Innocent people were going to jail.

Until about five years ago, Michigan had zero standards for the attorneys hired by counties to represent criminal defendants who couldn’t afford to hire a lawyer.

As a result, Michigan had a failing system in which court-appointed attorneys were overworked and underpaid, often rushing their clients into plea deals, rarely filing motions challenging the prosecution, and rarely spending time with their clients outside of court hearings.

Improper defense played a part in about half of all of Michigan’s overturned convictions listed in the National Registry of Exonerations, meaning innocent people went to jail because their lawyers failed them.

In 2018, the newly formed Michigan Indigent Defense Commission began issuing grants to counties to reform their indigent defense systems to meet new state standards that for the first time require counties to give court-appointed attorneys a reasonable caseload and to pay them well. The standards also require court-appointed attorneys to thoroughly investigate their cases and to meet with their clients early in the court process, among other standards.

Before the standards, only seven Michigan counties had a public defender office, in which defense attorneys are salaried and work only on indigent defense cases. Now, Michigan has 33 public defender offices serving 39 counties, including the Northeast Michigan Regional Defender Office serving Alpena, Montmorency, and Oscoda counties, which opened in July 2021.

Such reforms could be changing the outcomes for indigent defendants.

In 2022, 71% of all criminal circuit court cases across Alpena, Presque Isle, Montmorency, and Alcona counties ended with a guilty plea, down from 79% in those counties in 2018.

About 13% of cases ended with dismissal of the charges — either by the judge or the prosecutor — in 2022, up from about 9% in 2018.

Alpena County Prosecutor Cynthia Muszynski told The News for a recent story that the increased dismissal rate had less to do with defense attorneys and more to do with how the court worked to clear a backlog of cases caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. She said some defendants had multiple cases pending and she agreed to dismiss charges in one or more cases in exchange for guilty pleas in other cases that would result in the same sentences as if the other cases moved forward.

But Rick Steiger, the chief defender at the Northeast Michigan Regional Defender Office, said he believed his office was making a difference. Though she had no research to back it up, Kristen Staley, executive director of the Indigent Defense Commission, said she thought the standards were impacting the courts. And, though he didn’t know for sure what caused the increase in dismissals and decrease in guilty pleas, Ed Black, chief judge of the 26th Circuit Court, said the indigent defense standards absolutely impacted the court.

Whether or not the standards and reforms led to fewer guilty pleas and more dismissals, we say the reforms and standards are a good thing.

Everyone is entitled to a good lawyer when they’re charged with a crime. The Constitution says so. And whether or not someone gets a good lawyer shouldn’t hinge on whether or not they have the money to hire one.

And innocent people shouldn’t go to jail because their lawyer isn’t doing all he or she could to help.

So we commend the Indigent Defense Commission for its work, and we’ll pay more attention to the figures in the future to see if the trend of increased dismissals and decreased guilty pleas continues into the future.