This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for The Marshall Project’s Jackson newsletter, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook.
A little over a year ago, Michael Ardizone complained to jail officials in Pike County, Mississippi, that he’d been locked up for more than a year with no attorney and no indictment on his drug possession case.
“I feel that I am being denied my right to legal counsel,” Ardizone wrote in April 2023, according to documents he later filed in federal court in an attempt to get out of jail.
A jail official hand-wrote a brief response: “You will receive counsel once indicted. If you want to see one sooner, you’ll have to hire one.”
Two months later, in July, the Mississippi Supreme Court imposed new public defense requirements. In all 82 counties, people like Ardizone could no longer sit in jail without a lawyer even if they hadn’t been indicted, the court said. Instead, counties had 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.
Yet Ardizone remained in jail without a lawyer for six more months. He was indicted in November and was finally provided legal counsel in January. He has pleaded not guilty.
In a complaint to jail officials in Pike County, Michael Ardizone wrote, “I feel that I am being denied my right to legal counsel.” In response, a jail official wrote, “You will receive counsel once indicted. … If you want to see one sooner, you’ll have to hire one.” Photo courtesy U.S. District Court
Then, in February, Circuit Judge Michael Taylor found that the Pike County Jail was full of more people like Ardizone. After a review of jail records, Taylor appointed attorneys for 44 people without lawyers. The average time in jail for those defendants was 223 days. Three had been locked up for more than a year and 23 for more than six months, according to analysis by
Read original article by clicking here.