Jackson Free Press

Wilson Carroll wants badly to be the next district attorney in Hinds County. As a result, the Harvard and Ole Miss graduate is going on the offensive against incumbent Faye Peterson. In a recent interview in a Phelps Dunbar conference room, private attorney Carroll blamed Peterson's three years in office for the backlog of cases—much of which she, indeed, inherited—in the Hinds County judicial system.

Carroll doesn't have criminal-justice experience, but he says the job can be no tougher than his current position in the private sector. He promises to draw on both his technical prowess (he likes to talk about Web research and Excel spreadsheets) and his contacts (he was a former special assistant attorney general under Mike Moore, working on education funding), as well as his common sense, to eliminate the case backlog, he says.

A conversation with Carroll reveals an unsettling mixture of good ideas (like compiling more specific data about cases, and not trying youth as adults) with a seeming willingness to rely on media headlines and statistical wrangling to make his case that Jackson is becoming "the most dangerous city in America." Like many other critics of the current administration, he's using the city's own statistics to attempt to make both his opponent and the city administration look bad and make the case for a change in the DA's office. We talked about statistics and other topics during the Sept. 26 interview.

JFP: Why do you want to be district attorney?
Carroll: I think we have a terrible problem with crime in Hinds County, but I don't think it'll be that hard to fix what's wrong. There are some fairly obvious solutions to the problems that we're having, in terms of prosecuting and clearing out the backlog of cases.

The terrible problem with crime in Hinds County; is this a problem we've always had, or is it new? We've gone through cycles with crime that are a function of many factors. The particular problem we're having now can be traced fairly directly to the failure to prosecute the criminals in Hinds County in a timely manner. I believe that's a relatively new phenomenon.

How new?
I would say since, well certainly the last three years. I'll give you one specific example. When we opened the Hinds County Detention Center, it was with excess capacity; I believe I'm correct in saying that initially we were able to rent space to the state of Mississippi to actually house state inmates and actually generate a profit from the operation of the detention center. As the pool of pretrial detainees has expanded, it has squeezed out the opportunity to rent space to the state, so now we're actually paying Yazoo County to house our prisoners. That's a significant change in recent years.

Have you looked at the numbers to see how the numbers of people being put through the system have changed over the last three years?
I have looked at the numbers. What I have actually tried to do is focus on who's there now. I haven't developing a moving picture, but I know as of about 10 days ago that of the total inmate population at the detention center, there were only 20 inmates who had actually been convicted of anything. Using round numbers, there are 590 beds and 570 were pre-trial detainees … certainly according to the sheriff and others who are familiar with the process, that is an unacceptably high percentage of pre-trial detainees.

Do you have any sense of how those numbers break down? What kind of crimes have they've committed?
You can get the print-out from the sheriff's office. I had one about three months ago. Now I do think it's clear that the typical inmate incarcerated today is charged with more serious crimes. The sheriff had to perform a triage, and the process of deciding who to lock up and who to let go, they have made a studied decision to incarcerate the more serious offenses, even though they haven't been convicted, yet. That's why it is commonly understood now that people committing misdemeanors, property crimes are not going to be incarcerated today because there is no place to put them.

You were saying there's a "terrible" problem with crime. Are there particular crimes that you think are the ones that deserve more attention than others?
Clearly there's been a lot of publicity given to murders that are not being prosecuted in Hinds County. The day of my announcement, it was reported that there were eight different individual cases taken to grand jury and no indictment was returned. These were cases where somebody was killed, but for reasons that are still unclear, the district attorney's office did not put on a compelling enough case to get indictments in those cases. Since then, there have been, I believe, three other individuals released for failure to obtain indictments in a timely fashion. Cases involving I want to say murder because someone was killed, but they were homicides. Obviously there are different types of homicides: manslaughter is a form of homicide. Those are the cases that get our attention because they're such high profile. I believe, though, that they're only the tip of the iceberg. We hear about the murder cases because they're high profile. We don't hear about the car thefts, the carjackings and many, many other crimes that are not being effectively prosecuted.

