Jackson Free Press

A recent town meeting in Jackson highlighting prisoner abuse in the state's penal system offered a peek at another legal issue plaguing many Mississippians who find themselves on the wrong end of criminal prosecution.

Waynesboro resident Linda Williamson has a son, Marco, who is incarcerated at Parchman. Before the Waynesboro Circuit Court handed him time for armed robbery in November, however, Williamson said her son had already spent considerable time in the county jail just waiting for his court date. "They put him in jail on the 10th of January. My son stayed there until November," Williamson said, adding that she'd tried numerous times to reach her son's court-appointed attorney in hopes of speeding the process.

"Lord, I called that attorney so much. I went by his office so many times. His office was in Jones County, about 30 miles from where I lived. I went there so many times and he was never there. He was always out of town," Williamson said, and pointed out that when she did finally catch up with him her persistence wasn't rewarded. "He told me that he couldn't talk to me about the case. It was like I had no business talking to him about the fate of my own son."

Long jail time and limited legal advice is nothing new to Mississippi's rural areas, according to other family members of incarcerated individuals.

Mae Thomas, of Wiggins, is the mother of Eric Thomas, who is also at Parchman. Thomas said her son had a court-appointed attorney who visited him no more than three times. When the attorney did see him, Thomas said he hastily advised Eric to accept a guilty plea of aggravated assault that would get him three years of probation. The plea, said Thomas, actually resulted in a 20-year sentence.

"My son told [the attorney] about the witnesses to the crime. They could have helped his case, but he never called the witnesses or anything," Thomas said.

Sherry Tucker, of Monroe County, said she got fed up with her nephew's court-appointed attorney not returning calls and hired a private attorney.

"He wouldn't speak to us. He just told [Charles Caldwell's] mother that he didn't work for her, he was working for Charles, so he didn't have to say anything to us. But he was ignoring Charles too. I told her then and there that this ain't gonna get it. We need to find a lawyer and hire him," Tucker said.

Part-Time Justice

Under Mississippi's current system, many counties pay private lawyers on a part-time basis to represent poor defendants. Only the larger counties, such as Hinds, Jackson, Washington and Forrest can afford full-time public defenders. It's a system that means trouble for the disadvantaged in the money-strapped outlying counties, according to Miriam Gohara, assistant counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

The organization commissioned a study, released in January 2004, recounting Mississippi's failure to fund a statewide public-defender system. The publication, "Economic Losses and the Public System of Indigent Defense," followed an earlier report released by the same association called "Assembly Line Justice: Mississippi's Indigent Defense Crisis," which summarized the long periods of time indigent defendants are locked up in overcrowded jails awaiting court appearances. Gohara's view on Mississippi's effort to improve itself since the release of these two reports is anything but rosy.

"We haven't seen any evidence at all that Mississippi is taking the steps toward establishing adequate funding or support for indigent defense services," Gohara said. "Many of the people are still being arrested and sent to jail pretrial for many, many months before their cases are resolved. You might have somebody who's arrested for a very petty crime, like one woman we met from Harrison County who had been arrested for shoplifting $72 worth of goods from a Wal-Mart, yet she spent 14 months in jail just waiting for her case to be heard by the court. It wasn't that she had even been sentenced yet. It was 14 months before she was even contacted by an attorney."

Each of Mississippi's 82 counties has its own indigent defense system. Each one has its own way of providing lawyers for poor people who are accused of crime and none of them work according to any sort of statewide standards. Gohara called this "an uncommon trend nationwide."

"Most states offer some form of funding for indigent defense for the counties," she said. "They don't necessarily pay for all of it, but they at least offer some money. In recent years, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas have all undertaken indigent defense reform. Mississippi is really one of the last hold-outs that won't even consider putting any funding toward non-capital indigent defense cases."

To make matters worse, many of the lawyers hired by the counties are the lowest bidders for the contract, which means no matter how many cases they get, they're paid the same flat rate. This inevitably takes a toll on day-to-day motivation.

"Many of them don't mean to harm their clients, but they just don't have the incentive or the resources in place to do the most adequate job. Many of them don't have any secretarial support or even investigators to help investigate these cases," Gohara said.

