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The ongoing shortage of lawyers for low-income Mainers has long been in the news, but the problem grabbed headlines last week in a startling and tragic way.
Leein Hinkley was fatally shot by police in Auburn early last Saturday morning. According to police, Hinkley tried to break into a woman’s home, which was on fire when officers arrived. The woman escaped, but a body, believed to be her significant other, was later found in the home. A second home was also burned down. A shelter-in-place order was issued and some homes were evacuated while police dealt with Hinkley. Police said Hinkley shot at officers and led them on a chase through the neighborhood before he was shot on a rooftop by Maine State Police.
Hinkley had been released on bail from jail just days earlier. He had been jailed for violating probation involving a 2011 conviction for domestic violence charges, in which he pled guilty to stabbing his then-girlfriend and a passerby who tried to intervene. Hinkley had been arrested in May on charges of domestic violence aggravated assault. As an important aside, Hinckley’s domestic violence conviction would have prohibited him from possessing a firearm under a law that the Supreme Court upheld on Friday. So there are unanswered questions about how he obtained the gun that he used during Saturday’s standoff.
The Maine Fraternal Order of Police and Maine State Troopers Foundation blasted an Androscoggin County judge for releasing Hinkley on $1,500 bail, even though the county’s district attorney’s office had strongly objected. The judge, Sarah Churchill, had said that Hinkley’s constitutional rights were being violated because he could not get a defense attorney to represent him at numerous court hearings.
Last week, Churchill dismissed two misdemeanor charges, including one for domestic violence assault, against a different Androscoggin County man who had been held for 105 days without being appointed a lawyer. She also cited constitutional concerns in that case.
Gov. Janet Mills, in a statement on Thursday, was also critical of Churchill’s actions in the Hinkley case.
“Based on the facts of the case and my experience as a former defense attorney, district attorney, and attorney general, I strongly disagree with the judge’s decision,” Mills said. ”I recognize and appreciate that judges make difficult decisions every day, balancing constitutional rights, including the right to counsel, with many other considerations — chief among them being the safety of the public. In my view, given the severity of the charges, the defendant’s criminal history and the serious danger he posed, these important, competing interests were not properly balanced in this case.”
The state’s judicial branch defended Churchill, noting the ongoing shortage of attorneys for low-income defendants like Hinkley.
“It is dangerous and short-sighted to blame the court for the horrific acts because it obscures the real nature of the problem: an insufficient number of attorneys willing to represent the rights of the accused,” the judicial system said in a June 17 press release. “The crisis of lack of counsel has been developing for years; it will not disappear overnight. This is a systemic problem and one that all partners in the criminal justice system must work together to resolve rather than criticizing each other without offering a solution.”
These are all good points and the constitutional rights of defendants must be protected. However, this is far from an academic exercise.
Two people died in Auburn, and other lives were put at risk, because Hinkley did not get the defense he is entitled to.
We understand that the state’s chief justice and other judges, the Legislature and the governor can’t snap their fingers and magically make more attorneys available. But their work to solve this problem — which includes more state funding for the current indigent defense system while building a new public defender system — must take on even more urgency, which the governor emphasized in her statement.
The governor noted that Churchill could have appointed a lawyer for Hinkley instead of waiting for a lawyer from the Maine Commission on Public Defense Services and that private law firms could do more to ease the crisis.
The bottom line, however, seems to be that there are not enough lawyers in Maine willing and able to take on this work, despite significant pay increases in recent years.
Clearly, this is no easy problem to solve, but the terror and destruction that Leein Hinkley caused last weekend is a stark reminder of the consequences of Maine’s broken criminal defense system and it must be a call to action for state leaders.