The wheels of justice rattled on in the days after Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens pleaded guilty to conspiracy and resigned from office.
As the now-former district attorney cleaned out his office on the fifth floor of the Hinds County Courthouse, more routine scenarios unfolded in the courtrooms below.
In Circuit Judge Debra Gibbs’s courtroom Wednesday, a 26-year-old man pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and received a 40-year sentence.
That same day, another man indicted for aiding and abetting the 26-year-old appeared in Circuit Judge Adrienne Wooten’s courtroom for a status hearing. To the judge’s irritation, the man’s attorney was absent and hadn’t properly notified the court, meaning the judge wouldn’t receive an update on the man’s case.
She sighed audibly into the microphone and sent the man home.
Defendants hadn’t checked in with their public defenders. Deputies yelled their names loudly into the courtroom hallways, to no avail. Young men waiting for their cases to be called sat in the audience, hunched over and alone. Families watched anxiously as their shackled loved ones faced the judge and were sent back to the Raymond Detention Center.
Attorneys discussed plea offers, missing evidence and motions for continuances. The prosecutor, Deputy Chief Gwen Agho, assured Wooten that if the judge called a case to trial in August, “we can be ready.”
Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens speaks outside the federal courthouse in Jackson after he pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge on Monday, June 29, 2026. Credit: Richard Lake/Mississippi TodayFor all the headlines generated by Owens’ alleged and admitted actions, the bulk of the work prosecuting cases in Hinds County is undertaken by some 15 assistant district attorneys in five courtrooms, oftentimes at docket calls just like this one.
And the work of the district attorney’s office is continuing even as its leadership is in limbo.
Whoever takes the reins next, the work of prosecuting cases will continue. State law says the governor will call an election to fill the office of a district attorney who has resigned. Republican Gov. Tate Reeves will make an emergency appointment to fill the vacancy until an election is held.
“If the person who leads Ford Motor Company resigns, they still make cars,” said Matt Steffey, a professor at the Mississippi Christian University School of Law.
After Owens, a Democrat, won election in 2019, critics sometimes commented that the former head of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mississippi branch wasn’t a career prosecutor and had never tried a case before.
On paper, that’s what a district attorney does. According to state statute, the job of a district attorney is to handle “all criminal prosecutions and all civil cases in which the state or any county within his district may be interested.”
But in Hinds County, more than 2,000 felony cases are resolved each year – by far the busiest criminal docket in the state.
The district attorney can’t address the enormous case load alone on top of other duties, such as lobbying at the Capitol, serving on appointed commissions, signing checks, seeking grants and making budget requests to the board of supervisors.
Not to mention campaigning for reelection.
With that workload, the job of Hinds County district attorney becomes more about managing and delegating, said Jim Kitchens, a former Mississippi Supreme Court justice who was a district attorney earlier in this career.
“Most of the trial work – the pick and shovel work, if you will – is done by assistant district attorneys,” he said.
Of course, when tasked with prosecuting a high-profile case, Kitchens said the district attorney will sometimes step in. Owens did that a few times early on in his five and a half years in office, such as in the case of a Provine High School teacher who was convicted in November 2020 of fondling a student.
But in the vast majority of cases, it is the assistant district attorneys who are tasked with carrying out the district attorney’s agenda.
For Owens, that agenda was encompassed by the phrase, “Smart Justice.” During his initial campaign, Owens described the slogan as encompassing a number of policies that could reduce mass incarceration in Hinds County, including an increased emphasis on pre-trial diversion for people who had never been accused of a crime before, as well as sending more people to drug court.
But when it came to prosecuting violent cases, the policy was more nuanced. In a 2023 annual report, Owens described “Smart Justice” as “evaluating every case in terms of the best result for both the victim and the community.”
To that end, despite campaign promises that his office would not charge people for “low-level marijuana possession,” Owens did not have a blanket policy against prosecuting certain drug crimes. Instead, assistant district attorneys evaluated whether a person had a criminal history or if they faced violent charges in addition to the drug offense, according to office policies.
In most cases, assistant district attorneys were given latitude to make their own plea negotiations, said Joe Hemleben, a former assistant district attorney who worked under Owens from 2022 to 2025.
But in an effort to push back on the perception that Hinds County was not tough on violent offenses, Owens was involved in every plea decision for murder cases, with most offers starting at the maximum sentence of 40 years for second-degree murder.
Prosecutors had to write a memo to Owens justifying why a plea deal was warranted, according to an office handbook. In response, Owens often pushed for longer sentences – a stance that rankled some defense attorneys who expected more mercy from a self-proclaimed “progressive prosecutor.”
Another way Owens brought more uniformity to the office was through the adoption of an electronic case management system called Karpel. Under his predecessor, the controversial Robert Shuler Smith, the office worked with paper files.
With the newer system, prosecutors can request case files from the police, who upload digital documents that can be automatically transferred to the defense.
Still, issues with missing discovery persist for reasons beyond the district attorney’s control.
Toward the end of Wooten’s docket call, the judge called a defendant named Sydney Wright to the stand. The shackled man walked from the jury box, where he had been sitting with the other detainees, to the podium to stand next to his attorney.
“The status is basically the same,” said public defender Zach Adkins, who was assigned earlier this year to defend Wright against charges of aggravated assault and car burglary.
Adkins explained that he would have trouble moving the case forward because the discovery he had received so far lacked two files he believed were important to Wright’s defense: a recording of an interview with one of Wright’s co-defendants, and a record reflecting an interaction Wright had with police before he was arrested where he had allegedly offered information Adkins believed might be used against him.
Jackson Police Department Detective Stephanie Burse had referenced the incidents in her affidavit, but the prosecution didn’t include the documents in the file that Adkins received.
The prosecution seemed just as confused as Adkins.
“What should I be looking for, a report, a video?” asked Agho, the lead prosecutor in the courtroom.
“I don’t know,” Adkins responded. “Something that documents the interaction.”
Adkins then informed the judge that the name of one of Wright’s co-defendants was misspelled in the indictment.
Wooten called the next case. Another defendant stood before her without his lawyer.
“He didn’t know I had court today,” said the man facing a capital murder charge that carries life in prison without parole.
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