By Caleb Bedillion for The Marshall Project.
Broadcast version by Danielle Smith for Mississippi News Connection reporting for the Marshall Project-Public News Service Collaboration

Three months after Mississippi's Supreme Court directed judges in the state to ensure that poor criminal defendants always have a lawyer as they wait to be indicted, one of those justices acknowledged that the rule isn't being widely followed.

"We know anecdotally that there's a problem out there," Supreme Court Justice Jim Kitchens said during a state House of Representatives committee meeting on the public defense system last week.

That means Mississippi's "dead zone" - the period during which poor people facing felony charges are left without a lawyer while they await indictment - persists in many counties.

At the first court hearing after someone is arrested for a felony, a judge is supposed to decide whether the defendant can be released from jail and should appoint a lawyer if they can't afford one.

In many Mississippi courts, that lawyer stays on the case for a short time to handle initial proceedings, including a possible motion for bond reduction, and then exits. Only after the defendant is indicted, which often takes months, is another lawyer appointed. In the meantime, no one is assigned to the case, even if the defendant is in jail.

"Mississippi stands alone as the only state that has this problem," public defense expert David Carroll said at the state House hearing.

Carroll is the executive director of the Sixth Amendment Center, a nonprofit that studies state public defense systems and advocates for improvements. The center released a report in 2018 that found many defects in Mississippi's public defense system, including the dead zone.

The Supreme Court's rule, approved in April, was supposed to eliminate this problem. It says a lawyer can't leave a case unless another one has taken over. All courts in the state must follow it.

Individual judges could face sanctions for not complying with the rule if someone files a complaint against them, Kitchens told legislators. Beyond that, however, Kitchens said it's outside the purview of the Supreme Court to monitor local courts. "It's not for us to go out and investigate whether that rule is being complied with," he said.

When the rule went into effect in July, the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, The Marshall Project and ProPublica found that many courts were unprepared to comply. Some local court officials were unaware of it. Others suggested that their practice of appointing lawyers for limited purposes would satisfy the rule, even though those attorneys do little beyond attending early court hearings.

State Rep. Nick Bain, a Republican from northeast Mississippi's Alcorn County, convened the hearing on the weaknesses in the state's public defense system. He also practices as a defense attorney in about 10 counties and regularly talks with lawyers who work around the state.

"There are wide swaths all over Mississippi where that rule is not being followed," he said at the hearing.

In one circuit court district that did take action in response to the Supreme Court's rule, there are signs that appointed defense attorneys are not doing much more than they did before.

In the 1st Circuit Court District, which covers seven counties in northeast Mississippi, chief Circuit Judge Paul Funderburk issued an order in July directing lower court judges in the district on how to meet the new requirements for indigent representation. He said an attorney in the lower court, where defendants first appear, must stay on the case until the defendant is indicted.

State Sen. Daniel Sparks, a Republican from Tishomingo County, represents those defendants in the county's Justice Court, which hears misdemeanors and some early felony matters. He acknowledged that under the new Supreme Court rule and Funderburk's order, he remains the attorney for indigent clients until they are indicted.

He said that although he will take calls from defendants and offer advice after they appear in justice court, he believes there is usually little defense work to do before an indictment. "I don't think it changes my work dramatically," he said of the Supreme Court's rule.

He believes problems linked to the dead zone have been exaggerated by reform advocates.

Lee County Justice Court, based in Tupelo, is in the same circuit court district as Tishomingo. In July, the Daily Journal, The Marshall Project and ProPublica reported that the part-time appointed counsel for Lee County Justice Court, Dan Davis, typically did little more than file for a bond reduction for defendants who remained in jail for more than a month. After the new rule became effective in July, Davis told the court he didn't want the job anymore.

Bill Benson, the administrator for Lee County, said last week that it's not clear when a replacement will be available. "We're trying to find someone who will stick with the defendants all the way through like the rule says," Benson said.

Funderburk said he expects strict adherence to the new indigent defense rule and warned that courts "ignore it at their peril."

Courts across Mississippi have ignored a broader rule regarding public defense, the Daily Journal, The Marshall Project and ProPublica have found. That rule, part of a 2017 push to standardize how courts across the state operate, requires judges to send to the Supreme Court their policy on how they fulfill their constitutional obligation to provide lawyers for poor criminal defendants. Just one circuit court district, covering three rural counties in southwest Mississippi, has complied.

"The counties need to come up with a plan," Kitchens told lawmakers. "The justice courts, the circuit courts, the supervisors - all of them need to collaborate and come up with a plan."

He called on lawmakers to fix problems with public defense that the Mississippi Supreme Court has been unable to remedy by imposing rules on local judges. The state is responsible for ensuring that its public defense system is adequate, he said. "The bottom line is the counties cannot do it alone."

