WASHINGTON, DC, March 19, 2009 — In a historic move, the U.S. House of Representatives will hold a federal hearing on March 26, 2009 to investigate the failure of a state to uphold basic access to legal counsel for those accused of a crime, a right promised by the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The hearing, which will be held by the House Judiciary Committee’s Sub-Committee on Crime, Terrorism & Homeland Security, will focus on the serious flaws in Michigan’s public defense system, which include numerous questionable practices, from untrained and overburdened attorneys to slight-of-hand maneuvers to get the accused to unwittingly waive their right to an attorney.

The dire reality of Michigan’s public defense plight has received considerable recent attention, largely in reaction to the National Legal Aid & Defender Association (NLADA) report A Race to the Bottom, 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. The primary author of the NLADA report, David Carroll, NLADA’s director of research and evaluations for Defender Legal Services, will testify at the hearing. Carroll will touch 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.

“Although at the hearing we will be focusing on the crisis in Michigan, we could just as easily be talking about the crises of public defender work overload in Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri or Florida, or the lack of enforceable standards in Mississippi, Utah or South Dakota” said Carroll. “Michigan is not an exception, it is just one of the many examples of what is wrong with our nation’s public defense systems.”

The right to counsel is the most fundamental element of a fair trial, ensuring the government and the accused stand equal before the law. Unfortunately, there is ample evidence that Gideon's Constitutional promise is not being fulfilled in many states and counties around the country.

“In the 46 years since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Gideon v. Wainwright that any accused of a crime has the Constitutional right to an attorney, we have far too often seen this basic right pushed to the side. That must change,” said NLADA President & CEO Jo-Ann Wallace. “Our federal government must help fix the systems that are broken and set in place guidelines and procedures to ensure that situations like those in Michigan and elsewhere are not tolerated.”