Invoices of court-appointed lawyers in Michigan reveal few motions filed and few experts hired
Court-appointed lawyers in three Michigan counties are underpaid and rarely do much work on their client’s behalf, according to a newspaper’s review of invoices in more than 1,600 felony cases and more than 1,800 cases involving parents targeted by the state’s child protective-services agency.
The Lansing State Journal conducted the review of the attorney invoices from 2015 in Ingham, Eaton and Clinton Counties in the greater Lansing area.
“It’s a culture of justice negotiated at a bargain,” the newspaper reports, “that not only lands innocent people in jail—in Michigan, inadequate legal defense played a role in nearly half of the overturned convictions listed in the National Registry of Exonerations—but also contributes to the crowded prisons that cost taxpayers billions of dollars a year.”
Lawyers waived preliminary hearings in three-quarters of the criminal cases examined, filed motions in about 8 percent of the cases, and secured funding for outside experts and private investigators in only 2 percent of the cases. Fewer than 2 percent of the felony cases went to trial.
In cases involving parents targeted by Michigan’s Children’s Protective Services, lawyers billed for motions only about 1 percent of the time. An outside expert was hired in only one case.
The average pay for the court-appointed lawyers in the Lansing area was $580 per case, while the average pay for a lawyer representing parents in a protective-services case was $356 per case.
Only seven counties in Michigan have public defender offices. In other counties, lawyers are court-appointed and are often paid based on the number of hearings they handle, rather than the hours they spend preparing for the hearing.
David Carroll, executive director of the 6th Amendment Center in Boston, says there is a nationwide crisis with the delivery of indigent defense services. “Those are the types of things we see in assembly-line justice, where you literally are processing people instead of trying to reach the truth,” he told the Lansing Journal.
But Judge Joyce Draganchuk of Ingham County Circuit Court says she doesn’t see much of a problem with defense lawyering in her courtroom. “I think that our court-appointed attorneys have a really strong commitment to what they’re doing,” Draganchuk told the Lansing Journal. “And they work very hard at it, despite the fact that they’re not paid enough.”
