A report out Tuesday calls Michigan's efforts to provide legal counsel to defendants one of the worst in the nation. And it's not a new problem.

The report from the State Bar of Michigan and National Legal Aid and Defender Association Partnership basically says -- poor people in Michigan are not getting quality legal representation which is guaranteed by the constitution.
There are many reasons, including funding.
Michigan is one of only seven states that does not provide any money from the state for public defense. The entire burden falls on the 83 counties separately.
What that leads to, according to this report, is quick representation instead of quality representation.
In counties with a high crime rate it gets much worse. In Detroit for example, five part-time public defenders spend an average of 32 minutes per case, handling 2,400 to 2,800 cases each, while the national standard for a full-time public defender is only 400 cases per year.
Public defenders also have to ask the judge for money to run fingerprints, DNA tests and get expert witnesses. In some areas, like Jackson County, public defenders get paid a flat fee to try cases whether it's one case or 100.
"There's just a natural conflict of interest," says David Carroll of the National Legal Aid & Defender Association. "(When a lawyer's) ability to put food on (their) family's table is impacted on the decision to go to trial or not."
Moreover, that compensation pales in comparison to what private lawyers get paid.
"Overall the pay scale is out of sync with the private sector," says former prosecutor Don Martin.
The report concludes it translates into a public safety issue. In recent years, several wrongful convictions have come to light, exposing the state's failure to provide for a functioning justice system that keeps communities safe. When an innocent person is convicted the real criminal remains on the streets.
One example might be the Claude McCollum case. He was wrongly convicted in 2006 for the murder of LCC professor Carolyn Kronenberg. He was represented by a public defender although no court ever cited "inadequate defense" as a cause of the conviction in that case.

With many counties and the state constantly in a budget crunch, the question is where is that money going to come from to fix this overall problem? We'll have to wait and see for that answer.

In the past, many proposals have been introduced and shot down to fix the funding problem according to Martin.

There is also a class-action lawsuit still pending in Ingham County filed by defendants upset with their public defense. A judge threw out the Attorney General's petition to dismiss the case, but that decision is now pending appeal.