A multi-year lawsuit that accuses the state of Maine of failing to provide effective lawyers to low-income people is returning to litigation as the issue has become significantly worse, a justice said.
Maine Superior Court Justice Michaela Murphy on Tuesday rejected the second proposed settlement agreement between the Maine Commission on Indigent Legal Services and people in need of lawyers, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine. The class-action lawsuit alleges that the state violates the constitutional rights to legal counsel and a speedy trial, which are protected by the Sixth Amendment.
“The denial of counsel often leaves people waiting weeks, even months, before being assigned an attorney,” ACLU of Maine Chief Counsel Zach Heiden said. “We are committed to doing everything possible to ensure the state upholds the Sixth Amendment rights of all people accused of a crime in Maine.”
The Maine Commission on Indigent Legal Services provides lawyers to low-income people who cannot afford to hire a private lawyer. But the number of cases without legal representation has skyrocketed since October, when there were around 73 such cases. As of Tuesday there were 393 people and 500 cases without lawyers across the state, and around 100 of those people were held in jail.
The proposed settlement addresses issues that led to the denial of the first, but there are two important legal standards that it fails to address, Murphy said in the Tuesday order.
Murphy said the settlement doesn’t have any way to enforce the state’s legal obligation to provide qualified lawyers to low-income defendants and to develop and maintain a system of lawyers.
The settlement also doesn’t address the ongoing constitutional issue of people without legal representation, as evident by the hundreds of people waiting for lawyers.
“As it has now become clear that the number of unrepresented individuals increases week by week, it is beyond dispute that — as the chief justice recently states in her State of the Judiciary speech — ‘[w]e are in a constitutional crisis,’” Murphy said.
After rejecting the proposed settlement, Murphy outlined a two-phase litigation schedule. She acknowledged there is a risk to both sides for the lawsuit to move to litigation, but the settlement agreements cannot be “fair, reasonable or adequate,” with the “ever-increasing number of unrepresented indigent defendants.”
In phase one, the court will handle the issue of members of the lawsuit who have been denied their right to counsel because they were not provided a lawyer. Phase two will look at the “systemic conditions or practices” that may create an unconstitutional risk from ineffective counsel.
Both sides had “a number of justifications for their inability or unwillingness” to address the issue of the members of the lawsuit not being represented.
The Maine Commission on Indigent Legal Services said all it can do to help the crisis is advocate for sufficient resources to open public defenders’ offices from the Legislature and governor’s office. They believe that will fix the problem eventually and that they cannot be legally accountable if they “continue to work hard with current resources to implement reforms,” and continue to advocate for reform, the order said.
The first physical public defender office opened in late November. The first proposed settlement required the commission to make “good faith” efforts to roll out more public defender offices. The second settlement instead required the commission to “take all available steps within their powers and authority” to open the offices.
If those offices are not opened, there is no remedy for the failure because the case would be dismissed once the agreement is approved.
The ACLU first raised the issue of ineffective counsel and said caseload limits and performance standards would help fix that risk. The state instituted many of those changes, but it did “appreciate the reality” of many members of the lawsuit, the order said. Issues of the Sixth Amendment are still present.
“Standards and accountability mean very little when very few attorneys, or no attorneys at all, have been made available by [the commission] for judges and justices to appoint,” Murphy said in the order.
An in-person hearing is scheduled for March 15 and a trial will take place the last week of June.