Why are cases logjamming, and what specifically would you do differently than the current D.A.?
The backlog is due to a swelling population of pre-trial detainees; typically statistics tell you that for every one person incarcerated, you have six to eight who bond out or who are released on their own recognizance. Ms. Peterson said in her guest editorial in the Clarion-Ledger that we have 1,200 active cases in Hinds County; she also said in a later article that she had no idea how many people had actually been arrested and charged and released back into the community, that to get that information one would have to go to each law enforcement agency jurisdiction and ask them who you've arrested and charged. I don't understand why that's such a difficult thing to do, and I think that would be the first step in approaching this problem is to ascertain exactly how many people have been charged with crimes, whether they're locked up today or not, and generate a complete list.

Then would you divide them out based on type of crime?
Once I make the list, yeah sure. I'd put them on an Excel spreadsheet and you divide them out anyway you want. What I want to do—the first logical solution to me is to identify who the repeat offenders are. All of the law enforcement people I've talked to say a very small number of people are committing the vast majority of crimes in Hinds County. And they do it over and over again. Once I get my spreadsheet of all the people who have been charged, I don't want to categorize by crimes; I want to run the names and see what names pop up most frequently.

WLBT did a story recently about a guy who had been arrested 96 times in four years, and he hadn't been convicted of anything. His last name was Peterson; no relation to Faye. That's one example. I think there are many, many examples of people who are arrested repeatedly. Now, these may not be be heinous crimes they're committing. But if you're in a neighborhood stealing lawn mowers over and over and over again, you are destroying the quality of life in that neighborhood, and I will make it a priority to prosecute the people who are committing the most crimes right off the bat. We currently make no effort to prioritize in that way.

Faye Peterson's has talked about the sheer magnitude of the job. Do you think you would be able to make those kind of choices with the challenges the office faces from both the police and the judicial side?
You have to have a plan, and every plan has to have wiggle room. The program of prioritizing serious habitual offenders is not something I dreamed [up]. They do this in many jurisdictions. It's a plan that gets you incrementally where you want to go. You've got to have priorities; you can't just let the squeaky wheel get the grease.

You have to break it into parts. Build that Excel spreadsheet with all the cases on one spreadsheet. Then start doing what you talked about: mix and match to come up with most effective of prioritizing what you do. Serious habitual offenders should be first priority. Then I have a couple of personal priorities. You do have the discretion to emphasize things that are important to you; I have a particular problem with people who commit crimes against children. Sell drugs to children, sex crimes involving children. I think it's odd in our society that we differentiate in the penalties between someone who sell alcohol or cigarettes to a minor, but we don't distinguish between people who sell drugs to a minor. I think we should; I'd hope to encourage the Legislature to enhance penalties to people who sell drugs to children, or recruit children into the drug network, which is what we know happens in the schools.

Have you looked at other cities to help model your improvements? What cities?
I've gone to lots of Web sites; talked to other D.A.s in Mississippi. It's exciting; there is no one right way to fix it. There are lots of good answers out there. I printed out three different Web sites from different D.A. offices around the country. Not a perfect template; different rules in Mississippi. We don't have any white-collar crime emphasis in the Hinds County's D.A.'s office. I want to use the grand jury much more aggressively than we use it today. Mrs. Peterson was on the radio on Kim Wade's show, and she was explaining how in her world, the grand jury works. She said, "We don't actually present cases to the grand jury; the different law enforcement agencies present their cases, and we answer questions. That's all there is to it." That's not the way I would handle the grand jury, and that's not the way D.A.s handle the grand jury.

Would using the grand jury more be your choice?
To me, that's a no-brainer. You use the grand jury as an investigative tool. The grand jury has unlimited subpoena power, for documents and individuals. The drug trade in Hinds County is not run by children, but people who tend to get arrested on the street corner are kids. MBN is trying to do more to go into the higher echelons of the drug trade, but certainly the federal system and lots of other state jurisdictions, the grand jury is the tool that is best suited to perform those kinds of investigations and indictments. The beauty of using the grand jury is you get your indictment before they arrest anybody. So when they're arrested, you don't have any prolonged about when to indict; only question is when is the trial date. That's not done currently in Hinds County, and I think that's something that, if done properly, could make a huge difference.

(Note: Facts and statistics stated by Peterson and Carroll have not been independently substantiated by the JFP.)

A full transcript of the interview with Wilson Carroll will be online shortly. Please check back.