A Sea of Red Ink

The report "Economic Losses and the Public System of Indigent Defense" says that indigents represented by part-time public defense attorneys spend at least 81 more days in jail prior to sentencing, that full-time public defenders file significantly more motions on behalf of their clients and that those indigents receive better, more immediate and more satisfactory defense. It also said that full-time public defenders visited their clients in jail more often, accepted phone calls from the client, returned phone calls to the client, investigated the case, talked to top witnesses and more often attempted to reduce bond.

Another downside to underpaid part-time defenders, the report stated, was their tendency to supplement their work with private, more lucrative work on the side. The split in priorities means indigents received more delayed and poorer quality defense.

The situation bodes no better for the people prosecuting suspects in the poorer rural areas. Quitman County Chancery Clerk T.H. Scipper said he still fumes over the predicament of his own county, which got saddled with a $250,000 bill for defending the appeals of Robert Simon and Anthony Carr in the Feb. 12, 1990 torture and burning deaths of four members of a family in Lambert. The case ended with both defendants on death row at Parchman and Quitman County in a sea of red ink.

Scipper had supported a 1999 move by the county to sue the state after being forced to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars to finance both the prosecution and the defense of those cases. Their suit was shot down last year by Circuit Court Judge Ann Lamar, who would not declare the law requiring local government to slog it alone unconstitutional. Scipper said the result has been taxing for Quitman County—in a literal way.

"We've got the same system we had then. Nothing has been changed. What have we done about it? Well, we had to raise taxes again this year, not just for indigent defense, but for the government overall," said Scipper, who is also a member of the Public Defender Task Force.

William L. Waller Jr., presiding justice on the Mississippi Supreme Court, said a money pit like the one that swallowed Quitman County should never open up again, due to updates in the system, such as the creation of the Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel, directed by former Hinds County Public Defender Rob Ryan. The Legislature created the office to provide representation to indigent death-row inmates in post-conviction proceedings. The cases of both Simon and Carr were appeal cases.

"There won't be another Quitman County situation. The Quitman County situation was expensive because it involved multiple capital murders and expert witnesses, but that's not going to happen again because there's a good system established to deal with that," Waller said. "The larger issue is where the next step might be."

Waller said the counties still have the ultimate obligation of funding public defense but said that he felt in the "vast majority of times," indigent defense was provided in an effective manner.

Just the same, Scipper's Public Defender Task Force will be making a recommendation on indigent defense reform to the Legislature in an upcoming meeting schedule for November.

They shouldn't get their hopes up though, according to State Sen. Jack Gordon, D-Okolona, who is appropriations chairman.

"We don't have any plans to do any of that," Gordon said of proposals to fund local defense on a state level. "We've had some talk about it, but we don't have the revenue for that. We got about a $700 million gap between the revenues available and the needs of the state government already."

The Price of Doing Nothing

Not doing anything at all comes with its own financial consequences, said the January report, which cited that the implementation of a statewide full-time public-defender system could increase personal income in Mississippi by more than $90 million annually through the salvaging of wages lost while individuals are detained. This financial reclamation would result in increases of $5.3 million in state general-fund revenue and $546,000 in local government revenue. In addition, county jail costs could decrease by $16.5 million per year.

The numbers make sense, said Gohara, partly because incarceration represents some of the most expensive monthly rent imaginable and partly because being locked up is hardly a productive way to spend time.

"The people locked up are oftentimes working people, or people with families, people who have homes and cars and other responsibilities and what happens when they get sent to jail is they lose access to those resources," Gohara said. "The state also ends up losing fiscal revenue that they would've gotten if those people had continued to work and pay taxes. What we've found is that the states are actually losing millions of dollars every year by not funding an indigent defense system up front and allowing people to languish in jail for long periods of time before they're allowed to see their lawyers and get their cases resolved."

Millsaps College professor Carl Brooking, along with Millsaps co-worker Blakely Fox-Fender, helped crunch the numbers behind the January report. Brooking said the monetary loss to the state was considerable without even touching upon the societal ramifications. He also stood behind the accuracy of the numbers.

"We devised a sample of 11 fairly representative, randomly selected counties in Mississippi," Brooking said. "We had the files pulled from those 700 individuals. We we're looking strictly at how much time they spent in jail from when they were arrested to when their case was disposed of. One of the variables that made a difference, we found, was whether there was a full-time public defender. There was some potential for reduction of jail time and thus incarceration cost."