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.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.”
