Maine Hires Lawyers With Criminal Records to Defend Its Poorest Residents

[Judi Lynn]

Maine is the only state in the country with no public defender system. Instead, legal services for the poor are left to private attorneys, who face disproportionately high amounts of discipline, and an office that doesn’t supervise them.

by Samantha Hogan, The Maine Monitor, with data analysis by Agnel Philip Oct. 6, 6 a.m. EDT

The temperature hovered just above freezing as Officer Zachary Harmon drove his patrol car down the Route 1 bypass close to Maine’s border with New Hampshire. It was right after midnight on Feb. 25, 2012. A mix of snow and rain had fallen throughout the night, leaving the blacktop slick. Out of the dark ahead, Harmon saw a pair of headlights headed directly at him.

Harmon cranked up his siren and flashed the cruiser’s red and blue lights. The oncoming car was driving in the wrong lane, forcing him to veer off the road. Swinging his patrol car around, he pulled in front of the vehicle, bringing it to a stop. After a flustered search the driver handed a passport to Harmon. Dispatch confirmed she was out on bail for drunken driving, police records show, so Harmon asked her to step out of the car. In fast and slurred words, Suzanne Dwyer-Jones made one thing clear: She was a lawyer.

A death and divorce had rattled the defense attorney. A year of rambling voice messages, missed work and an arrest for allegedly attempting to sell prescription drugs had left the people around Dwyer-Jones worried, according to disciplinary records from the state agency charged with overseeing attorney conduct. Now, Harmon watched her irises shaking involuntarily, a sign of intoxication. For the fourth time in 14 months, Dwyer-Jones was arrested for driving under the influence. She would plead guilty to misdemeanor “reckless conduct.” At a disciplinary hearing a year later, a judge ruled that her alcoholism and mental health posed a “substantial threat of irreparable harm to the public” and suspended Dwyer-Jones from practicing law for a year.

. . .

Dwyer-Jones appeared again in Maine’s courts two years later. But this time, it was not for any alleged crime. She had secured a job as an attorney for Maine’s Commission on Indigent Legal Services, or MCILS, the agency responsible for defending the state’s most impoverished people.

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