Mississippi defendants spend months in jail awaiting trial

BRANDON, Miss. (AP) — Jerry Sanders has been sitting in a jail cell on a relatively minor charge of methamphetamine possession for more than a year — longer than the sentence he could get if he's convicted.

And with no money to post bail or hire his own lawyer, he may be sitting there for weeks or months more.

"I miss my children, I miss my woman, I miss my dog, I miss my job, I miss my home — everything," Sanders, 58, said recently by videoconference from inside the Rankin County jail in Brandon.

Long pretrial detentions are not unheard of elsewhere in the United States. But poverty, scarce resources, and a pattern of locking up people for low-level crimes make them particularly prevalent here, in the country's poorest state.