Pennsylvania Contributes 57 Cents per Capita to Indigent Defense
A joint investigation by ProPublica and The Philadelphia Inquirer found that Pennsylvania’s system for reviewing wrongful-conviction claims allows court-appointed lawyers to go years — sometimes nearly two decades — without filing anything on behalf of the people they were appointed to represent. The review, based on a decade of court dockets and public-records requests filed with courts serving all 67 Pennsylvania counties, documented attorneys who received dozens of continuances and in some cases never filed at all before being replaced. The news organizations also reported that Pennsylvania contributes just 57 cents per resident toward indigent defense, while neighboring states on average contribute $26 per resident.
Nolan O’Neal was 20 years old and a high school student when Chester police arrested him for murder on the strength of four eyewitness identifications. At his 2005 trial, all four witnesses recanted, saying police had pressured them to accuse him. By the time attorney Scott Galloway was appointed to handle O’Neal’s petition under Pennsylvania’s Post Conviction Relief Act in 2013, O’Neal had already spent eight years in prison insisting he was innocent. Court records show Galloway filed one unsuccessful request for evidence and then asked for more time. In 2020, seven years after his appointment, Galloway told the judge he was still looking into the case: “I am still in the process of interviewing individuals,” the lawyer wrote to the judge in Delaware County, outside Philadelphia, who had already granted him 32 extensions. In 2022, after nine years, one unsuccessful request to access evidence and 41 extensions, Galloway filed a two-page brief that addressed only one of the issues O’Neal had wanted him to raise.
O’Neal wrote Galloway dozens of letters from state prison proposing legal arguments and sending leads to investigate, O’Neal said in an interview. “It is a daunting and exhausting task to navigate this legal process and be heard,” he said. “We at times even have to fight the attorneys who are supposed to represent us.” He also wrote directly to the judge overseeing his case: “Dear Judge Pagano: I am writing to your attention as I have grave and urgent concerns about my current appointed attorney Scott D. Galloway, who you have appointed to represent me on my PCRA petition pending in your court,” O’Neal wrote. “This is the best I can do to bring matters to your attention as my filings are going unanswered.”
In 2020, O’Neal received a letter from the brother of the murder victim admitting that his prior testimony against O’Neal was a lie. “I want to fix it. I know my brother would want me to. It’s been long enough,” the brother wrote. O’Neal said he pleaded with Galloway to track the man down. In 2022, Galloway attached the brother’s signed statement to his two-page filing, which mentioned none of the other issues O’Neal had raised nine years earlier or the other witnesses who had come forward over the years. The judge began the process of dismissing the claim, partly because the filing had been made too late. O’Neal is still fighting his case, now with a new court-appointed lawyer.
The problems documented by the news organizations extend beyond O’Neal’s case. Across Pennsylvania’s 67 counties, most post-conviction cases are handled by private lawyers paid hourly, by the case, or by the year, with little or no supervision. Reviewers found pay as low as $500 per case and delays stretching 19 years without a single filing. In Philadelphia alone, about 65 people waited three to eight years for a lawyer to take action before receiving a so-called “no-merit” letter — a filing urging the judge to reject the client’s claims. Statewide, nearly 200 cases in the last 15 years saw lawyers appointed, then file nothing at all over the span of a year or longer before being replaced. One of those cases stagnated for almost seven years before a new attorney picked up the file; another man was appointed five lawyers over eight years, dockets show, none of whom filed anything on his behalf.
To be sure, there can be good reasons for delays, since investigations can be complex: lawyers have spent years chasing down missing witnesses, litigating requests for DNA testing or combing through police files.
But in at least three counties, contract lawyers left multiple clients stranded for a year or longer with no progress on their cases, dockets show. In Erie County in 2021, a court pulled 50 cases from attorney James P. Miller and eventually reported him for discipline, citing extreme delays that cost some clients their appeal rights. His law license was later suspended. Erie court administrator Robert Catalde said the debacle spurred the county to double lawyers’ pay to $46,800 and provide benefits. In 2025, Chester County — an affluent region west of Philadelphia — abruptly ended its contract with Charles Thomas Jr. after discovering that he had been putting in an average of just five hours a week across his roughly 25 cases. Court dockets showed Thomas had left cases untouched for as long as two years before the county acted.
