JACKSON, MISS. — Five candidates are running next week to lead the Hinds County District Attorney’s Office, which has long been mired in controversy and dysfunction. The next district attorney will face, among other challenges, a backlog of hundreds of people who have been arrested by police but are stuck in local jails without formal charges from the prosecutor’s office.
As of June 30, there were 287 people in jail in Hinds County who had not been indicted, The Marshall Project found in an investigation this week. That amounted to nearly half of those who had been in jail for at least 30 days. Indictment is a requirement in Mississippi for a felony case to move forward.
Nearly 200 of those people had been stuck in jail for more than 90 days without an indictment, including 56 who had been detained for a year or more, The Marshall Project found.
People can end up sitting in jail without an indictment for many reasons: Court dockets are backed up, the public defender’s office is often understaffed, and prosecutors have often bemoaned that law enforcement agencies don’t quickly turn over their investigative files. But the DA’s office is ultimately responsible for bringing cases to a grand jury for indictment.
Unlike many other states, Mississippi does not have a limit on how long someone can be jailed without an indictment.
If no candidate receives a majority in Tuesday’s nonpartisan special election, there will be a runoff on Dec. 1. The winner will succeed Brad McCullouch, who was appointed by the governor in July to temporarily fill the office following the resignation of Jody Owens.
McCullouch said his office has been scrutinizing jail rosters to identify people held without an indictment who can safely be released from custody, and said 79 people have been released since July. That included one man who had been held almost 16 months on a third-offense intoxicated driving charge and people held hundreds of days on drug possession charges, according to a list his office provided to The Marshall Project.
Will a new district attorney continue these policies, or similar ones? That’s a key question hanging over the race. The Marshall Project attended candidate forums and asked each of the five candidates running in Tuesday’s election how they would address the problem of unindicted cases. Here’s what they said.
The five candidates are:
Gwen Agho
Agho has worked as a prosecutor in the Hinds County District Attorney’s Office since 2016. On the campaign trail, she touts her trial experience and her role in moving the office to an electronic case management system. She has also made jail crowding and indictment delays central to her campaign, casting herself as the candidate best able to address these issues.
She told The Marshall Project she has been raising concerns within the office about the dysfunctional grand jury indictment process for a long time. She shared a December 2025 email she sent then-District Attorney Owens describing “widespread and systemic disorganization” in the office’s case management system, which caused some cases to be indicted twice.
“Cases are lost, defendants are lost, indictments have errors, hundreds of cases have been presented to the Grand Jury but never turned in,” Agho wrote in the email she provided.
Agho said she was involved in managing the grand jury process from 2022 to 2024. This overlapped with a major push involving state money to clear pandemic-related case backlogs. Agho said she had to keep jail lists and indictment records cross-referenced, a significant undertaking in a justice system where data sources are spread across many management systems that don’t talk to each other.
If elected, she wants to move the office to a “vertical” organization, in which the prosecutors who will be responsible for handling a case in court would also have to indict the case. Currently, one unit in the office handles indictments while another takes cases to trial or negotiates plea deals.
Agho said her office would rank defendants by how long they have been jailed, and give law enforcement agencies firm deadlines to hand over investigative files. It would also be prepared to take those cases to a grand jury without a file to ask that no indictment be returned.
She called it unacceptable to leave defendants and victims alike in legal limbo, and underscored the dangers of the county’s notorious Raymond Detention Center, which is currently under federal oversight and management.
“Maybe someone is sitting there, and maybe they get killed in there, and they never should have been there,” Agho said. “Or maybe a case is sitting, and a victim never gets resolution.”
Greta Mack Harris
Mack Harris is currently an assistant district attorney in nearby Madison and Rankin counties. She previously worked for 10 years as an assistant prosecutor in Hinds County and was a public defender before that.
She called the unindicted cases in Hinds County the result of “no one taking responsibility” and said that, if elected, clearing the backlog would be a major priority for her first 90 days in office.
“We’re talking about real people,” Mack Harris said. “There are grieving family members. And what of those who the facts of the cases won’t support a conviction? That should not be acceptable to anyone who took an oath as a prosecutor.”
