Thread by @CalesMcGinnis

The sixth amendment guarantees the rights of criminal defendants.

But in Mississippi low income defendants are routinely jailed for months, sometimes years, without legal representation because of Mississippi’s dysfunctional public defender system.

🧵 #SaveMississippi

In 2022, the 2,850 local jails scattered across the country held about 658,000 people on any given day.

Hundreds of thousands of people are detained in jails every year solely because they’re unable to pay bail.

vera.org/news/u-s-jails…

Most states manage public defenders through a central office. Mississippi is one of 5 states that manages the appointment of public defenders at the local level, with individual judges assigning cases to attorneys.

Many defendants lose their appointed attorneys after their… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Without representation, defendants are unable to ask a judge to reduce their bonds or dismiss their trial.

Prosecutors are not given deadlines to bring cases before a grand jury, leaving defendants sitting in jail, sometimes for years, waiting to be indicted.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

In 2016, a federal judge ordered Lauderdale County officials to make a list of inmates who did not have lawyers.

The order by U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves came in a hearing for inmate Maurice Blackshear, who was jailed for months without an indictment or a lawyer after he… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

In 2018, an autistic teenager from the Gulf Coast was arrested on burglary charges and spent more than 270 days in jail because his family didn’t post a $10,000 bond.

The charges were ultimately dropped after a grand jury declined to indict him.

themarshallproject.org/2023/04/14/mis…

Last week, the Mississippi Supreme Court approved a mandate that criminal defendants who cannot afford their own attorney must be continuously represented before an indictment.

courts.ms.gov/research/rules…

While this is an important first step, current and former public defenders have cautioned that Mississippi’s decentralized justice system will make it hard to implement the Supreme Court’s new rule.

The amended rule prevents an appointed attorney representing an indigent client… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

In most Mississippi counties, attorneys are paid a flat fee, no matter how many indigent clients they are assigned.

The Sixth Amendment Center argues that this incentivizes lawyers to spend little time on indigent clients so they can take on those who can pay.

Pam Metzger, director of the Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center at Southern Methodist University in Texas, says that simply requiring the assignment of an attorney will do little to improve legal representation for low income defendants.

Metzger who has studied this phase of… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

In Mississippi, Metzger says they are really focused on charging time since state law gives prosecutors unlimited time to indict someone after they’ve been arrested.

Even when lawyers are appointed early on, like in Yazoo County, Mississippi; defendants still spend months to… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

In 2022, the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office reported that 24 of 31 prisoners in the jail as of the end of September had not been indicted.

This included 13 who had been there 90 days or longer. Only six of these 13 people had lawyers as September 2022.

One person had been in… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

In January 2022, the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Mississippi School of Law released a comprehensive report identifying more than 5,800 people incarcerated in Mississippi’s county jails.

2,716 of those detainees have been in jail longer than… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…