Berrien County has been named in a lawsuit backed by the American Civil Liberties Union alleging that adequate legal counsel is not provided to poor defendants in Michigan. According to documents on the ACLU Michigan website, the organization in 2007 filed a class-action suit challenging the way public defenders are provided to low-income residents accused of crimes in Michigan. It says that the system currently in place encourages attorneys to seek plea deals, rather than pursue a legitimate defense for the accused...and argues that it's underfunded and improperly organized. A Berrien County case is one of four cited in the lawsuit. The ACLU says that incident involved an 18 year-old indigent defendant whose appointed counsel was revoked after the judge told him his mother should be able to afford a lawyer. That defendant was also jailed when he failed to pay a fee for his electronic tether. Other cases cited in the suit come from Genesee, Wayne, and Muskegon Counties. Berrien County's corporate counsel told WSBT that he believes the reasoning of the ACLU suit is flawed, and that the system of bidding out and contracting private attorneys to serve as public defenders works better than any heavily-administered state system. The Michigan Supreme Court has agreed to hear the ACLU case, with proceedings set to begin in April.
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