With a Chance at Freedom, They Faced an Unexpected Obstacle: Their Own Lawyers

Milique Wagner spent more than a decade in prison fighting his murder conviction. One obstacle he faced along the way to winning his freedom was opposition from his own lawyer. Jessica Griffin/The Philadelphia Inquirer Milique Wagner always insisted that his 2013 murder conviction was built on an informant’s lie. But Wagner said he couldn’t persuade his trial lawyer to investigate that, even after the informant confessed to the murder and testified that Philadelphia police and prosecutors knew the truth. In 2015, Wagner’s appeal failed, and he faced life in prison. But Wagner had another chance at freedom under a state law that allowed him to get a new court-appointed lawyer to help him challenge his conviction. Court records show that the attorney never spoke with the informant or looked into the detective on the case, who made headlines after being benched for secretly paying a witness. Instead, Wagner’s lawyer urged the judge to shut down his client’s petition, writing in June 2017, “There are no meritorious issues that could be raised.” Wagner would remain in prison another six years before prosecutors acknowledged that police had hidden evidence suggesting that the informant had committed the murder and the detective was corrupt. Although Wagner maintains his innocence, he agreed to a plea deal for third-degree murder that allowed him to leave prison. The opposition Wagner faced from his own lawyer is permitted under Pennsylvania’s Post Conviction Relief Act, the law that allows people in prison to raise newly discovered evidence or argue that their previous lawyer mishandled the case. The state provides a lawyer in these cases, but with a catch: The attorney can argue against the client’s claims and withdraw from the case by filing what’s known as a “no-merit” letter. Wagner received a graduation certificate after completing a carpentry program at the State Correctional Institution Frackville, a state prison about 100 miles north of Philadelphia. Courtesy of Milique Wagner A Philadelphia Inquirer and ProPublica investigation found case after case in which court-appointed attorneys did minimal work to examine their clients’ claims and rejected what later turned out to be legitimate legal issues. The findings reveal that Philadelphia’s post-conviction system repeatedly delayed or denied justice for wrongfully convicted people who then spent years or decades behind bars. The news organizations reviewed 250 of Philadelphia’s reversed convictions and sentences since 2018 in violent felony cases. Wagner was one of at least 50 people whose lawyers said there was no basis to challenge their cases, only for judges to later decide they deserved new trials or sentences. While in some cases the exonerating evidence did not emerge until years after the no-merit letter was filed, a majority were tossed out based on issues the PCRA lawyers overlooked or rejected. Three years of invoices