For nearly ten years, Zedric Owens has woken up inside the Shelby County jail, waiting for a murder case that still has not reached a jury. He is accused of killing his sister and severely injuring his 75-year-old mother in 2016, and his case has become a flashpoint for how Memphis handles defendants with serious mental health needs while crowded dockets and strained jails slow everything down.
New reporting traces a stalled case
An investigation by WREG reports that Owens has been held at the county jail at 201 Poplar since his 2016 arrest, as his case has bounced back and forth between findings that he is competent to stand trial and later rulings that he is not. Early coverage of the crime scene on the 900 block of South Willett Street described officers finding two women who had been stabbed, one of whom died from her injuries, according to Action News 5. WREG also reports that the outlet Memphis Crime Beat estimates Owens’ decade behind bars has cost taxpayers about $250,000.
Competency rulings on a loop
Defense attorneys have continued to seek updated psychiatric evaluations as Owens has repeatedly been ruled incompetent, then competent, then incompetent again, according to WREG. Juni Ganguli, appointed to represent Owens in December 2023, told WREG that “as the trial date approached, Owens fell back into delusion,” leading a judge to order that he stay in a treatment facility where he would receive medication in an effort to restore his competency. In other words, every time the case inches toward trial, his mental state appears to slide in the opposite direction.
Jail under pressure from mental health crises
Shelby County’s own “jail report card” numbers point to just how much mental health care is happening behind bars. In the January through February 2026 report, the Sheriff’s Office logged 566 mental health sick calls and 387 mental health provider patient visits in those two months. Those figures, drawn from the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office monthly jail reports, show that correctional staff at 201 Poplar are routinely responding to psychiatric needs that look a lot more like a hospital ward than a traditional jail tier.
Advocates call yearslong wait ‘inhumane’
Local advocates and court watchers have been pressing for more transparency and faster action in long-stalled cases like Owens’. Leaders with Memphis Crime Beat have publicly highlighted the lengthy waits that some defendants face, and criminal justice reform group Just City has argued that holding someone year after year without a timely resolution is “inhumane,” a criticism that has echoed in coverage of the broader backlog. The basic question they keep returning to: how long is too long to sit in a cell waiting for the system to make up its mind?
Backlog behind the headlines
Officials and reporters say a recent wave of arrests linked to a multiagency crime task force has piled extra cases onto an already busy court system, making it harder to move older and more complicated prosecutions along. Coverage by both national and local outlets has documented thousands of task force arrests and their ripple effects, from packed court calendars to more inmates being housed offsite. All of that can slow down everything from competency hearings to trial dates in serious felony cases.
Legal path to forced medication is narrow
When judges order treatment to restore a defendant’s competency, they are operating within tight federal limits set by the U.S. Supreme Court. In Sell v. United States (2003), the Court held that involuntary medication to make someone fit for trial is allowed only in limited situations. The government must show an important interest in bringing the case to trial, that the medication is substantially likely to restore competency, that no less intrusive option would work, and that the proposed treatment is medically appropriate.
Owens’ case sits at the crossroads of those legal rules and the day-to-day realities of an overloaded system. Mental health professionals, defense lawyers, and judges are all weighing patient care, constitutional protections, and the community’s interest in seeing the case resolved. Whatever happens at his next court date, his decade in limbo has come to embody the pressure points, from constant jail mental health calls to clogged court dockets, that can keep a serious criminal case stuck for years.
