In July of last year, the Mississippi Supreme Court imposed new public defense requirements that mandated counties 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 Marshall Project reports. Yet despite the ruling, months later a judge found that in one county jail there were 44 people without lawyers who had spent an average of 223 days in jail. And broader reform seems elusive.  Despite initial momentum in the Mississippi Legislature this year, lawmakers eventually rejected a bill to authorize the development of new public defense guidelines for local officials.
The state requires that local governments bear almost the entire burden of creating, funding and managing indigent defense. So, in Mississippi’s legal system, criminal defendants may move through as many as three different court systems, each with its own system of public defense, as they go from arrest to a plea deal or trial verdict. The state, however, fails to evaluate or even monitor whether local governments and courts are providing lawyers to defendants who cannot afford them. Mississippi is one of only eight states that rely on local officials to fund and deliver almost all public defense for people facing trial, according to the Sixth Amendment Center, a Boston-based nonprofit research center that advises states about how to strengthen public defense. But even some of those other states with local indigent defense systems have created some oversight measures, including similarly rural states with conservative political leadership, said David Carroll, director of the center.