The Bangor Daily News covers the proposed changes to the way indigent criminal defendants are provided legal assistance. The proposal calls for an independent commission to oversee the legal services for indigent defendants, something the State’s Judicial Branch now does. The full report on the proposal is available here.
A growing percentage of criminal defendants, the report concluded, are indigent and entitled to free representation. In fiscal year 2008, 42 percent of all juvenile defendants and 61 percent of all Superior Court defendants qualified for indigent legal services.
In addition, the number of cases in Superior Court, where felony charges are filed, grew nearly 20 percent from fiscal year 2007 to fiscal year 2008. That increase primarily was due to recent changes by the Legislature to the criminal code that turned crimes that previously were misdemeanors and did not require jail time into felonies based on prior convictions or aggravating factors.
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