court to adopt the amendment.
“No just or useful purpose is served by allowing such incarceration without benefit of legal counsel,” wrote Brad Pigott, who served in the 1990s as one of Mississippi’s U.S. attorneys. “Certainly no legitimate law enforcement purpose is thereby served.”
‘We’ve Got People Languishing in Jail’
Across Mississippi, some people without attorneys have spent months or longer in jail waiting for an indictment.
After prisoners in eastern Mississippi’s Lauderdale County jail filed complaints, a federal judge ordered the county in 2016 to provide him with a list of all people held in jail without indictments and without lawyers.
“Something needs to be put in place to make sure someone doesn’t fall through the cracks in this way,” said U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves, according to an Associated Press story.
On the state’s Gulf Coast, an autistic teenager was arrested in 2018 on burglary charges and spent more than 270 days in jail because his family didn’t post a $10,000 bond. The charges were ultimately dropped after a grand jury declined to indict him.
The Wayne County Sheriff’s Department, in southeast Mississippi’s Pine Belt region, reported that 24 of 31 prisoners in the jail as of the end of September had not been indicted, including 13 who had been in jail 90 days or longer. Only six of these 13 had lawyers as of September, according to the report.
One person without a lawyer had been jailed for about six months awaiting indictment on a drug possession charge, according to the report.
Of those 13, only one is still in jail and hasn’t been indicted as of this week, said Kassie Coleman, the district attorney for Wayne County.
Gregory J. Weber, a part-time public defender in Madison County, said he sees delays with many cases, particularly drug charges.
“We’ve got people languishing in jail and nothing is being done,” Weber said in an interview before the Supreme Court acted. For defendants with a private attorney, “something usually is done about it. There is a bond reduction, or they get into drug court and they plead. So we’ve definitely got a problem with people falling through the cracks.”
Lawyers Aren’t Only Factor in Long Jail Stays
Even as Carroll, of the Sixth Amendment Center, called the change an important first step, he cautioned that because indigent defense is handled by local court systems, “the state still has no oversight function to make sure that the court rule gets implemented.”
The Sixth Amendment Center has found that in counties without full-time public defender’s offices — which is most of them — the payment structure discourages public defenders from doing extensive work on behalf of their clients.
In most counties, attorneys are paid a flat fee, no matter how many indigent clients they are assigned. That incentivizes attorneys to spend little time on indigent clients so they can take on those who can pay, the center argued.
Nor does the new rule spell out how defendants will be transferred between appointed counsel working for different court systems and different local government bodies. “I think it needs to be delineated much more clearly about when the handoff occurs and who is responsible for that person,” Weber said.
But better payment structures and effective administrative procedures won’t change a key factor in long jail terms: Prosecutors have unlimited time to indict and prosecute someone after they’ve been arrested.
“We’re really focused in Mississippi on the charging time,” said Metzger, who has studied this phase of criminal proceedings in courts across the country.
She said it would be more effective to institute deadlines for indictment, mandatory bail hearings and early disclosure of evidence.
Even when lawyers are appointed early on, such as in Yazoo County, defendants still spend months or years in jail.
Defense attorneys in the county have filed almost 100 motions since 2019 seeking to reduce bonds or dismiss charges. Many of those defendants had spent a year or more in jail while waiting to be indicted.
John Paul Thornton was arrested by Yazoo City police on Dec. 3, 2018, and charged with two counts of commercial burglary involving a local dollar store. Over a year later, Thornton was still in jail and had not been indicted.
Belinda Stevens, an attorney who works part time as a public defender in Yazoo County, filed a motion on Thornton’s behalf in January 2020, seeking a dismissal of the case and claiming that his constitutional right to a speedy trial had been denied. Stevens didn’t respond to requests for comment.
A month later, prosecutors dropped the case. A judge signed an order, and Thornton walked free the next day after 436 days in jail.
