How Can Michigan Prosecutors Work If The Poor Are Adequately Defended?
It's so much easier when they just plead guilty!
According to the National Registry of Exonerations, about 18 percent of those who have been exonerated of a crime they did not commit actually pleaded guilty to the crime they did not commit. It is likely that the real percentage of actual innocence is much higher, as 95 percent of convictions end in guilty pleas rather than trials and many innocent people are willing to take plea deals rather than face spending the rest of their natural life in prison. This tends to be especially true for those who cannot afford a lawyer and thus have to rely on overworked and underpaid public defenders.
Last week, with the hope of better complying with the United States Constitution and maybe incarcerating fewer innocent people, Michigan legislators practically doubled the state's budget for indigent defense. One would think this would make everyone happy, since most decent people would prefer not to send poor people to prison for crimes they didn't commit, but one group of people is pretty upset over this — prosecutors .
Michigan prosecutors are coming out and saying, without shame, that poor people having an adequate defense makes it impossible for them to do their jobs, on account of the fact that they have other things to do beyond sending innocent poor people to prison for crimes they did not commit.
"There's a great imbalance right now," said Kalamazoo County Prosecutor Jeffrey Getting, a Democrat who is president-elect of the Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan.
"Indigent defense is funded at a far, far, far greater rate than prosecutors' offices are." [...]
Around the state, starting salaries for assistant prosecutors range from about $45,000 to $82,000, Getting said. Prosecutors handle far more cases than public defenders do, but are getting outnumbered in terms of staff, and it is starting to impact the ability to win convictions, he said. He cited the thousands of felony cases his office reviews that don't result in charges, paternity cases, most misdemeanors, and cases of abuse and neglect, as examples.
Kent County Prosecuting Attorney Chris Becker told the Free Press that he is offering $72,000 as a starting salary for an assistant prosecutor and can't get anyone to bite.
This would make it seem as though public defenders are making far more than prosecutors in Michigan. This does not appear to be remotely true, as they tend to make between $52,306 and $65,629 (and that's not a starting salary). As the Free Press notes, there are many other reasons why people may not be too excited to be prosecutors, given that they are hardly the most beloved people in the country right now.
Getting also asserted that funding indigent defense properly is unfair, because prosecutors have a lot of other things to do and it's easier for them to do those things if people just plead guilty.
Public defenders are filing more motions and the clients they represent are less willing to agree to plea deals, he said.
Becker agreed, noting that prosecutors are also currently slammed by requests for expungement , resulting from a new law that allows for the automatic expungement of many felonies and misdemeanors after a certain amount of time. You know, so people can get jobs.
John Shea, an attorney who has actually done indigent defense work, suggested that prosecutors stop whining about defense lawyers getting proper funding and instead push for increased funding for themselves. The answer to their problem really should not be "we need poor people to have less access to legal assistance so that we can do our jobs."
A good way of determining if things really are fair is to imagine a world in which everyone really does have equal opportunity and see if things fall apart. It's clear that, if everyone in the United States were to "work hard enough" to get a job on which they could support themselves and their family without any government help, the entire country would fall apart. Because, as the pandemic showed us, we rely very heavily on people who do not earn enough to live and we would not be able to fend for ourselves without them.
The fact that the prosecutor's office is not built to handle everyone receiving an adequate defense gives away the game. Poor people were never meant to have the same access to legal help as the rich. Plea deals were not simply being reserved for those who were actually guilty and had no chance of winning in court due to the piles of evidence against them, but also for innocent people who assumed they had no chance of winning against the county's prosecutors. If the prosecutor's office is falling apart because indigent people have access to an adequate defense, then we have to consider the fact that our system was designed to send innocent people to prison.
Because here's the thing — any defense attorney is going to recommend that their client take a plea deal when that is, in fact, the best deal they can expect, when it's very obvious that they are guilty (or are not even professing their innocence) and stand no chance of winning at trial. The fact that fewer people are pleading guilty now, to the extent that it is overwhelming prosecutors' offices around the state, suggests that a lot of people who were innocent, or who at the very least stood a good chance of winning at trial, were more or less coerced into pleading guilty when they did not have to.
That's not just straight hypothesis. Michigan had the second highest number of proven wrongful convictions in the country in 2020 and the third highest in 2021 . Clearly, the system was not working
Our culture has largely valorized prosecutors and demonized criminal defense attorneys — making District Attorney this big, fancy, elected position and springboard to endless opportunities, famously paying public defenders almost nothing and portraying defense attorneys in the media as lowdown, devious shysters who don't care whom they hurt so long as they get their obviously guilty clients off. We are now working against lifetimes of programming in order to try, in some ways, to make things a little more fair. As much as the "true crime" genre can veer into copaganda, it has also brought a lot of attention to the ways a lot of innocent people have been railroaded into prison by lowdown, devious police and prosecutors who don't care who's guilty as long as they keep their conviction records up. People have seen the way their criminal justice sausage is made and they are skeeved out by it. It's going to take a whole lot of adjustments like this to make things even just a little bit more fair for everyone, and prosecutors are either going to have to deal or find a new vocation.
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