Boring Alert (Halbert v. Michigan)
While everyone else is talking about the Supreme Court’s decision in Kelo, I’m just gonna slip in with something else. In Halbert v. Michigan, another decision released yesterday, the Court decided, 6-3, that a person who pleaded guilty to a crime and is seeking leave to appeal must be appointed a lawyer if he cannot afford one. Halbert v. Michigan is a second-tier case. There weren’t many people holding their breath for this one. But dammit, I did a lot of reading on this issue last year, and I’m not about to let that go to waste!
In 1994, Michigan amended its Constitution to allow appeals, in cases where an accused criminal plead guilty in the first trial, only by leave of the court. These defendants would have to apply for leave to appeal to Michigan’s Court of Appeals. That doesn’t sound bad, right? But Michigan also has a law limiting the circumstances in which indigent (poor) plea-convicted defendants can be appointed counsel for their application for leave to appeal, and this is where the problems come in…
But don’t defendants have a right to appointed counsel for their first appeal? Well, yeah, sort of. Douglas v. California says that prisoners have a right to appointed counsel when they have a right to a first appeal. (Interestingly, it seems that Douglas v. California was also overshadowed when it came out, as it was decided the same day as Gideon v. Wainwright, the case that everyone (well, the subset of everyone who cares about this kind of thing) associates with appointed counsel.) The other major precedent here is Ross v. Moffitt, which established that counsel did not need to be appointed for second-tier, discretionary appeals, such as appeals to the highest state court or the Supreme Court itself.
The issue concerning the Court here is determining which precedent is most applicable to this situation. Halbert, a defendant denied the right of counsel, claims that Douglas requires that counsel be appointed to assist with the application for leave to appeal, while Michigan argues that this is a discretionary appeal, similar to the appeal to a state supreme court, where Ross held that appointed counsel is not required.
Why do I know any of this? I looked at Kowalski v. Tesmer, a case raising the same issue, for a political science class last year. At the time, the Court failed to reach the merits of the case because the attorneys bringing the case did not have standing to challenge the statute on behalf of the indigent defendants being denied counsel. Admittedly, though, the petitioners had a tough case to make. They had to show that there was a substantial hindrance to a prisoner’s ability to assert his own rights, when the respondents could simply point to Halbert, already scheduled for conference, and say, “Well, he did it.” So that case wasn’t really that tough. But back to yesterday’s decision in Halbert…
The majority opinion, written by Justice Ginsberg, held that this case was more similar to Douglas’s first-tier appeals of right and that failure to provide an attorney to those who cannot afford one violates the Constitution. The Court gave two major reasons for their decision: first, the Michigan court’s decision on the prisoner’s petition for leave to appeal is decided on the merits of the case. Michigan’s Court of Appeals functions as error-correction by evaluating each appeal on the substance of its claim, where the State Supreme Court in Ross took cases not to correct the mistakes of lower courts, but to decide issues of public interest or settle important legal points. Second, in most cases, this is the only review the prisoner would get, and without an appellate attorney, he is at an unconstitutional disadvantage. In Ross, the appellants already had the benefit of an attorney for their first-tier appeal, and so they could use the materials from this appeal to make their case to the high court. Here, defendants–often learning impaired or illiterate–do not have the use of a brief prepared for a court of appeals. They have to navigate the complicated appellate system working only from the trial transcript and materials prepared for their first trial.
Justice Thomas’s dissent, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Scalia, argues that Michigan has set up a system of discretionary appeals, and so Ross should apply. He also argues that even if Halbert had a right to an appellate attorney, he waived that right when he entered his plea. Justice Ginsberg addresses this point at the end of her opinion, saying that Michigan law did not recognize that right, so Halbert could not waive it, and even if he could, he did not do so knowingly and intelligently.
And that’s pretty much it for Halbert v. Michigan. Wasn’t that fun? (Don’t answer that.)
June 26th, 2005 at 5:28 pm
Random — my crim professor briefed/argued that case (and the prior one the Supremes dodged on standing), so I followed that case fairly closely too. Good summary!
June 27th, 2005 at 11:58 am
Your professor argued those cases? That’s really cool. This was a good case for me to keep track of. It was interesting and wasn’t so complex that I lost track of what was going on (though the third-party standing stuff in Kowalski was a little over my head at the time).