(Photo: mindgutter via Flickr.com)

(Photo: mindgutter via Flickr.com)

Michigan Campaign for Justice (MCJ), a non-profit coalition of advocacy groups across the political spectrum, held a press conference Wednesday to publicize a report on Michigan’s public defender system and call for action in the new legislative session to ensure that every person accused of a crime has effective and competent representation in court.

The report (PDF), prepared by the National Legal Aid and Defender Association in cooperation with the State Bar of Michigan, presents a damning indictment of Michigan’s system for providing legal aid to those who can’t afford to pay for it, calling the situation “a constitutional crisis” and concluding that the state “fails to provide competent representation to those who cannot afford counsel in its criminal courts.”

The report notes that Michigan ranks 44th out of 50 states in spending for public defenders and contrasts that with the fact that the state is among the nation’s leaders in spending on its correctional system. The report also notes that Michigan has no state agency to oversee the program, putting all the onus on counties to provide for legal defense of the indigent without providing funding, oversight or any coherent standards that must be met.

The study looked at 10 counties in the state and graded them on their ability to meet the standards in an American Bar Association document called Ten Principles of a Public Defense Delivery System. Those standards have been recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as defining the constitutional obligation the government has to ensure that every citizen has a right to competent counsel when put on trial. After examining the systems in those 10 counties, the report concludes that “the state of Michigan is failing its citizens by forcing counties to fund the public defender system and neglecting to oversee public defense work in those counties.”

Because there are no statewide standards or oversight, each county has its own distinct system and some of the practices found at the county level are in clear violation of those 10 principles. For example, Jackson County’s public defenders are picked by the judges in each case, which the report argues that undermines the independence of the public defenders from the courts. And because of financial strains in communities around the state, most Michigan counties award contracts for public defense on a low-bid, flat-fee basis, which the report says “guarantee lawyers will not have the resources necessary to prepare a full and fair defense.”

The report notes that in Detroit, only five part-time public defenders handle between 2,400 and 2,800 cases a year, spending an average of 32 minutes on each case. The national standard for public defenders is 400 cases per year. And some courts, according to the report, do not provide public defenders at all for misdemeanor cases, and others are so overwhelmed with cases that they will “offer to let people get out of jail for time-served if they agree not to ask for an attorney.”

The costs of such a broken system are varied and serious, wasting taxpayer money and undermining public safety. Every time someone is wrongly convicted of a crime, they are locked up at enormous cost while the real perpetrator remains free. Wrongful convictions also lead to expensive lawsuits, such as the $4 million judgment paid out by Wayne County recently. And then there’s the human toll.

Present at Wednesday’s press conference was Walter Swift, a man who was convicted of multiple counts of rape and spent 26 years in prison before being exonerated last year by the Innocence Project. He told the story of how his wrongful conviction disrupted his life, how his now-28 year old-daughter never got to have a father and about the difficulty he has holding a job now because he could not keep up with technological changes while in prison.

The MCJ has put together a surprising coalition of advocacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Michigan Family Forum, Citizens for Traditional Values and the Michigan Catholic Conference, to push the state Legislature to fix the public defender system. They are working on a model bill to increase funding and state oversight to bring Michigan in line with its constitutional obligations. Laura Sager, the group’s director, told the Michigan Messenger that they want to build a broad, bipartisan coalition and are in talks with many legislators who are interested in sponsoring legislation to develop a bill that will achieve their goals.

“I’m confident that we’ll come forward with a solution that everyone will be on board with,” Sager said. She said the primary challenge may be funding the system during a time of deep cuts in the state budget. She notes that Michigan counties now spend a total of about $80 million a year and to bring that spending up from 44th in the nation to 26th would require that amount to increase to about $120 million. “We know it will be difficult,” she said, “but it’s a constitutional mandate.”

The importance of fixing the system is noted in the NLADA report:

Our constitutional rights extend to all of our citizens, not merely those of sufficient means. The majority of people requiring appointed counsel are simply the unemployed or underemployed – the son of a co-worker, the former classmate who lost her job, or the member of your congregation living paycheck-to-paycheck to make ends meet. Though we understand that policy-makers must balance other important demands on their resources, the Constitution does not allow for justice to be rationed due to insufficient funds.

Michigan Campaign for Justice officials are hoping to have a model bill drawn up in the next few months and are working with legislators on both sides of the aisle who are interested in sponsoring the bill. They are confident they can get something done in the current legislative session and that Gov. Granholm will support it as well.