Records review found no indication three indictments were served in custody
On a Friday afternoon in August, attorneys for the Hinds County district attorney and public defender asked Hinds County Court Judge Johnnie McDaniels to release about three dozen people from the crowded Hinds County Detention Center. Each defendant faced nonviolent charges, had not been indicted and had spent at least 100 days in jail. McDaniels declined the group request. In an order issued days later, he said crowding alone did not justify releasing a defendant and directed attorneys to submit requests case by case. The attorneys sought release for 19 defendants over the next few weeks, and McDaniels granted release to 13, according to his docket.
Interim Hinds County District Attorney Brad McCullouch said in an interview that his office had secured the release of 74 people jailed without indictment on nonviolent charges, far more than the 19 defendants his office sought to release with the public defender. A Mississippi Today review of records found that McCullouch’s list covered all defendants with felony charges released from jail from July 1 to Sept. 28, including 15 people facing violent charges and defendants whose releases were unrelated to the district attorney’s efforts. McCullouch acknowledged that he did not know how many people had been released during the same period a year earlier. Nevertheless, he said the office’s efforts were paying off: “People have been coming in, but nobody has been getting out.”
The missing-file problem was central to the release effort. Charlie King, a new prosecutor leading it, told McDaniels that some defendants remained unindicted because the district attorney’s office could not proceed until it received a complete investigative file, even though prosecutors had sometimes taken cases to the grand jury without one. McDaniels said: “In the past,” the district attorney “would just kind of sit around and wait until law enforcement sent the file over.” King said he could not speak to former prosecutor Jody Owens’ decisions. “The lack of file,” King said, “is unacceptable.”
The district attorney’s office told Mississippi Today that McDaniels had not denied any of its release requests. A review of court records showed otherwise: McDaniels denied four motions, and in three, he wrote that the defendants had already been indicted. The records showed no indication that the three defendants had been served with their indictments while they remained in county custody.
The September hearings did little to reduce the roughly 200 people then jailed without indictment. The hearings exposed cases in which defendants remained in custody despite release orders and prosecutors struggled to account for cases that had languished for months or years. Mississippi Today reported that defendants are presumed innocent and have rights to a speedy trial, but prosecutors and defense attorneys rarely invoke those constitutional protections during the hearings. The publication attributed the infrequent use of those protections to Mississippi’s status as one of a handful of states without a fixed deadline for obtaining an indictment after an arrest.
Mississippi Today described the prosecutor-public defender collaboration as unusual in Hinds County, where community-safety concerns had overshadowed the circumstances of defendants awaiting indictment in Raymond. Matt Steffey, a Mississippi Christian University School of Law professor who helped write the state’s rules of criminal procedure, said: “Now, I’ve heard of this happening on the planet earth, but not in Hinds County.” He added: “In fact, most of my career, what I’ve heard is the opposite: the difficulty of getting the DA to agree and the judge to set reasonable bonds.”
State Public Defender Andre de Gruy questioned why the effort was needed. He noticed the jail population jumped the previous summer but did not know whether the increase reflected more arrests or prosecutors failing to move cases through the system. He asked, “Why are nonviolent offenders sitting in jail for months?” McDaniels, who declined an interview for the report, said during one hearing: “That’s the giant elephant in the room, so to speak, as it relates to these matters.”
A little over a month before the August proposal, McCullouch stood in the federal courthouse in downtown Jackson on the day the governor would appoint him district attorney, after former Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens pleaded guilty to a federal corruption charge and resigned. McCullouch promised U.S. District Court Judge Carlton Reeves that he would release people facing nonviolent charges from the jail. Reeves oversees the Raymond Detention Center through a long-running consent decree.
Days before that appearance, an 18-year-old had been stomped to death, and a video of the person’s final moments went viral. The jail remained crowded, and the number of unindicted detainees had barely changed from October 2025, when the federally appointed jail receiver, Wendell France, had asked Owens to “expeditiously resolve” pending cases. About a month after appearing before Reeves, McCullouch’s office asked the public defender for a list of defendants facing nonviolent charges. The request produced 60 names, from which prosecutors selected 32 candidates for release. By the time they presented the cases to McDaniels, most of the defendants had been in jail for at least 150 days.
