Maine Will Soon Hire Its First Five Public Defenders. Most of the State Remains Without Them – By Samantha Hogan (The Maine Monitor) / April 26, 2022
The only state in the country with no public defenders will still need an estimated $51 million to provide the service to indigent defendants in all 16 of Maine’s counties. It’s “not a solution, it’s a patch,” says the agency’s director.
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Until this week, Maine was the only state that had no public defenders. But a last-minute push by state lawmakers has succeeded in securing money to hire Maine’s first public defenders. Now it will have five.
The decision, which will cost Maine lawmakers nearly $966,000, is a small first step for a state that The Maine Monitor and ProPublica found had regularly contracted private attorneys with criminal convictions and histories of professional misconduct to represent the state’s poor. The investigation also found that the Maine Commission on Indigent Legal Services, or MCILS, routinely failed to enforce its own rules and allowed the courts to assign 2,000 serious criminal cases to attorneys who were not eligible because they had too little experience or had not applied to work on complex cases.
The new funding, which is a far cry from the tens of millions of dollars the MCILS’ director estimates is needed to overhaul the system, will establish a “rural public defender unit” to travel to courts across the state and provide direct legal representation to defendants who cannot afford to hire their own lawyer. The five public defenders will be employees of the MCILS, which is responsible for providing “efficient, high-quality representation” to adult and juvenile criminal defendants who cannot afford to hire an attorney.
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