One Lawyer. Five Years. 3,802 Cases.
Melinda S. Cameron has been a private criminal defense attorney in Detroit for 35 years—and she hasn’t taken a vacation in a decade, she says. Nearly every day, you can find her at the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice, the city’s austere 1970s-era courthouse, asking the clerks whether any poor people need a lawyer.
Most of the judges there know her, she says, from law school or from past cases. And she always shows up to court on time, she points out.
That helps explain why judges appoint Cameron to represent more poor defendants—by more than a hundred every year—than any other private lawyer in Detroit’s felony court system, making her the highest-paid attorney doing such work. In the past five years, she has taken 3,802 cases, including 1,787 new felonies, according to data from Michigan’s Third Judicial Circuit Court. That’s more than one felony case every workday—excluding the ones involving simple probation violations, which Cameron also takes hundreds of each year.
One Detroit lawyer’s caseload
A national commission that sets standards for criminal defense lawyers recommends that an attorney should not handle more than 150 felony cases per year. In Detroit, however, some private defense attorneys appointed by the