Mack Harris said she would prevent future backlogs and keep indictments or other resolutions of cases moving faster by “eliminating silos” and conducting evaluation of new and pending cases in group discussions involving prosecutors throughout the office. Attorneys would evaluate cases by assignment and report their findings back to the group within established deadlines.
Although prosecutors in Mississippi can’t unilaterally dismiss cases, Mack Harris said they could walk away from or weed out weak cases using various methods.
“Does it need to be reduced to a misdemeanor? Does it need to be returned to law enforcement? Does it need to be declined altogether?” Mack Harris said. “That frees attorneys up to work on things of real consequence.”
Darla Palmer
A criminal defense attorney in private practice, Palmer has never worked as a prosecutor. She has run for district attorney twice before, in 2019 and 2023, losing to Owens both times, and has pitched her distance from the District Attorney’s Office as a strength, given the recent turmoil.
Palmer has made public safety the major theme of her campaign. In campaign videos, signs, and public events, Palmer has repeated a single refrain: “Do you feel safe?”
“My concern is about violent crime,” she said in her opening remarks at a recent candidates’ forum at Anderson United Methodist Church in Jackson.
She also told the forum that, if elected, she would launch an immediate assessment to identify “how many outstanding cases are not indicted.”
Palmer has said these lingering cases eat up limited resources within the local justice system.
“Folks do not need to sit in the jail waiting to get their cases indicted,” Palmer said in a campaign video. “Guess who indicts them? The Hinds County DA’s office. So if they’re just sitting there and they haven’t been indicted, it’s taking up space in the jail. We need to move those cases.”
Like Agho and Harris, Palmer has also discussed the possibility of changing how the office organizes and assigns cases — but has also cautioned against micromanagement, calling that kind of leadership a bottleneck.
“The number of cases is numerous. The DA doesn’t have time to review all the cases,” she said at the candidates’ forum. “That’s why you hire competent people.”
Marvin Sanders
Sanders worked as a Hinds County assistant district attorney years ago under Faye Peterson, who is now a circuit judge. Since then, he has worked in another district attorney’s office, as a supervisor in the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office, and as a private criminal defense attorney.
At the recent candidate forum, Sanders said jail overcrowding and delayed cases are the biggest issues facing the justice system in Hinds County.
Casting himself as the most experienced prosecutor among the slate of candidates, and the only one with management experience in a prosecutor’s division, Sanders said he’s prepared to tackle the problem immediately.
Speaking to The Marshall Project, Sanders said cases shouldn’t linger without indictment, and that timely presentation of new cases to a grand jury should be the norm.
He also cautioned that indicting cases faster can ease one backlog while adding to the list of cases delayed while waiting for a trial or hearing in front of a circuit judge. Even so, he said indicting a case is better than letting it sit because it creates a firmer pathway toward resolution.
Seeking indictments quickly also requires prosecutors to identify cases that shouldn’t be indicted at all, Sanders said. He told The Marshall Project the district attorney should have the “courage” necessary to seek the dismissal of cases that don’t have sufficient evidence.
“If the case is trash, get rid of it,” he said. “I don’t believe in people in jail for no reason.”
Wendy Wilson White
White is currently a Hinds County prosecutor assigned to the grand jury team who often appears in court for hearings on unindicted cases. It’s her second stint in the DA’s office; she has also been the chief prosecutor for the city of Jackson and an attorney for the Mississippi Department of Human Services. Her campaign has focused on issues involving mental health and youth crime.
White told The Marshall Project she would continue McCullouch’s practice of looking for unindicted defendants who can be safely released from the jail. She also pointed to recent funding from the Hinds County Board of Supervisors that paid for a new assistant prosecutor in the county, which she said will enable the new district attorney to process cases faster. McCullouch has already filled that position and assigned the hire to review pre-indictment cases.
Pointing to the progress she believes has already been made in recent months, White said the next district attorney will likely face some tougher challenges.
“I think we’re now at a point where we’re going to have to draw a hard line,” White said, indicating that she’d issue final deadlines to law enforcement agencies for outstanding case files that are still missing.
And if there’s still no file after that?
“Then it means we go to the grand jury without a file,” White said.
A grand jury would likely decline to indict most such cases.
“We don’t want to do that, but we have to be conscious of the defendant’s rights,” she said. “It’s not fair for them to be held indefinitely.”