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Some of the state’s 2,600 bar advocates — private attorneys who represent people unable to afford a lawyer in criminal cases — are looking into forming a union. 

“Without a fair increase, this system will no longer exist,” Sean Delaney, a bar advocate and partner at Rappaport & Delaney, told GBH’s Trajan Warren. “We’re seeing the nearing of the end of this public defense system in Massachusetts. It’s all because there’s one common denominator to all of this. It’s the low pay.”

You may recall that earlier this year, many bar advocates stopped taking new cases to protest low pay compared to public defenders and their counterparts in other states. So far, legislators raised bar advocates’ pay by $10 an hour — from $65 to $75 for district court cases — with another $10-per-hour increase expected next year. Attorneys doing the same job make $158 per hour in Maine, $125-$150 in New Hampshire and $112-$142 in Rhode Island.

Because of the work stoppage, as of Aug. 27, 4,252 people in municipal and district courts were without legal representation, Warren found. (In case you missed it: here’s what that means for defendants and for our communities.)

Four Things to Know

1. A federal judge in Boston ordered the Trump administration to restore $2.6 billion in funding they cut from Harvard University’s research grants. 

“A review of the administrative record makes it difficult to conclude anything other than that Defendants used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities,” U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs wrote. We will keep following this case in the coming days and weeks.

2. A record-breaking 40 potential ballot questions have cleared a key hurdle on their way to appearing on your ballot next year: a constitutional review by Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office. Not all of those questions will end up in front of voters in 2026. Some are duplicates, where the same group filed multiple versions of a question and will ultimately choose just one. Questions can also face legal challenges or fail to collect enough voter signatures to make it onto the ballot.

“I don’t think there’ll be that many at the end of the process, so I don’t think voters will have more than a half a dozen questions to address,” Christopher Anderson, president of the Massachusetts High Technology Council, told GBH News. “But it is an interesting indication that the Legislature really is not the source and summit of major-impact policy changes in Massachusetts – either good or bad, depending on your perspective.”

3. Three bills currently under consideration could significantly impact how accessible voting is for Massachusetts residents. “With voting rights under attack by the federal government, now is the time for us to pass same-day voter registration in Massachusetts,” said State Rep. Carmine Gentile, a Democrat from Sudbury.

The first bill would bring Massachusetts in line with 23 other states (plus Washington, D.C.) that allow same-day voter registration — a change that would be especially impactful for students and other people who move frequently and need to update their address before voting. The second would stop the practice of marking people as inactive voters if they don’t respond to a municipal census; the third bill would have the Secretary of State’s Office assess how accessible polling locations are for people with disabilities.

4. Massachusetts Treasurer Deb Goldberg is appealing a judge’s ruling that the state reinstate Shannon O’Brien as chair of the Cannabis Control Commission and award her back pay.

But the Suffolk judge who issued the ruling this week, finding no evidence that O’Brien had exhibited “gross misconduct” as Goldberg alleged, wrote in his opinion that he doesn’t see an appeal as likely to succeed. “As the case at the bar does not present as a close one,” Judge Robert Gordon wrote, “the Court does not foresee that the Treasurer is reasonably likely to succeed on the merits of an appeal.”

Young driver deaths on pace to reach 10-year high in Mass

GBH’s Jeremy Siegel found a worrisome statistic in state data: 22 drivers ages 15-21 have died between January and August this year, a higher number for the first eight months of any year since 2015, the earliest available data. 2022, the deadliest year for drivers 15-21 in Massachusetts, saw 24 deaths over the full 12 months. 

“And this is just a partial year, so we are concerned about the trajectory of that number,” Colleen Ogilvie, the state’s Registrar of Motor Vehicles, told Siegel. “I think it’s time for a call to action for us all to come together and say, how can we work together to fix this?”

So why are more young drivers dying? There’s no single answer, but Siegel found some areas of concern in the data. About 35% of all crashes involving teenagers include speeding, and seven of the 18 young drivers who died between January and July of this year were not wearing seatbelts. 

“We know that wearing a seatbelt is going to reduce your risk of dying in a crash by about 50 percent, so if all those young people were wearing seatbelts, three or four of them would still be alive today,” said Mark Schieldrop, a senior spokesman for AAA Northeast. The organization has a partnership with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation to make people more aware of safe driving practices for teenagers. “That’s a really nuts and bolts type of advice — to always wear your seatbelt. And for some reason, teens are opting not to by a large margin.”

The vast majority of drivers who died were male — 18, compared with four female drivers.

“Girls are still dying behind the wheel, but when we look at the data, it clearly tells us that something’s off, and that disparity is so significant that we really need to pay extra attention to our male drivers,” Schieldrop told Siegel.

And our collective tendency toward lots of screentime and not enough sleep can be a factor too.

“Many young people report being on their phone until the very moment that they want to be falling asleep,” said Dr. Rebecca Robbins, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Cultivating skills in our young people to resist the urge to be checking the phone constantly, to be responding to every notification — that might improve driving behavior and our ability to get a good night’s sleep.”

Read Jeremy Siegel’s full reporting here. 

Dig deeper:
-Hundreds mourn, call for change after Cambridge cyclist deaths

-Boston releases review of streets, including new bus and bike lanes

-10 road safety dos and don’ts that might just save your life