Bain, whose term ends in December after a primary defeat, said Mississippi must eliminate the dead zone and address other problems, including a lack of full-time public defenders and payment arrangements that encourage lawyers to cut corners.

"I think Mississippi is really stretching the limits of our constitutional obligations," he said.


Caleb Bedillion wrote this article for The Marshall Project.




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Maryland has one of the highest percentages in the nation of people in prison who began serving time when they were juveniles.

A new report from Human Rights for Kids included survey results from more than 120 people in Maryland who have been in prison since childhood. It found nearly 70% had experienced six or more Adverse Childhood Experiences, the major upheavals in a child's life affecting their development, from abuse and neglect to incarcerated relatives and domestic violence.

Nate Balis, director of the Juvenile Justice Strategy Group at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, said one concern is children in Maryland are automatically tried as adults if they're accused of any of more than 30 crimes.

"Because it's based on offense -- and not based on the individual circumstances of the offense itself, or of a young person's history, or of even considering the trauma that young people have experienced -- it means that just because of the offense, we are charging young people as adults," Balis explained.

The report showed 6% of Maryland's incarcerated population has been in prison since childhood. The numbers also include immense racial disparities, with more than 90% being people of color. The report recommended all cases involving a child start in juvenile court and courts be required to take Adverse Childhood Experiences into account during sentencing.

Balis also noted compared to adults, young people are more capable of change, which he argued should mean more effort is made to keep them out of the adult system.

"We want to do everything we can to steer them away from the system," Balis urged. "To prevent them from future offending, to fill their lives with good things, to keep them away from the justice system. Not to pull them deeper into the system and even into the adult criminal justice system, when we could serve them effectively in the juvenile justice system."

Other recommendations include prohibiting the use of solitary confinement for children and not housing children in adult jails and prisons.

Changes in federal law will permit West Virginia and other states to use Medicaid dollars to pay for health care services for incarcerated youths beginning Jan. 1.

In addition to helping kids get physical and dental health care, the new rules should give them needed resources to address mental and behavioral health challenges stemming from childhood trauma.

Elizabeth Crouch, associate professor of health services policy and management at the University of South Carolina, said mitigating adverse childhood experiences is a growing part of efforts to keep rural children out of the juvenile justice system and detention.

"A fifth of rural children are diagnosed with developmental behavioral mental health disorders," Crouch pointed out. "Rural children are more likely to be diagnosed with developmental behavioral disorders, such as ADHD, than their urban counterparts."

About 45% of West Virginia children experience adverse childhood experiences, a rate five points higher than the national average. The Medicaid coverage for youth in detention includes physical, dental and behavioral health screenings and case management services.

States are also taking into account neurocognitive research showing teen brains do not fully develop until the mid-20s. Crouch noted arrests of young people have dropped by more than 80% since the mid-1990s, as a greater understanding of childhood trauma has increased the number of alternatives to detention. Still, she acknowledged the challenges for rural kids are formidable.

"What we have found is that rural children have been disproportionately living in homes affected by current substance use or mental illness," Crouch explained. "Rural children have experienced much higher rates of opioid use."

Despite declining arrests and detention rates, young people of color are still far more likely than white youth to be held in juvenile facilities, according to The Sentencing Project.

The New York Police Department's new commissioner must address the agency's dwindling public trust as her tenure begins.

Jessica Tisch became the agency's top official after former commissioner Edward Caban resigned amid federal investigations. Past surveys show moderate trust in the department but a new survey of heavily policed neighborhoods paints a different picture.

Brett Stoudt, associate director of the Public Science Project, said it found people in such neighborhoods want crime handled differently.

"A significant number of these residents do not desire more investments in policing but instead desire approaches to public safety that invest in a broad set of supports and services, and institutions," Stoudt explained. "The kind that more fundamentally address the root causes of violence."

Other findings show people are fearful of their neighborhood's expanded police presence. Along with this, some said they have experienced physical or sexual violence from police officers. Stoudt noted this kind of policing mostly affects minorities in the city. The New York Civil Liberties Union finds Black people are 20% of the city's population, but were 60% of people police stopped in 2023.

Recommendations to fix the issues include increasing transparency for the department, firing officers who abuse their position for power and stopping the spread of misinformation from the agency.

Ileana Méndez-Peñate, program director for the group Communities United for Police Reform, said other recommendations aim to reduce the department's omnipresent role in some areas.

"The other policy recommendation related to that is the real need to invest in the fundamental needs of New Yorkers," Méndez-Peñate emphasized. "I talked about housing and education but also youth programs and services and quality city infrastructure through security. These are some of the top concerns."

There could be challenges to enacting the survey's solutions. One is the charter revisions passed on Election Day, since one of them gives the department more power. She added another challenge is financing, since the millions of dollars the city spends on the police department do not address the root causes of certain issues.


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