Wrongly convicted lose key case in bid for more money
DETROIT (AP) — People who are compensated by the state for being wrongly convicted aren't titled to collect cash for time spent in custody before trial, the Michigan Supreme Court said Thursday.
Since the compensation program began in 2017, lower courts have rejected requests for money for pretrial detention, saying the law doesn't mention it.
The Supreme Court agreed in a 4-3 opinion.
“It makes sense that the Legislature would decline to compensate plaintiff for pre-conviction detention that was purely the result of local decision-making,” Justice Brian Zahra wrote. “The Legislature could have written the (law) as a wrongful-prosecution act or a wrongful-arrest-compensation act, but it did not do so.”
The case centered on Davontae Sanford, whose murder convictions in Wayne County were thrown out because of police misconduct.
He was paid $408,000 for his time in prison — $50,000 for each year — but he was also seeking $27,000 for 198 days spent in a detention center for teens.
Chief Justice Bridget McCormack, who represented the wrongly convicted before joining the court in 2013, wrote a dissenting opinion.
“Mr. Sanford was ‘imprisoned’ every day that he was confined in a juvenile detention facility for a crime that he did not commit and is therefore due compensation for the time he was detained before and after his conviction,” McCormack said.
ABA program to explore problems of rural access to justice
Three experts on rural justice will join American Bar Association President Judy Perry Martinez on Tuesday, July 28 to discuss problems of rural access to justice.
The one-hour online webinar coincides with the release of the 2020 ABA Profile of the Legal Profession, an annual compilation of statistics and trends among lawyers, judges and law students.
New to the report is a chapter on legal deserts, with maps and charts showing where lawyers are abundant and where they are rare in areas across the country.
Martinez will serve as moderator of the panel composed of:
• Patrick Goetzinger of Rapid City, S.D., former president of the South Dakota State Bar Association, who helped create Project Rural Practice in South Dakota
• Lisa Pruitt, law professor at the University of California, Davis, and lead author of “Legal Deserts: A Multi-State Perspective on Rural Access to Justice,” published in the Harvard Law & Policy Review in 2018.
• Lauren Sudeall, law professor at Georgia State University and a co-author of the 2018 Harvard report
The program will be from 11 a.m. to noon ET on on Zoom.
Registration is required to attend and can be completed by visiting https://americanbar.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_mjk6v-tTTbq1JDcSkQqWCQ
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