Massachusetts is raising the pay for private defense attorneys, in an effort to cajole them into resuming work for clients who can’t afford representation. But a survey of some of those former clients shows many believe they weren’t properly represented in court.
Dwight Williams, 41, who is serving life without parole for a 2005 murder he says he did not commit, has spent years trying to get the state’s public defense office to help him overturn his conviction. He says his trial attorney — a “bar advocate” appointed and paid by the state — made numerous errors that contributed to his conviction. He heard much of the same from others in the prison.
“I had experienced a lot of inequities with assigned counsel, but also heard countless complaints regarding assigned counsel,” Williams told GBH News. “I basically took it upon myself to try to document these complaints and just gauge people’s experiences. So I created a questionnaire and I just asked people to answer yes or no.”
He based the wording of the questions on the manual produced by the state Committee for Public Counsel Services, the organization that assigns cases to either public defenders or private attorneys. Late last year, he started circulating the questionnaire to other men incarcerated with him inside the state prison in Norfolk.
The nearly 60 responses Williams has so far received reflect a consistent pattern of complaints. Two thirds of respondents, all of whom faced substantial criminal charges, said they met with their trial attorneys fewer than four times, with 16% saying they never had a face-to-face meeting.
Seventy percent of respondents said their lawyer was in possession of favorable evidence but failed to present it; more than 90% said their defense counsel did not “build a defense strategy” that included their input.
The results show a deep flaw in the justice system, Williams said. “People are not receiving their constitutional guarantee to effective representation, which is denying them also of a fair trial.”
Williams, working with contacts on the outside, is launching a nonprofit called Just Outcomes to focus on addressing inequities in criminal defense. He says he supports better pay for the lawyers, but first the state should audit CPCS attorneys to see if they are providing effective defense for their clients.
In Massachusetts, private attorneys typically handle about 80% of the public defense caseload, but many stopped taking cases this summer to protest their low hourly pay. State legislators passed a bill last week to raise pay rates by $10 an hour this year and again next year, bringing the bottom rate for a private attorney from $65 an hour to $85 an hour. For murder cases the rate would rise from $120 an hour to $140 an hour.
State Rep. Russell Holmes — who meets monthly with prisoners in Norfolk who are advocating for policy changes — said the value of Willams’ survey is that it focuses on specific services that are supposed to be provided, not just on a prisoners’ feelings or frustrations about having been convicted and sent to prison.
Quantitative data like the number of meetings “are the metrics that are really indicative of whether or not they were thorough with the case,” Holmes said. If “50% of the people only met with [their lawyer] one or three times in a Superior Court case — that’s gonna be a challenge, right?”
Holmes said he agrees that a performance audit for CPCS attorneys is a good idea. And he noted that incarcerated men of color could not help but notice the difference between the representation they got and the fleet of private lawyers who defended Karen Read, a white women who was acquitted of killing her police officer boyfriend earlier this summer.
“If that’s what representation was like for every single person, there would be a lot less people in prison,” Holmes said.
Former State Rep. Nika Elugardo, who worked with prisoners in 2022 to document racial disparities inside Massachusetts state prisons, said the survey supports “an anecdotally well-known reality: People relying on public representation do not receive equitable or adequate legal services or due process.” The response, she said, should be “to adequately fund, train and pay public defenders.”
But Elugardo said the survey is also an example of the significant organizing and leadership skills of incarcerated people, which are frequently underestimated by outsiders.
CPCS says that bar advocates go through rigorous trainings and their performance is regularly evaluated. In addition, the organization accepts and investigates complaints by clients, and attorneys can be disciplined or even removed from the system based on poor performance.
Still, spokesman Robert McGovern said, “We understand that many responses in the survey reflect frustration with legal representation. Communication, strategy collaboration, and explanation of court proceedings are critical, and these are all things we actively train and evaluate for.”
While it is hard to draw broad conclusions from an “informal and anecdotal” survey like this, McGovern said, it does underscore “the pressure on the public defense system. Bar advocates are working under difficult conditions with high caseloads, and limited time and resources. These structural challenges make it harder for even the most dedicated lawyers to meet client expectations.”
But even once pay raises go into effect, Stephen Pina says it might take a larger systemic change to really make a difference. He spent 22 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted — and said it was only after studying the law behind bars that he and other prisoners started to understand how flawed their defense was.
“I learned that an ‘adequate defense’ is defined as bare minimum.” Pina said. “So as long as you are doing something, then it’s considered an adequate defense.”
