Gov. Janet Mills has issued her first vetoes of this session by opposing proposals dealing with defendants who cannot afford a lawyer and protections for agricultural employees who discuss their workplace conditions.
The vetoes appeared on the state’s website Monday, but the Democratic governor’s veto letters are dated June 18. At least two-thirds of lawmakers must vote to override a veto, but that has not happened since Mills first won election to the Blaine House in 2018.
Sen. Anne Carney, D-Cape Elizabeth, who co-chairs the Legislature’s Judiciary Committee, presented the public defense bill, but it grew out of a recommendation from the Maine Commission on Public Defense Services. The other proposal from Sen. Rachel Talbot Ross, D-Portland, would give agricultural employees the right to engage in certain “concerted activity” surrounding their work conditions, such as regarding wages and terms of employment.
The public defense measure clarifies an indigent defendant is entitled to legal counsel at the state’s expense if a prosecutor requests imprisonment, the accused is in custody at the time of their arraignment, the accused is held in custody for more than 24 hours or a court has found a risk of imprisonment for the defendant in any other pending criminal case they are facing. An amendment also applied the measure to a defendant being subject to bail conditions.
Mills, alluding to an ongoing public defender shortage and how a judge ruled in March the state is violating defendants’ Sixth Amendment rights, said the legislation would “undermine” the progress Maine is making on the issue.
“This bill would exacerbate the problem by creating a new statutory entitlement to counsel in a category of cases that the Sixth Amendment does not cover, placing further strain on both the roster of available attorneys and the courts as they work to reduce the backlog in criminal dockets,” Mills, a former attorney general and criminal defense lawyer, wrote.
The Maine Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers supported the measure, with executive director Tina Heather Nadeau testifying in May that “putting the decision about when a poor person gets a lawyer in the hands of the prosecuting attorney is unwise.”
“In other states, anyone who is deemed indigent and who is charged with a crime is eligible to receive court-appointed counsel,” Nadeau told members of the Legislature’s Judiciary Committee. “We believe Maine should adopt this broad approach — taking the determination of ‘risk of jail’ out of the hands of prosecutors and judges completely.”
On the agricultural employee front that has previously pitted the governor against labor interests, Mills had signed into law earlier this month a long-sought measure from Talbot Ross to cover farmworkers under Maine’s minimum wage of $14.65 an hour. She had vetoed her own proposal on that topic last year after objecting to an amendment that would have allowed workers to sue over alleged violations.
But Mills vetoed this year’s “concerted activity” measure to protect agriculture workers from retaliation for discussing their work conditions. The bill backed by labor groups initially failed to pass the Maine House of Representatives due to some Democratic opposition before that chamber decided to join the Senate in passing it.
In this month’s veto letter, Mills said that in states “where agriculture is dominated by large factory farms and corporate interests, it is important that workers receive the protections of strong labor laws.”
“But that bears no resemblance to the agricultural sector in Maine, where small businesses struggle to find reliable help and therefore generally treat their workers very well in order to retain them,” Mills wrote.
The Democratic-controlled Legislature will return to Augusta this month to handle vetoes from Mills before adjourning for the year.