A Superior Court judge has ruled that Maine is failing to provide “continuous representation” to criminal defendants who can’t afford an attorney in violation of constitutional principles.
Both the state and federal constitutions guarantee low-income defendants the right to a free attorney. But the number of so-called indigent clients lingering in Maine jails for weeks or months without assigned counsel has grown dramatically in the more than two years since the ACLU of Maine first filed its lawsuit against the state.
In a partial judgment issued Friday, Superior Court Justice Michaela Murphy wrote that the Maine Commission on Public Defense Services has taken a “very limited view of what they owe indigent defendants in Maine under the Sixth Amendment.” In addition to guaranteeing the right to a speedy trial by an impartial jury, the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees criminal defendants “the assistance of counsel for his defense.”
Murphy found the state was failing to provide legal representation to some low-income defendants at “critical stages,” including pre-trial hearings, bail hearings and plea bargaining. The justice called some of the state’s arguments difficult to understand and “simply not credible.”
“The right to counsel is a ‘continuous right,’” Murphy wrote. “The [commission’s] argument that the critical stages are only those stages at which a defendant’s rights at trial may be prejudiced by denial of counsel ignores the more recent [U.S.] Supreme Court precedent explicitly rejecting this view.”
Up until several years ago, Maine was the only state in the nation that lacked a public defender system. Instead, the state relied on a network of private attorneys who were paid by the commission to represent clients. But the number of participating attorneys plummeted even as the COVID-19 pandemic worsened the backlog of criminal cases in the courts.
Maine lawmakers responded by allocating millions of dollars to launch a public defender system and by more than doubling the hourly compensation rates for private attorneys who take on indigent clients. But the public defender system is still relatively small. And the number of clients waiting to be assigned counsel roughly tripled to more than 900 clients during 2024.
Murphy wrote that Maine law doesn’t just “suggest the involvement of defense counsel during the pretrial period — it demands thoughtful and substantive representation” during the complex legal process before trial.
“It would be close to impossible for an unrepresented defendant to understand these processes, much less to productively access a court for redress of important federal constitutional rights under the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments,” she wrote.
ACLU chief counsel Zachary Heiden said Sunday that the decision clearly establishes that the state is not meeting its obligations.
“We are looking forward to the next steps in this case and to a future in which all Mainers are afforded their rights under the constitution,” Heiden said. “It’s taken years of litigation to get to this point and we hope that this decision has brought us one step closer to a day when people in Maine are afforded all of their rights, including their right to counsel.”
A representative for the attorney general’s office, which represents the commission in the case, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday.
Murphy plans to meet with attorneys from both sides this week to begin talking about potential remedies to the situation. The justice had previously rejected to settlement agreements between the ACLU and the state.
This article appears through a media partnership with Maine Public.
