NLADA's David Carroll Testifies at U.S. House of Representatives Hearing on Quality of Indigent Defense in Michigan and Other States (Link to Video of Hearing Included)

On Thursday, March 26, 2009, NLADA Director of Research & Evaluation David Carroll testified to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary's Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security concerning the current situation of indigent defense in Michigan, as well as the failure of other states to live up to their constitutional duty to provide fair and adequate representation to those accused of a crime and in danger of incarceration.

The hearing, Representation of Indigent Defendants in Criminal Cases: A Constitutional Crisis in Michigan and Other States?, was spurred by the recent NLADA report on Michigan's public defense system, A Race to the Bottom: Speed & Savings Over Due Process: A Constitutional Crisis, which studied 10 of the state's 83 counties and determined the state has failed time and again to uphold the constitutional rights of its citizens or to meet the nationally recognized standards prescribed in the American Bar Association's Ten Principles of a Public Defense Delivery System.

In his testimony, Carroll, the primary author of the NLADA report, touched on the history of the right to counsel, the situation in Michigan and the larger national problem that has developed because of a lack of federal oversight in bringing individual state systems into constitutional compliance.

Also appearing before the sub-committee were: Dennis Archer, former mayor of Detroit and former president of the American Bar Association; Nancy Diehl, past president of the State Bar of Michigan and chief of the trial division for the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office; Erik Luna, professor of law at Washington & Lee University School of Law and adjunct scholar with The Cato Institute; Regina Daniels-Thomas, chief counsel of the Juvenile Law Group with the Legal Aid & Defender Association of Detroit; and Robin Dahlberg, senior staff attorney for the ACLU Racial Justice Program.

The testimony of all experts who appeared at the hearing can be found at the following link. http://mynlada.org/congressional-testimony

Visit http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/hear_090326.html! to see Congress' video of the hearing.