Lawyers in This State Are Allowed to Ghost Clients for Years. Why Don’t More Judges Stop Them?
And when it came to Finley letters, judges accepted almost all of them over the three years of cases I reviewed, despite the lawyers’ minimal investigative efforts.
Key points
- “It’s looking like it’s going to be a Finley dismissal,” the judge agreed after a bit more discussion, “but every option is open.” I’ve spent years covering criminal justice in Pennsylvania, including the post-conviction system that allows people to argue that their lawyer had mishandled their case or to raise newly discovered evidence.
- I noticed that judges continued to assign lawyers more cases even after appeals courts flagged serious issues with their work.
- What I wanted to know was: Why has it become the norm for Pennsylvania’s lawyers to argue against their own clients?
I also looked at three years’ worth of invoices and found that, three quarters of the time, Philly lawyers who wrote Finley letters had never spoken with their clients, contacted the trial lawyer or obtained available police files before deciding their claims had no merit.
Additional details
- Judges are largely in charge of appointing them to cases, and those same judges are supposed to make sure they’re doing a timely and diligent job.
- Over the past year, I’ve reported on how lawyers, working under fee structures banned in other states, fell years behind on their cases.
- That question sent me on a yearlong reporting odyssey, during which I read hundreds of Finley letters, tracked down court financial records from all 67 Pennsylvania counties, interviewed dozens of lawyers and analyzed thousands of court dockets.
- In fact, dozens of lawyers I spoke to expressed sharply divided opinions about the extent of their obligations to these clients.
- I spoke with prisoners who’d waited nearly a decade for their lawyers to file anything and others whose lawyers filed Finley letters despite compelling evidence of innocence.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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