Michigan: The Poster-Child for Reform

In 1985, Eddie Joe Lloyd was convicted in Detroit of the rape and murder of an under-aged girl. The evidence of his guilt was overwhelming - Eddie Joe Lloyd's written confession gave specific information about the crime scene only the perpetrator could have known. Police also had him on tape admitting to the brutal act. It was a slam dunk case; the jury took less than an hour to convict him of 1st degree felony murder. Lamenting the lack of the death penalty in Michigan, the judge sent Eddie Joe to a maximum security prison for the remainder of his life without the possibility of parole - a measured and appropriate sentence for such a heinous crime. Justice was served .... Except for one small problem - Eddie Joe Lloyd was innocent.
 The road to Mr. Lloyd's wrongful conviction began with a letter he drafted to the police suggesting that he had pertinent information on the case. The letter was not unique. Eddie Joe was convinced that he had the supernatural ability to solve crimes and wrote letters to the police offering his services on previous occasions. The particular letter that set in motion his wrongful conviction was written from his bed at the Detroit Psychiatric Institute where he was non-voluntarily committed. The police interrogated Eddie Joe on at least three separate occasions at the mental health facility. Mr. Lloyd was never offered a lawyer during these interviews, during which time, as it turned out, the police officers "allowed Lloyd to believe that, by confessing and getting arrested, he would help them ‘smoke out' the real perpetrator." They fed him salient information about the crime scene to make his confession more believable.

The high ethical demands of representing a capital case combined with the paltry compensation paid to lawyers in 1985 Detroit left the Wayne County district court two pools of attorneys from which to fulfill Mr. Lloyd's constitutional right to counsel - 1) those that saw accepting court-appointments and zealously defending poor people as part of an attorney's professional and ethical duty to the Bar, despite the significant personal financial loss it imposed; or, 2) those that maximized their economic return on court-appointed cases by taking on as many assignments as the courts would allow while disposing of them as quickly as possible. With such a high profile case as this - Detroit had been under curfew in the months that followed the crime - the appointing judge assigned a lawyer that would not put up too many hurdles to getting Mr. Lloyd off the streets and behind bars for good.

Aiding the goal of quick convictions, Wayne County only paid a single flat fee of $150 to court appointed attorneys to cover the entire cost of pre-trial preparation and investigations. In Eddie Joe Lloyd's case, his attorney gave $50 to a convicted ex-felon to serve in the capacity of investigator and pocketed the extra $100 to cover the rest of his pre-trial expenses. Not surprisingly, the "investigator" conducted no independent inquiry into Mr. Lloyd's confession or his mental state. The lawyer too failed to interview both Mr. Lloyd's doctors and his family members about Eddie Joe's history of delusions of grandeur. And, no independent of the police canvass of the crime scene occurred - a simple endeavor that would have shown that a number of "facts" in Mr. Lloyd's original letter were incorrect and that later admissions only matched the police's prevailing theory of the case at the time and not the true particulars of the crime. No expert was retained to explain Mr. Lloyd's mental history to the jury or to challenge the state's expert testimony that Eddie Joe was competent despite his non-voluntarily committed status at the state facility. In 1985 Detroit, such defense expert witnesses were rarely granted by the court, and if they were, the measly reimbursement basically eliminated any decent expert unwilling to donate his time from testifying. Whether or not Eddie Joe's attorney knew this to be the case from past experience, he never bothered to ask the court for an expert. And, despite the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Miranda v. Arizona, Lloyd's court-appointed attorney never appropriately challenged the non-counseled custodial interrogations at the mental health facility at pre-trial hearings.

Then, eight days before trial, Eddie Joe Lloyd's attorney suddenly withdrew from the case. But that apparently was a mere inconvenience to the court which quickly hand-selected another attorney who saw no ethical problem with starting the trial in approximately one week's time since the original attorney had done "all the necessary" pre-trial work. This second attorney did not even bother to meet with Mr. Lloyd's original court-appointed attorney before trial or to cross-examine the police officer who was most responsible for Eddie Joe's coerced confession on the stand. In fact, Mr. Lloyd's new defense lawyer did not call a single defense witness to testify. His closing argument clocked in at less than five minutes. Post-conviction, Mr. Lloyd's received another court-appointed lawyer to conduct his direct appeal. This one never even bothered to make a cursory visit to Eddie Joe in prison or to raise ineffective assistance of counsel claims against the two trial attorneys. After his direct appeal, Eddie Joe wrote the court to suggest he had not received an adequate defense, and act that spurred his appellate attorney to write a letter to the judge saying that Eddie Joe's claims should not be taken seriously because he was "guilty and should die."

Eddie Joe Lloyd fortunately experienced a few years of freedom after serving 17 years in prison before passing away from medical complications at the age of 54. Eddie Joe's freedom was secured thanks to the efforts of The Innocence Project - a non-profit legal clinic at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law that handles post-conviction cases where DNA evidence still exists in cases tried before the advent of DNA sciences - working in conjunction with local Michigan attorney Saul Green. For failing to provide an adequate defense up front, Wayne County cost its tax payers $4 million in a settlement agreement with Mr. Lloyd's estate. Sadly, the DNA evidence that completely exonerated Eddie Joe Lloyd has not led to a match on any law enforcement database. More than 20 years after the crime, the whereabouts of the real perpetrator remains unknown.

NCEJ & Successful Reform in Michigan
On June 16, 2008, NLADA released a report detailing the current constitutional crisis in the State of Michigan. After studying a sample of ten county defender systems, we concluded that the state's willful denial of its federal obligations has produced a myriad of public defense systems that vary greatly in defining who qualifies for services and the competency of the services rendered. Though the level of services varies from county to county - giving credence to the proposition that the level of justice a poor person receives is dependent entirely on which side of a county line one's crime is alleged to have been committed instead of the factual merits of the case - NLADA found that none of the public defender services in the sample counties were constitutionally adequate.

The statewide study of public defender services was conducted under the auspices of a joint resolution of the Michigan Legislature (SCR 39) through a generous grant of the Atlantic Philanthropies.  The resolution states whereas the people of Michigan "expect the government to administer a system of justice that is just, swift, accountable and frugal," and "whereas there is no accounting of total indigent defense cases nor complete accounting of for expenditures dedicated to public defense services, the Michigan Legislature requests the NLADA, in cooperation with the State Bar of Michigan, to issue a report respecting the fairness, cost and accountability of the various indigent defense systems throughout the state."

The year since the release of "A Race to the Bottom" has been one of near constant activity as Michigan has become the poster-child for the nationwide right to counsel crisis. The U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security has held two hearings on the indigent defense this year alone, with NLADA's David Carroll testifying before the subcommittee at the first on March 26. NCEJ continues to work closely with committee staff to guide the Federal response to the national crisis. Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) has expressed interest in holding field hearings throughout Michigan, even as in-state stakeholders work to enact meaningful reforms. NLADA remains a close partner of the State Bar of Michigan, providing technical assistance to State Bar representatives as they work with state legislators in drafting reform legislation. The progress towards reform has been moving at such a fast pace, that one NLADA partner characterized indigent defense in Michigan as having two eras: 1857 to 2008; and the present era of NLADA involvement.