One of Thomas’s clients, Patrick Hickson, said he spent two years trying to get Thomas to track down a witness whose absence Hickson argued had cost him a fair trial on a 2018 shooting charge. His trial lawyer had failed to call a single witness, admitting to the judge, mid-trial, that he had wrongly assumed the prosecutor would send a summons to an eyewitness who had told police Hickson was not the shooter. When Hickson finally reached Thomas by phone in August 2025, for the first time in months, the lawyer told him he was off the case. “He said the courts told him he was taking too long,” Hickson said. Thomas declined to comment.
Chester County criminal court administrator Jordan Ludwick acknowledged concerns about the delays but said he resolved the problem by finding a qualified lawyer to take over the contract. That attorney, Shannon McDonald, said it was “not an easy transition.” “There were many cases that had not been touched at all,” she said. She cut through the backlog by filing 17 briefs in just over three months — all but three of them no-merit letters. “The case has to survive on the merits,” she said, “and, frankly, the deck is stacked against overturning a case.” In the Finley letter she sent Hickson in March, she blamed him for failing to track down the would-be witness and said his trial lawyer had a strategic reason for not sending a subpoena. Reading the letter, Hickson said, “I felt defeated.” Since McDonald asked to drop the case, he is pursuing exoneration alone.
The Philadelphia Inquirer and ProPublica have previously reported that the no-merit letter — sometimes called a Finley letter — is discouraged in several other states. The practice allows lawyers to dispose of cases quickly, urging judges to reject claims their clients have made in handwritten or typed filings. In Philadelphia, the news organizations previously found, dozens of people who received such letters later had their convictions or sentences overturned based on issues their lawyers had rejected or overlooked. About three-quarters of the time, lawyers who ended up filing no-merit letters did not take basic steps such as meeting with their client, tracking down the trial lawyer’s file, or obtaining available discovery.
“I do not know how you can evaluate trial counsel’s performance, which is the main role of post-conviction counsel, without talking to your client and reading trial counsel’s file,” said Jennifer Merrigan, a co-founder of Phillips Black, a nonprofit law firm. Lee Mandell, a Philadelphia attorney practicing for more than 50 years, sent a Finley letter in 2017 saying he had written to but never spoken with his client of four years and did not understand his claims. “It is entirely unclear as to what the defendant really means,” Mandell wrote. The letter failed to flag an erroneous jury instruction that four years later led to the conviction being overturned. Mandell was later formally reprimanded for allowing another client’s hearing to be delayed six years, during which two witnesses died. He did not return calls seeking comment.
Judges’ inaction added to those delays, leaving matters to stagnate for years. In 2023, the state’s Superior Court registered concerns about a case from Wayne County, where a lawyer filed a “two-page, deficient motion to withdraw, and the PCRA court did nothing in this case for 20 years.” Before they are assigned a lawyer, Pennsylvania prisoners must write the first draft of their post-conviction filing on their own within a strict one-year deadline; the lawyers appointed to revise their petitions are not generally held to any timeline. The state courts say lawyers should act “expeditiously so as to reduce unnecessary delays.” Yet judges have granted extensions liberally, court dockets show, and in many cases failed to impose any deadlines at all.
Pennsylvania has published no best practices for indigent defense, no caseload guidelines, no required training, and no qualification standards for lawyers seeking post-conviction appointments, the investigation found. In August, a state court committee published a proposal recommending only that lawyers have relevant work experience “to the extent practicable.” The committee argued that work experience is not “possible to quantify” and that “less-than-experienced representation is better than no representation.” Other states set more demanding standards. North Carolina requires appeals lawyers seeking court appointments to apply with the state appellate defender, submit references, demonstrate relevant work history, provide legal writing samples, and complete a training course on strategy and best practices. Ohio has long enforced work-experience requirements.
