The Mississippi Supreme Court has taken a half-measure to try to resolve the inequity that poor defendants in this state face when they are locked up and awaiting trial.
Last week, the high court approved a mandate requiring that indigent defendants be provided legal counsel every step of the way, from arrest through trial.
The change is supposed to put a stop to the situation in which defendants languish in jail, waiting sometimes years for their cases to come to trial, with no legal representation to try to speed things along. The situation is bad enough for those who are guilty of the crimes for which they have been charged. It is intolerable for those who are innocent.
Under the old rules, indigent defendants would have a court-appointed attorney assigned to represent them at an initial hearing, at which a judge decides on whether they can be released from jail awaiting trial and what bond or other guarantee is necessary to ensure that they don’t flee. After that, in many counties according to the reporting of the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal in Tupelo, the legal representation ends until the defendants are indicted by a grand jury.
During this so-called “dead zone,” these defendants, if they can’t make or aren’t eligible for bond, are at the mercy of the prosecutor’s timetable. If the prosecutor is slammed with other work or just not in a big hurry, the accused just waits behind bars. There’s no attorney to ask the judge to reconsider the bond or to dismiss the case if it drags on without activity for an inordinately long period of time.
Although this is progress, an even more equitable change would be to create a statewide public defender system, just as we have a statewide system of prosecutors.
In most of Mississippi, the criminal justice playing field is not level. Prosecutors, starting with elected district attorneys, have the staff and other resources to try to win convictions, and the state picks up the tab. Meanwhile public defenders, who are funded locally, are often assigned more cases than they can sufficiently handle, are underpaid for the work and are disincentivized from spending much time or money trying to prove their clients’ innocence. There are a few counties that have established their own public defenders’ offices, but most counties, to save money, outsource the work.
Until Mississippi puts as much resources into defending the accused as it puts into convicting them, the criminal justice system will be tilted against those who can’t afford their own attorneys. Even with the new rules, they are more likely to be denied their right to a speedy trial, more likely to be convicted and more likely to draw a harsher sentence.
The new rules will lessen the imbalance, but it will take more than those changes to eliminate it.
