Hinds County supervisors boost long-underfunded public defender’s budget by $600K, marking one of the largest investments in the last decade

Hinds County’s historically underpaid public defenders will earn more through September 2027 after an advocacy coalition urged supervisors for months that with better pay, public defenders can reduce the costly burden of the county’s deadly jail and dysfunctional criminal justice system. 

The $600,000 pay bump for the Hinds County Public Defender’s Office was rolled into the county’s new budget that takes effect Oct. 1, records obtained by Mississippi Today show. The Hinds County Board of Supervisors unanimously passed the pay increase earlier this month, marking one of the county’s largest steps forward in the last decade to narrow a funding gap that’s long left public defenders behind prosecutors.

Years of lower pay, staff turnover and cramped desk space have strained the public defender’s office, which represents poor clients in a county where most criminal defendants can’t afford an attorney.

Robert Graham, the board president, said supervisors were convinced by arguments from newly launched advocacy coalition Defend Mississippi that paying public defenders more can help reduce the number of people sitting in jail at the county’s expense.

“They are the line of defense between people who have no resources and people who have plenty of resources,” said Graham, who represents District 1 in northeastern Hinds County. 

Records show the new pay bump brings the public defender’s total budget to over $3 million — nearly double what it was a decade ago.

But in an interview with Mississippi Today, Graham was shocked to hear how much the board boosted public defenders, insisting supervisors couldn’t have passed a pay increase as large as they did.

“$600,000? Absolutely not,” he said. “We increase someone’s budget $600,000, the entire county would be up in arms in pitchforks.”

Graham did not return multiple calls from a reporter after Mississippi Today confirmed the figure with the county administrator and budget comptroller.

Despite state law, public defenders’ funding still lags behind prosecutors’

For nearly half a century, state law has required Hinds County to fund the public defender’s office on an equal basis with the district attorney.

But despite the statute, Hinds has for years funded the public defender’s office below the district attorney, whose budget is largely supported by the state.

“I want for there to be fair fights in the courtroom,” said CJ Lawrence, an attorney and organizer with Defend Mississippi. “I think that would streamline the process for everybody involved.”

Even though the public defender’s office in Hinds oversees one of the busiest criminal dockets within Mississippi’s patchwork public-defense system, it remains short of manpower, desk space and other resources to be on par with the district attorney. 

The county’s head public defender, Gail Wright Lowery, unearthed the state law and has repeatedly raised it to the board over the last year to reinforce her calls for more funding. During a budget hearing last month, she printed out the state law and passed it out to the board, before telling supervisors that her team’s office is so cramped, three investigators have to work from a storage closet.

Even though the public defender’s office ended up with a budget increase after the hearing, supervisors ultimately balked at providing the full funding that Lowery requested to fill staffing shortages.

This leaves the public defender’s office over a million dollars short of what she estimated would put her office on equal footing with the district attorney’s.

Lowery said the new budget bump made no provision for the public defender’s office to hire more attorneys or employees, even though supervisors recently agreed to expand the district attorney’s staff. Last month, the board approved a request from Hinds County District Attorney Brad McCullouch – who was appointed earlier this year by Gov. Tate Reeves after his predecessor, Jody Owens, stepped down – to hire a new prosecutor to work on grand jury cases.

Lowery hasn’t yet calculated how much she’ll be able to raise salaries, but she said the boost will lead to better pay through next September. She hopes it’ll at least be enough to put her attorneys’ starting salaries at $80,000 annually — the same as the only assistant district attorney position funded by the county.

She’s lost an attorney due to low pay every year since she was appointed in 2020, except in 2022 — when a short-lived pay increase temporarily bumped up salaries — Lowery wrote in a February column with Mississippi Today. She said many public defenders move to the district attorney’s office because becoming a prosecutor can virtually double their salaries. 

“Since I’ve been here, I have lost so many attorneys to higher-paying jobs, and that disrupts the system,” Lowery said. “We are hoping that this will result in stability in our office staffing.”

Supervisors: Imbalanced funding structure can put public defenders behind prosecutors

Graham said the board hopes to achieve equal funding between the two offices over the next several years. But it’s “hard to say” whether the public defender’s historic funding increase will be permanent, Graham said, as it depends on how much money the county has in its coffers.

When faced with Lowery’s request for more staff at last month’s budget hearing, other supervisors decried how state law sets up an imbalanced funding structure for the public defender’s office, which can leave it behind the district attorney.

Under the state statute, cash-strapped Hinds County — where one in five residents fall below the poverty line — is required to match the public defender’s funding to what the state largely provides for the district attorney.

“The state of Mississippi made the law but didn’t put a dime in there,” said Supervisor Deborah Butler-Dixon, who represents District 3 in west Jackson. “But the people come to the county thinking that we don’t want to help the public defender. That’s not true.”

To pay for the new budget, which included the historic boost to the public defender’s office, the board had to hike property taxes by $1.5 million. Graham said the tax increase would cost homeowners about $30 a year.

Now, the board’s next step is to ask the state for help funding public defenders to the same level that it funds the district attorney. 

Last month, Graham told Lowery that the board had put a lobbyist to work on convincing the Legislature to pass more funding for the public defender’s office, hopefully during next year’s session. And Lynn Seals, the county administrator, is eyeing a larger space for the public defender’s office in the same building as the district attorney.

In the past, the board has relied on short-lived pay raises for public defenders. In June, the board raised the public defender’s pay for six months using leftover pandemic relief funds, after supervisors narrowly voted down pay raises in 2023, saying the county didn’t have enough money.

To advocates, the historic pay increase is an encouraging signal that Hinds County may be on the way to putting public defenders on equal footing with prosecutors. 

“I’ll close being grateful because you are hearing us, you are investing in us,” Lowery told the board last month. “But this is just the beginning of what I’m calling a new day in the Hinds County Public Defender’s Office.”