Last year, Empower Mississippi filed a motion with the Mississippi Supreme Court to change the procedure for appointing public defenders. The goal of the motion was to ensure that criminal defendants had continuity of representation to defend their rights throughout criminal proceedings. Today, the Court adopted new language for Mississippi Rule of Criminal Procedure 7.2 to do just that.
Empower’s motion was supported by a wide range of both in-state and national organizations, including:
The Office of the State Public Defender University of Mississippi School of Law Mississippi College School of Law The Sixth Amendment Center Cato Institute Gideon’s Promise FWD.Us
The U.S. Supreme Court has long recognized that the 6th Amendment affords a criminal defendant the right to effective assistance of counsel, and that this right is a gateway to other constitutional rights meant to ensure that people accused of crimes receive fair process.
States are entrusted under the Constitution to make attorneys available to defendants. Most states manage public defenders through a central office. Mississippi is one of a handful of states that handles the appointment of public defenders at the local level, with individual judges assigning cases to attorneys.
Very frequently, this system results in a gap counsel known as “the dead zone.” What happens is that one attorney is appointed to represent a defendant for a preliminary hearing and then another attorney is appointed before trial. In effect, this means that there is a broad period where defendants have no counsel to protest excessive bail or move a case along to trial.
The end result is thousands of people sitting in local jails, often upwards of a year, awaiting indictment. The MacArthur Justice Center, which has conducted extensive record requests on Mississippi’s jails, said that based on their findings, 2,716 detainees out of 5,800 people in Mississippi county jails had been there for more than 90 days. “More than 1,000 have been detained for at least nine months, and 731 have been stuck in county jail for over a year,” according to MacArthur.
In some cases, people who could not afford an attorney or assigned bail,
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