Tomorrow at 1 pm, the Maine Commission on Indigent Legal Services will hold a public hearing at the Statehouse, in the Judiciary Committee room, to hear comments on a proposed rule on eligibility requirements for counsel (attached below). For the first time, Maine will have concrete uniform standards to determine who is eligible to represent indigent criminal defendants at the state's expense. The rules are not overly burdensome, but they are significant, as they should be. The US Supreme Court held in U.S. v. Cronic that the right to counsel means more than the right to have a warm body next to you when you are tried and sentenced: "The Constitution's guarantee of assistance of counsel cannot be satisfied by mere formal appointment."
I'll be at the hearing, speaking in support of this rule. Qualifications standards for defense attorneys makes sense as a constitutional matter--these attorneys are the only thing standing between an innocent person and a wrongful conviction, and it is not possible to have a fair trial without adequate representation. And, they make sense as a matter of public policy--the courts run more efficiently when lawyers know what they are doing, and that saves everyone involved time, hassle, and money.
Indigent defense across the country is experiencing a crisis, but we are hopeful that Maine is working its way out of trouble, one public hearing at a time.
