A WORK STOPPAGE among court-appointed lawyers in Massachusetts, which has already prompted the release of nearly a dozen defendants without legal representation, may soon spill over into the juvenile justice system. The state agency in charge of providing lawyers for indigent defendants filed a petition with the Supreme Judicial Court on Monday asking it to approve a similar emergency measure for cases in Juvenile Court, where more than 100 young people are facing criminal charges without representation.
In late May, private attorneys who serve as court-appointed lawyers for indigent defendants began their work stoppage, demanding an increase in hourly pay.
As the pay dispute ground the normal flow of justice to a crawl, the Supreme Judicial Court earlier this month approved what is known as the Lavallee protocol – an emergency process that requires defendants who have been held in custody for a week without representation to be released and those who have been without representation for 45 days to have their cases dismissed, at least for a time.
Despite good faith efforts by the Committee for Public Counsel Services, the state’s public defender agency, and the local bar advocate organizations, SJC Justice Dalila Argaez Wendlandt wrote, “there is an ongoing systemic violation of indigent criminal defendants’ constitutional rights to effective assistance of counsel.”
On Monday, CPCS petitioned the courts to implement the Lavallee protocol for young people without representation. There were 101 unrepresented juveniles as of July 18 charged with crimes in Essex, Franklin, Hampden, Middlesex, Norfolk, and Suffolk counties, according to CPCS’s filing.
“As in District Court, there is a chronic shortage of private counsel in juvenile courts across the Commonwealth which has been exacerbated by the work stoppage,” the filing reads. “Without a specific end date to the work stoppage combined with the ongoing counsel shortages in Juvenile Court, increasing numbers of children will face criminal charges and detention unrepresented. The ‘strong medicine’ of Lavallee is now urgently needed in Juvenile Court.”
Staff lawyers at the Committee for Public Counsel Services are continuing to represent indigent clients, but roughly 80 percent of cases in which defendants cannot afford their own attorney are handled by private lawyers, or “bar advocates,” assigned to the case by CPCS.
As the work stoppage by bar advocates enters its ninth week, hundreds of cases are on the verge of being dismissed. Tuesday marks the first day of mass hearings for defendants who have been without representation for 45 days, with courts on the precipice of needing to process about 800 cases across district courts in Suffolk and Middlesex counties.
There are far fewer cases in Juvenile Court than in adult district courts. In fiscal year 2024, according to CPCS, there were 6,765 new cases filed in the Juvenile Court as compared with over 558,000 new criminal filings in district courts.
However, even before the work stoppage, the filing claims, CPCS attorneys were having trouble securing counsel for young offenders because of a chronic shortage of court-appointed lawyers in Juvenile Court cases. Multiple young people are without counsel in multiple courts for reasons “that do not appear to be related to the work stoppage,” the filing reads. Now, dozens of young people in Suffolk and Middlesex counties have been unrepresented for at least 15 days.
Though bar advocates and CPCS, which oversees the bar advocates, have advocated for more funding from the Legislature, no raise was included in the 2026 budget approved by Legislature and signed by Gov. Maura Healey earlier this month.
CPCS proposed a pay increase for the attorneys from $65 an hour to $73 an hour over the next two fiscal years for lawyers in district court, an increase from $85 an hour to $105 an hour for lawyers in Superior Court, and $120 an hour to $150 an hour for lawyers handling murder cases.
In successfully arguing on July 3 before SJC Justice Wendlandt that the state high court should approve the Lavallee protocol for adult defendants, CPCS also asked the justice to directly order raises for the bar advocates. She denied that part of the request, for now, noting that the Legislature is responsible for setting the wage rates for bar advocates.
When asked about the work stoppage last week, Healey said releasing defendants under Lavallee raises multiple concerns.
“It’s a matter of public safety, it’s also a matter of due process, and people are entitled to representation,” Healey said. “I continue to call for a swift resolution here so we can get beyond this so that people can be protected in court with counsel, and also that public safety is protected.”
The consequences of prolonged incarceration or time awaiting trial are even more dire for juvenile defendants, which are necessarily treated differently under law, CPCS argues.
Long-term detention worsens rates of recidivism among young people, it is destabilizing, results in worse legal outcomes, “devastates” access to education, increases racial disparities, causes trauma and exacerbates mental illness, the filing argues. On a dollars and cents level, it is also “costly and ineffective,” CPCS wrote.
The daily cost of secure detention in the state was approximately $300-350 per bed in 2014, the brief says, citing a 2014 study on youth incarceration. “The indirect costs,” it said, “in the form of negative impacts on a youth’s life and recidivist outcomes, make detention the most expensive and least effective of the available alternatives.”
CPCS is asking for a modified version of the Lavallee protocol, in which a young offender is released if they are held more than three days without counsel and their case dismissed if no attorney has filed an appearance on behalf of a young person within 15 days of their first court appearance. CPCS is also asking that hearings on these cases happen in the juvenile court where the case is pending, and clerks provide daily lists of unrepresented youths so that attorneys can identify potential Lavallee cases.
