Innocent until proven guilty. That is a principle supposedly embedded into the legal fabric of this nation.
In Mississippi, however, it is questionable as to whether the majority of its citizens — and the lawmakers who represent them — truly believe it. They seem to operate more along the idea of guilty until proven innocent, at least when it comes to those who are accused of crimes and are of meager financial means.
The disparity between the public resources put into convicting indigent defendants and what’s put into defending them exemplifies how the justice system works differently for the poor.
Mississippi has a well-funded, well-coordinated system of district attorneys to handle prosecutions. On the defense side, though, it is a lowly paid hodgepodge of mostly court-appointed lawyers. Efforts to create a statewide system of public defenders has only been successful in dealing with those accused of capital crimes, which carry the death penalty, or the appeals of those convicted of non-capital felonies.
At the pre-trial stage in non-capital cases, the quality and timeliness of counsel for the accused hinges on how seriously a county takes its constitutional responsibility to ensure a defendant receives due process. As The Marshall Project recently reported, some counties don’t take the obligation seriously at all, even ignoring dictates imposed just last year by the state Supreme Court that were designed to ensure the accused don’t languish in jails, waiting to see whether the criminal justice system believes there is enough evidence to take them to trial.
According to the Supreme Court rules, adopted in July 2023, counties are required to provide free legal representation to poor defendants shortly after an arrest and throughout the time spent waiting for an indictment from a grand jury. The reasoning is that if there is no attorney working early in the process on the accused person’s behalf, no one in the court system is going to feel compelled to speedily present the evidence to a grand jury and get the process moving along toward conviction, acquittal or dismissal of the case.
The Marshall Project reported on one county, Pike, in which the situation was especially egregious. There, a local circuit judge discovered, after reviewing jail records, that there were at least 44 people being held on criminal charges but had yet to be appointed an attorney. The average time in jail for those defendants was 223 days, or roughly seven months. Three had been locked up without an attorney for more than a year, one of them for almost 600 days.
Although Pike County might be the extreme, the problem of indigent defendants going unrepresented for inordinately long periods of time is reportedly widespread in Mississippi. And the Legislature does not appear to be overly concerned. During the recently completed 2024 session, even the most modest reforms to the public defender system got nowhere. A bill to just exempt public defenders from the fees required to access the Mississippi Electronic Courts system — an exemption already granted to prosecutors — failed.
A more ambitious bill, which would have authorized the state public defender to establish performance standards for local public defenders, was stymied by a state senator from Northeast Mississippi who has done indigent defense work, the Marshall Project reported. He apparently didn’t like the idea of the state telling counties how to operate their public defense systems, since it’s the counties who pay for it all.
That’s the crux of the problem. Mississippi is one of only eight states that rely on local governments to provide and fund legal counsel for defendants who can’t afford an attorney.
This should be a state responsibility, just like the prosecution is.
