The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution — a section of the Bill of Rights — guarantees a citizen a speedy trial, along with a fair jury, an attorney if the accused person wants one and can’t afford to provide his own and a chance to confront the witnesses who are accusing the defendant of a crime.

Speedy, however, does not seem to apply to many in Mississippi.

A recent survey (which can be found at msjaildate.com) of Mississippi jails conducted by the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Mississippi School of Law — released exclusively to The Associated Press — shows that 2,500 defendants — more than one-third of all of those jailed before trial — have been in jail 90 or more consecutive days. More than 600 have been in jail longer than a year.

The most recent census conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2013, showed an average pretrial jail stay in Mississippi of 40 days, the sixth-longest in the country. The census also revealed that Mississippi had the second-highest number of local jail inmates per capita, behind Louisiana.

According to information from the survey, the average stay in the Warren County jail is 131.4 days. Rankin County was much worse with the average stay of 700 days.

There are a number of reasons why this is the case in Mississippi:

4Most defendants in Mississippi can’t afford their own lawyers or the high bails judges continue to slap on them, despite decades-old federal court rulings that they consider what a defendant can pay.

4Public defenders in Mississippi are overworked and underpaid. Attorneys may spend five minutes with a defendant while a judge sets bail, but defendants may not see lawyers again until after they’ve been indicted. A recent report slamming indigent defense called this period the “black hole” of representation. Judicial leaders plan to ask lawmakers for more funding to increase the amount of help available to poor defendants.

4In many rural Mississippi counties, grand juries and courts meet only twice a year. In 2012, a woman in Choctaw County was jailed for more than three months without a preliminary hearing because the court was out of session.

Money is also a reason for delays in presenting evidence and conducting autopsies. Crime Lab Director Sam Howell says one of the state’s four labs is six months behind on testing, because of a lack of analysts to verify and weigh illegal drugs. Many autopsies from last year remain incomplete because Mississippi only has two medical examiners, Howell said. After news stories about the delays, lawmakers this spring allotted money to hire four more beginning July 1.

And inmates who may be mentally ill face truly extraordinary delays, said Dr. Tom Recore, a forensic psychiatrist with the state Department of Mental Health.

Recore told the AP there are only 15 DMH beds available in Mississippi’s 82 counties.

Recore said 90 to 100 inmates statewide need evaluation at any given time, with most waiting three to four months.

The wait time got shorter after more evaluators were hired and counties began using private contractors. But some of the 60 people currently awaiting treatment have been on a list for years, Recore said.

One of the most sacred principles in the American criminal justice system, holding that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty, may not always be the case.

The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees to every person “equal protection under the law” but in Mississippi it seems this may only apply to those who can afford to pay.

Our criminal justice system can and must do better.