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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.
The state’s highest court approved a mandate on Thursday that criminal defendants who cannot afford their own attorney must always have one before an indictment.
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 are not appointed new lawyers until they are 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 cannot 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.
Click here to view the Mississippi Supreme Court’s April 13, 2023, decision.
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