Minn. public defender urges change in Michigan

Fred Friedman, the Chief Public Defender for the 6th Judicial District in Minnesota, has an op-ed in the Lansing State Journal about the need to reform Michigan’s system for providing attorneys to represent indigent defendants. Friedman minces few words, noting right up front, “You have a lovely state. You also have a lousy public defense system.”

As the Messenger reported earlier this year, a study by the National Legal Aid and Defender Association in cooperation with the State Bar of Michigan concluded that Michigan’s public defender system was so underfunded and so ill-constructed that its failures constituted a “constitutional crisis” for the state.

Friedman notes that Minnesota had a system similar to Michigan’s in years past, but it fixed things:

Second, I come from a state, Minnesota, which used to handle public defense in many of the same ways you do in Michigan now. Our counties, not the state, paid for defense attorneys, just like in Michigan. We lacked sufficient standards and training to ensure consistency and quality of representation across county lines, just like in Michigan. Our system didn’t treat the poorer or rural counties right. The pay rate for attorneys varied too much. The workloads varied too much. Justice varied too much.

With all this said, however, we also fixed our public defense system two decades ago, just like Michigan is working to do now.

Here are a few details. In Minnesota, our system is now funded by the state, not our counties. Our state is divided into judicial districts, every one with a chief judge and a chief public defender. We are governed by a bipartisan state board appointed by the Supreme Court and the governor.

Those follow the recommendations of the previously mentioned study and the American Bar Association’s guidelines as well.