Public defender Ted Skaarup, who has advocated for training and qualification rules, said inexperienced and untrained lawyers are more likely to default to writing no-merit letters. New lawyers, he said, are left to consult with older attorneys who may pass on bad practices. “You go to them for advice and they say, ‘I’ll send you a copy of my [no-merit] letter.’” Only one of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties provided written criteria requiring specific work experience for lawyers to be appointed to post-conviction cases. Philadelphia court leadership says lawyers must complete a training session and show they have recently handled three hearings involving disputed evidence; a volunteer panel tasked with approving prospective lawyers there rarely meets and is not empowered to approve or reject candidates based on writing samples, a core part of screening appeals lawyers in some other places.
In Pittsburgh, the nonprofit Allegheny Lawyers Initiative for Justice has urged local court officials to set up a system to screen and supervise appointed lawyers. For now, the organization is running its own voluntary trainings, as well as a resource center with office hours, a library of sample motions, and help with social-service referrals. Without such systems, the organization’s executive director, Rob Perkins, said, “There’s no quality control.” Lawyers can get away with “doing a poor job in these cases for years without anyone really paying attention.”
When attorney Corrie Woods took over Washington County’s post-conviction caseload in 2020, he was startled to discover about a dozen files that had been untouched since being assigned to the previous lawyer in 2019 or earlier. In some, the lawyer’s inaction had caused the clients to lose their appeal rights. Looking back, Woods said, it is not surprising, given that the western Pennsylvania county was paying him $25,000 a year as a part-timer for up to 24 cases. “These cases are not going to take priority in most law offices,” said Woods, who now handles mostly personal-injury cases. Under such a contract, he said, “Your incentive is to do the least work. You’re not getting more for doing more.” The American Bar Association has long opposed such flat-fee pay structures. States including Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada have banned them.
Not Pennsylvania. The state began contributing any money to indigent defense only in 2023. Today it kicks in just 57 cents per capita; neighboring states, on average, pay $26 per resident. Counties provide the rest as they see fit. A pending American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit claims that has resulted in widespread violations of the right to counsel.
About three-quarters of Pennsylvanians live in counties that use flat-fee arrangements or cap the amount a lawyer can bill for a case. Daniel Buzard, the court administrator in the county where Woods held the contract several years ago, said in an email that this “provides financial stability for both parties.” Some counties pay as little as $500 per case. Based on time estimates from Maine, one of the only states to publish post-conviction workload standards, that would come out to $11 per hour. Twenty-one Pennsylvania counties offer flat annual pay for part-time lawyers — sometimes then assigning them caseloads that exceed Maine’s standard for full-time work.
Only five of the 18 contracts obtained in response to public-records requests included a limit on the number of cases the court could heap onto a lawyer. None of the contracts set deadlines, specified a time commitment, or described any oversight mechanism. Stuart Wilder, whose contract to handle post-conviction cases in Bucks County, outside Philadelphia, kept the lights on in his law office for years, said he worked hard for clients and won several challenging cases. But he said the flat-fee structure did require him to deprioritize cases where he didn’t see merit. “Being able to file Finley letters gave me the time to work on cases I could fix,” said Wilder, who recently retired.
Court officials have long been aware of the backlogs. A 2003 law review article written by court officials outlined needed reforms but acknowledged the lack of political will, saying the “low status” of these cases stems from a bias among judges and lawyers who believe “that most post conviction claims are frivolous.” In Delaware County, where O’Neal was convicted, post-trial matters are handled by a group of part-time lawyers. Galloway, who declined to comment on O’Neal’s case citing ethical confidentiality rules, has been responsible for 20 to 30 post-trial cases per year for the county while running his own law practice and, for a time, holding local elected office. Judge George A. Pagano, who granted 41 extensions on O’Neal’s case, also declined to comment. O’Neal is fighting on with a new court-appointed lawyer.
Hannah Beckler of ProPublica contributed data reporting.