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Jim Howaniec has practiced criminal defense law in Lewiston for nearly 40 years. He is a former assistant attorney general in Augusta and a former mayor of Lewiston.
I have been a member of the Maine criminal defense bar for nearly 40 years. It has been a very rewarding career. As criminal defense lawyers we get to challenge governmental power on a daily basis. We fight to protect basic American constitutional principles like the presumption of innocence. We often defend those most in need, suffering from poverty, mental illness, homelessness, and substance addiction.
Being a criminal defense lawyer is a noble profession, but we are not always the most popular in the public eye. After all, we represent people charged with serious crimes like murder, sexual assault, drug trafficking, and many other offenses. But without the right to defense counsel — for all citizens, rich and poor — government power over our lives would go unchecked.
The criminal court system in Maine is in a constitutional crisis. We simply do not have enough lawyers available to handle the nearly 40,000 criminal cases filed across the state each year. The system has become backlogged since the COVID-19 pandemic, with hundreds of criminal defendants unrepresented by lawyers. It has gotten so bad that the American Civil Liberties Union has successfully sued the state for violating federal and state constitutional rights, and a judge in Augusta is considering releasing many of the unrepresented defendants who are incarcerated indefinitely without lawyers.
Our criminal defense bar is swamped. Many of us are juggling hundreds of cases at a time. Last year, I had over 200 open criminal cases, including, at one point, seven clients charged with murder. I have done numerous jury trials since the pandemic, including six murder trials. These cases are voluminous, with thousands of pages of police reports and complex evidence involving DNA, medical, and other forensic sciences. The cases are incredibly stressful, as the consequences for our clients can be devastating, including incarceration for decades in prison.
I have had numerous clients who I am convinced are innocent, including most recently a young man named Trevor Averill, who was acquitted of murder in Androscoggin County but was convicted of manslaughter for allegedly shaking his two month old daughter to death, based on the very controversial “science” of “shaken baby syndrome.” Seventeen medical doctors testified in that case. Trevor was recently sentenced to 18 years in prison.
In 2023 the Maine Legislature raised our hourly pay rate from $80 to $150 per hour. Gov. Janet Mills had offered a different, tiered wage plan. We are very grateful to the Legislature for that pay raise. But it has not solved the problem and the crisis is getting worse every day.
And there is a catastrophe looming on the horizon: The current state fiscal year budget, which just started on July 1 and ends on July 1, 2026, has badly underfunded the needs of the Maine Commission on Public Defense Services. Our funding will run out around April 1, 2026. This means that our criminal defense system is going to be without money to pay its lawyers for the entire three-month final quarter of the 2025-26 budget. This is going to be a nightmare for our court system.
Judging from her recent public comments, Gov. Mills seems to think that the Maine criminal defense bar is slacking. I assure her that we are not. We have dozens of outstanding, honorable criminal defense lawyers in this state with caseloads that are simply maxed out. We are paid at hourly rates that are less than half of what private attorneys charge in other areas of practice. We simply cannot compete with the private sector, where lawyers are routinely charging $300 to $400 or more per hour.
The governor, prosecutors, and Maine taxpayers are simply going to have to understand that if they want to continue to “get tough on crime” in this state, resulting in high levels of arrests and incarceration, then it is going to be very costly to fund constitutionally adequate criminal defense services. To do anything less will plunge us into the category of a third world criminal court system, which is where I think we are pretty much headed right now.
