ACLU Lobbies For Public Defense Reform
DETROIT (WWJ)- The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan is calling for changes by the legislature in a new report that highlights what it calls a "systemic failure" of the state's public defense system.
"Attorneys do not have the resources or the time to investigate the cases of their clients before they go to trial," said Robin Dahlberg, senior staff attorney with the ACLU's racial justice program.
- Edward George Carter (Third from left, in vest)
"In many cases that we looked at, attorneys will just turn to a case file a couple of days before trial, and then show up in court on the day of trial and realize that they... didn't know that their client had a valid alibi defense," she said.
Each county sets its own standards for public defense attorneys. The ACLU wants to state to set uniform standards for training and practices. ACLU leadership is now headed to Lansing to lobby for this and other reforms.
The ACLU is pointing to the cases like that of 55-year-old Edward George Carter of Ann Arbor, who was convicted of armed rape and robbery in an hours-long bench trial that landed him in jail for 35 years.
But he couldn't have committed the crime, Carter says, because on the day it happened he was in jail.
The victim was shown a photo which police had suggested might be the man who attacked her. And, according to the ACLU, because Carter's public defender was a recent law school graduate, she didn't have the experience to know that the I.D. could be tainted.
It wasn't until 2009 when someone from the Michigan Innocence Clinic at University of Michigan Law School contacted him, that efforts were undertaken to look beneath the surface of his case. Fingerprints collected at the scene of the crime were checked against a national data base and hit on one suspect -- a pedophile. By the time Carter was exonerated in April of last year, the statute of limitations had run out on the 1974 crime, and the real rapist, identified through fingerprints, remains a free man.
The new report, "Faces of Failing Public Defense Systems: Portraits of Michigan's Constitutional Crisis" is a combined effort of the ACLU and the Campaign for Justice. It is available online at: http://www.mijustice.org/.
