A years-long lawsuit about the state’s requirement to provide people constitutionally mandated lawyers is now headed to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court.
The state’s highest court said Friday it will take up the 2022 lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine against what is now the Maine Commission on Public Defense Services and the state of Maine about legal counsel for indigent defendants, or low-income people, who are entitled to state-appointed lawyers but were not receiving representation.
Kennebec County Superior Justice Michaela Murphy ruled in March that Maine has violated the Sixth Amendment rights of indigent defendants. Under that ruling, people who spend 14 days in jail without a lawyer are eligible to be released with bail conditions, and people who wait 60 days for a lawyer will have charges dismissed. Those charges can be refiled once lawyers are found.
The state of Maine, through the Attorney General, appealed to the supreme court on June 6 under an emergency motion and asked for future habeas corpus hearings to be paused. Habeas corpus hearings determine if someone is being detained unlawfully.
This is the latest development in Maine’s legal crisis that has left indigent defendants without lawyers for weeks and months at a time. It pits a person’s right to legal counsel, and what the ACLU says is too long a waiting period, against the state of Maine, which claims releasing people in custody is a public safety issue.
Hearings scheduled for Tuesday and July 1 in Augusta and Bangor to determine if eight people held in jail without legal counsel should be released with bail conditions were canceled after lawyers for those people were found.
No future habeas hearings can be held until the appeal before the supreme court is resolved, according to a Friday order from Chief Justice Valerie Stanfill.
The AG’s office declined to comment on the case and the ACLU did not respond to request for comment.
In January, roughly 1,000 people were waiting for lawyers, and that number is down to about 220. The commission is concerned the number of people waiting will skyrocket after the state’s budget did not include enough funding for public defenders.
The state also wants the supreme court to decide if the timelines set by Murphy are appropriate.
The state said in the appeal that it has a public safety interest in “preventing individuals — especially dangerous individuals — from obtaining release from custody.”
If people were released from jail, it would be with bail conditions. The eight people who previously had hearings scheduled before finding lawyers faced charges including unlawful possession of drugs, violations of conditions of release, domestic violence and unlawful trafficking, according to the state’s list of people waiting for a lawyer.
The ACLU argues “the State then sat on its hands” for three months after Murphy’s order and just two weeks until the habeas hearings were scheduled. Murphy’s ruling was correct, the ACLU said, and added that the state’s appeal was an attempt to “interfere” with the “ongoing efforts to remedy the state’s Sixth Amendment crisis.”
“[The supreme court] should reject the State’s gamesmanship and decline its emergency bid to stop all habeas relief for unrepresented indigent defendants,” the ACLU said. It also argued the AG’s office improperly appealed.
Oral arguments will be held in early October.