Daniel Ray Boyd Collom called himself one of the ‘nobodies’ referenced in McCullouch’s remark: “People have been coming in, but nobody has been getting out.” Collom, 36, entered the Raymond Detention Center in October 2025 facing burglary and failure-to-appear charges. He said he slept on the floor and that other detainees carried knives and set fires that left cell blocks covered in soot. Months went by, and he lost hope of ever getting out.
Then on Friday, Aug. 28, nearly a year after Collom was locked up, officers loaded him into a van and dropped him off on a sidewalk in downtown Jackson. He said no one told him why he was released: “I have no idea, no clue, not even the slightest inkling.” Collom said his freedom seemed as bewildering as his confinement.
Mississippi Today described the process after an arrest as offering few chances at freedom. The first opportunity typically comes during an initial court appearance, when a judge decides whether to give a defendant a bond and sets an amount. A defendant who cannot afford the amount may request a lower bond after a probable-cause hearing. If those efforts fail, the defendant can remain in custody in what the publication called a “no man’s land” while waiting for a grand jury to review the charges.
The path out usually runs through McDaniels, who presides over all unindicted criminal cases under a 2023 standing order issued by Hinds County Circuit Court Senior Judge Winston Kidd. Mississippi judges have discretion to determine whether a defendant poses a danger to the community and how likely the defendant is to return to court.
In the first case the district attorney’s office presented from the public defender’s list, McDaniels questioned why prosecutors wanted to release a man charged with possessing a firearm as a convicted felon. King cited poor jail conditions. Sitting behind a plexiglass barrier, McDaniels told King: “You were in my chambers.” He added, “I think I was pretty clear the idea of what may be happening with jail overcrowding is not going to compel this court.” McDaniels asked whether the district attorney’s office would still seek the man’s release if jail crowding were not an issue, then said, “I have to hear persuasive arguments, not political arguments,” before granting the request.
McDaniels said he considered the details of the alleged offense as well as a defendant’s ties to the community and character. In one case, public defender Ginny Kramer asked him to release a 27-year-old father of two who had a job lined up cleaning cars at a showroom. Before his arrest, the man had been working to earn a GED at a community college. McDaniels told Kramer, “I’m not sure the facts of this matter,” and asked what property the man was alleged to have stolen.
In another case, a defendant had remained unindicted and in jail for nearly two years on DUI and drug charges. The defendant was in a wheelchair because he had broken his leg while incarcerated. Kramer told the judge, “He’s been through a lot while in jail.” McDaniels asserted that statistics showed people arrested for DUI had likely driven under the influence at least 40 times before being caught, then asked, “How does the ailment prevent him from driving around under the influence of alcohol?”
Throughout the hearings, McDaniels repeatedly returned to the question of why the district attorney’s office had yet to indict defendants it was now seeking to release. After hearing the case of a woman charged with first-degree arson, he said, “It appears all the other parties … did their job” and “And at that point, nothing else happened.” McCullouch acknowledged that his office needed to indict cases more quickly. He hoped whoever won Tuesday’s special election for district attorney would continue changes he made to the grand jury unit, including hiring a prosecutor focused on clearing unindicted cases. That employee, Greta Kemp Martin, reviews jail logs every day to find cases that need indictments. All five candidates for Hinds County district attorney agree the backlog of unindicted cases needs to be addressed, though they differ on how best to do so.
Individual cases continued to stall despite the new approach. Dennis Green had been in jail since December 2024, accused of burglary, malicious mischief and violating parole. McDaniels ordered him released in June 2026 and again in September after the district attorney’s office brought his case back before the court.
Jerry Jefcoat, 59, was recently released after being held in jail since April 2026 on a charge of failing to register as a sex offender. The district attorney’s office said it could not find the police officer who filed the charges, preventing prosecutors from presenting the case to the grand jury. Martin said, “We are still unable to ascertain who the ‘Williams’ is that is listed as the investigator.”
Hinds County Sheriff Tyree Jones, whose department had overseen the jail until the federal government stripped it of control, declined to be interviewed. De Gruy described the records concerning the three indictments as emblematic of other breakdowns in the system. “Presumably, the prosecutor has a copy of the indictment,” he said. “They could hand it to the bailiff, and the bailiff could serve the person. It could happen in the courtroom. I just cannot understand how people can be indicted, in jail and the indictment not served.”
De Gruy had recently noticed that the jail’s daily population counts were declining, suggesting the district attorney’s new approach might be producing results. He remained skeptical that the change would last. “But are you going to do it again?” he asked.