NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WSMV) – In order to see her son, Kema Martin has to flip through photo albums.
The only way she can talk to him is by phone.
Terry Martin has not been convicted of a crime, but he is still in jail, and has been there for nearly three years. He has yet to work with his new court-appointed attorney on defense strategy for his case.
“I wanna be free, go home, be in the living room with my mother watching movies,” Martin said.
Dawn Deaner, the executive director of the nonprofit law firm, Choosing Justice Initiative, said Martin’s case is an example of a crisis with a shortage of court-appointed attorneys which is resulting in people, not convicted of crimes, sitting in jail.
“Their lives are on hold and they’re locked in a cage,” Deaner said.
Terry Martin was arrested in 2017, along with two others, in a deadly shooting at a North Nashville gas station. But he has yet to go to trial.
Martin was able to bond out, but three years later, his mother said an issue with his ankle monitor resulted in him being put in jail.
WSMV4 Investigates reached out to Martin’s current court-appointed attorney to get details of what happened with his ankle monitor but did not receive a call back.
Kema Martin says her son’s current court-appointed attorney has been battling health issues, so there hasn’t been any movement in his case.
But it’s Terry Martin’s former court-appointed attorney that his mother blames for derailing her son’s case.
She says the attorney stopped communicating with her son, her family, and stopped filing motions, like having her son’s case separated from the case of the man affidavits show is the suspected shooter. She said his attorney ended up moving out of state without giving any notice.
“It was like, he gave up,” she said
Deaner said Martin’s case isn’t isolated.
“There’s a significant number of people today who are in the Nashville jail who’s been waiting more than three years for trial,” says Deaner.
Deaner, and others in the court system, say a big part of the problem stems from issues surrounding court-appointed attorneys.
When a person cannot pay for representation, they are either assigned an attorney from the public defender’s officer, or they get a court-appointed attorney. These court-appointed attorneys work in private practice but agree to take cases paid for by the state.
And here’s where both attorneys and judges said the issue lies: court-appointed attorneys in Tennessee get the lowest reimbursement rate in the country. The $50 an hour rate hasn’t changed since 1997, and many cases have caps in place.
It means no matter how many hours are needed to work on a case, the state only reimburses up to a certain dollar amount. Judges say it all makes for a constant struggle to find people to take cases.
“This is absolutely the worst it’s been,” said Judge Sheila Calloway, a juvenile court judge in Davidson County.
Calloway said the reimbursement cap makes things especially dire in juvenile court.
She said their cases often need more court-appointed attorneys and last longer, which requires more time, despite reimbursement limitations.
“It doesn’t help their clients. It doesn’t help the children that we serve, and ultimately it doesn’t help the system,” Calloway said.
“Every day we hear from judges who must find lawyers to represent citizens who are constitutionally entitled to legal counsel. They tell us that the system is teetering on the brink,” Tennessee Supreme Court Chief Justice Holly Kirby wrote in a statement to WSMV4 Investigates. “Court proceedings can’t happen without court-appointed attorneys, but attorneys can’t afford to take cases at the current rates. The criminal justice and juvenile court systems are running out of options.”
Those in the system acknowledge that court-appointed attorneys get overloaded, which comes with its own impact on the quality of representation.
“You do see the quality of that representation deteriorate,” says Martesha Johnson, Chief Public Defender for Davidson County.
“Giving somebody a lawyer who never comes to see them and doesn’t communicate with them and doesn’t file any motions or advocate for them is giving them nothing,” Deaner said.
The courts are calling on the General Assembly to increase the hourly rate and expand funding for the program overall, but that won’t be decided until lawmakers approve a budget next year.
“There’s not any justice happening in our criminal justice system,” Deaner said.
It leaves people like Terry Martin in limbo.
“It shouldn’t be prolonged because they have too much to do. It shouldn’t be like that,” says his mother.
In January 2023, the Administrative Office of the Courts worked with the Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury to review the impact of the low hourly compensation rate for appointed attorneys in non-capital cases on the court system. The Comptroller’s investigation is still pending.
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