IMG_8818emailLaura Sager is the director and spokesperson of the Campaign for Justice and is responsible for leading the Campaign’s legislative and organizing efforts. The Campaign for Justice is a broad-based group of organizations and individuals from across the political spectrum fighting for a fair and effective public defense system in Michigan. The Campaign’s coalition includes nearly 50 organizations from across the political spectrum.

Previously, Laura served as Michigan project director, executive director and the national campaign director for Families Against Mandatory Minimums, leading FAMM’s media, coalition-building, and legislative campaign for reform of mandatory sentences in across the country. Her work as the Michigan project director resulted in the first major reform of Michigan’s harshest in the nation mandatory minimum drug laws in July 1998, then the 2002 repeal of those laws The 2002 legislation reformed Michigan’s entire structure of mandatory minimum sentences and was the most sweeping drug law reform enacted by a state. Both reforms had majority support on both sides of the aisle and were signed into law by former conservative Republican Governer John Engler.

In 1999, Laura received a tribute from Michigan’s House of Representatives and Senate for her service to prisoners and their families. She has been interviewed extensively on sentencing and public defense reform, including segments on 60 Minutes II with Dan Rather and national conservative talk shows the O’Reilly Factor and From the Heartland.

Question: How do you give a man back his life after spending more than a quarter of a century behind bars on a wrongful conviction?

Answer: You don’t, because you can’t.

Walter Swift knows this all too well. He was wrongfully convicted of the 1982 rape and robbery of a Detroit woman and sentenced to 20-40 years in prison for the crime. After spending almost 26 years incarcerated, he was exonerated on May 21, 2008.

What makes Swift’s case doubly tragic is that, this gross miscarriage of justice wasn’t due to the more commonly understood problems within the justice system such as a biased jury, bigoted judge or even being framed by rogue police. In fact, the problem is more endemic, even as it is much less well understood by the public and the media.

It was the failure of his public defender to present an adequate defense.
Lawrence Greene served as Mr. Swift’s trial attorney in 1982. Mr. Greene was reprimanded numerous times for misconduct and failure to provide effective representation, and his license to practice law in Michigan was revoked three times – after he represented Mr. Swift. A working public defense system would monitor attorney performance and ensure that cases are assigned to qualified attorneys.

Mr. Swift’s attorney failed to question the police officer about the faulty eyewitness identification procedures, despite the fact that the officer’s notes read that it was “not a strong ID.” The officer later noted the weakness of the attorney’s line of questioning in an affidavit.

The attorney was aware of physical evidence that suggested the semen at the crime scene was not Mr. Swift’s. However, the attorney failed to cross examine one of the lab technicians and waived testimony from the other technician that would have helped to prove Mr. Swift’s innocence.
Walter Swift’s conviction was vacated on May 21, 2008. The Wayne County Prosecutor joined the Innocence Project in its motion to set aside the conviction.
The simple fact is the constitutional right to effective legal counsel for people who cannot afford a lawyer is fundamental to ensuring fairness and justice in American courts. Michigan’s system of public defense has been repeatedly identified as one of the worst in the country and we’re all paying a high price for its failures.

A report issued last June by the National Legal Aid and Defender Association was the first in depth study of the failures of Michigan’s public defense system. The report’s shocking conclusions: the system is chronically and severely under funded, poorly administered and fails to protect the constitutional rights of the accused. Even more alarming, the system for providing defense representation to children facing juvenile delinquency proceedings is considered the “poor stepchild” of the trial level system.

Families and communities of color are disproportionately affected by the failure to adequately fund public defense. A U.S. Department of Justice survey showing that, nationally, public defense attorneys represented 77 percent of African Americans and 73 percent of Latinos housed in state prisons in 2003.

Why is our system broken? First, Michigan’s is one of just seven states to punt all the responsibility for trial-level public defense to our counties. The state provides no funding and counties are ill-equipped to pay for or administer the system. The result: Michigan ranks 44th out of 50 states in per capita investments in public defense services. Our 83 counties provide widely varying levels of funding for the system, determining who is eligible for an attorney and what, if any level of training is required to represent county residents.

Bottom line: the side of a county line you live on should not affect your right to effective defense representation.

Just listen to this story from National Public Radio last month and you will see that in Michigan today, justice can be a matter of where you live and how much is in your checking account.

But funding isn’t the only problem. Michigan has no statewide standards to ensure attorneys have adequate training, meet with their clients before trial, or have manageable caseloads. In many counties, lawyers trying to do a good job for their clients, have to fight for access to essential resources, like investigators and expert witnesses. In many of the state’s counties, the lack of resources and overwhelming caseloads lead to mistakes, waste taxpayer dollars, put the public’s safety at risk and can put innocent adults and children in prison.

The Michigan Campaign for Justice is working, with the help of hundreds of volunteers, to fix the system. Please, let me introduce the campaign to you.

The Campaign is a non-partisan broad based coalition of organizations, individuals and grassroots volunteers (the Michigan conference of the NAACP and the National Conference of Black Lawyers – Detroit Chapter, included) working with state lawmakers to put in place both sufficient state funding and constitutionally-based standards for a public defense system that provides effective defense representation, no matter where an individual lives.

Unfortunately, there is nothing anyone can do to give Walter Swift back the years that he lost. But we as citizens can work hard to ensure that not another innocent person will have to endure decades in prison. Under the present broken system, what happened to Walter Swift can happen to anyone – especially if you are too poor to afford an attorney.

So our constitutional rights are worth fighting for. Our public defense system is failing the taxpayers, who are funding a patchwork and ineffective system; our communities, whose safety is compromised when the innocent are imprisoned and the guilty are free to commit other crimes; and the accused who must rely on it to deliver justice.

I greatly appreciate the opportunity to contribute to The Black Bottom and introduce the campaign to you. I invite you to find out more about our legislative efforts to reform the system at mijustice.org.