Following arrest, defense lawyer banned from representing defendants for state

Suzanne Dwyer-Jones was charged with impaired driving on May 10. She continued to represent the state’s poorest defendants — until she was suspended Thursday.
A drawn illustration of the inside of a courtroom. On the left, an inmate dressed in an orange jumpsuit is looking at the empty seat next to them where their defense attorney should be sitting. On the right, sitting at a separate table, is a prosecutor.
Illustration by Chloe Cushman for ProPublica.

A lawyer working on behalf of the state continued to represent low-income defendants after being arrested for impaired driving this month. 

Suzanne Dwyer-Jones was arrested by the York Police Department for driving while intoxicated after failing a sobriety test around 10 p.m. on Monday, May 10, police said. She paid bail and returned to work on May 12 at Biddeford court as the state’s lawyer for defendants who couldn’t afford to hire their own attorney.

Dwyer-Jones has been charged with driving under the influence at least four other times and been convicted twice of operating a vehicle while intoxicated in the last decade. A judge suspended her law license in 2013. Within days of being reinstated to practice law in 2015, she was given a job defending Maine’s poor.

Dwyer-Jones did not return an email seeking comment from The Maine Monitor. She is being charged with felony Operating Under the Influence and is scheduled to appear in York County Superior Court in Alfred on June 9.

Maine is the only state that does not employ public defenders. People who cannot afford to hire an attorney instead rely on the Maine Commission on Indigent Legal Services, or MCILS, which contracts private defense attorneys like Dwyer-Jones to represent adults and juveniles in criminal cases and other legal matters. The agency, run by only four people, has repeatedly been scrutinized for inadequate training and oversight of the attorneys it hires.

Lawyers are required to notify MCILS within five days of being charged with any crime. Failing to report a criminal charge can result in an attorney no longer being eligible for court appointments, according to the commission’s rules. The executive director has the power to remove and suspend attorneys.

Justin Andrus, the interim executive director, said Dwyer-Jones had not notified the commission of her new criminal charge and would no longer be eligible to work on its cases as of Thursday afternoon. Andrus became director in January and said he is still learning where he needs to be attentive, after being informed by a reporter of Dwyer-Jones’ recent charge. 

Andrus has asked judges and the Maine Prosecutors’ Association for help establishing a protocol to notify MCILS when an attorney is charged.

“MCILS considers the need to address instances in which rostered counsel are charged with crimes integral to ensuring that our client base receives the quality of representation to which each client is entitled,” Andrus wrote in a separate statement. “While not every charge is necessarily disqualifying, MCILS will assess each charge it becomes aware of individually, and act appropriately to safeguard the rights of appointed clients.”

RELATED: A low bar for public defense

Sen. Lisa Keim (R-Dixfield), who serves on the Judiciary Committee with oversight of MCILS, said the arrest made it apparent that the agency does not have adequate staff or rules to oversee attorneys.

“When you are doing everything you can every day and things are still slipping by you, there’s a problem in the system. It’s one the Maine Legislature needs to fix, and they haven’t been doing their job,” Keim said.

Eleven years ago the Legislature formed MCILS. Its first executive director, John Pelletier, was in charge for a decade and routinely contracted attorneys with criminal convictions or histories of professional misconduct, including Dwyer-Jones, a joint investigation by The Maine Monitor and ProPublica found last October.

Family members of a man who was assigned as one of Dwyer-Jones’ clients in 2017 said she didn’t show up to court and sent bizarre, confusing texts to excuse her absence. Despite complaining about her conduct to the state’s licensing agency, Dwyer-Jones was allowed to keep practicing law and remained on the list of eligible court-appointed attorneys.

Until Thursday, Dwyer-Jones was eligible to represent adult defendants charged with domestic violence, drunk driving, drug offenses, felonies or misdemeanors, according to state records. She was also eligible to be assigned child protection cases in multiple York County courts earlier this year.

Even after being convicted of crimes or professional misconduct, attorneys have not routinely been removed from the MCILS roster. Pelletier suspended five attorneys during his tenure.

In April, Ian L’Heureux began appearing on MCILS’s list of approved attorneys for felonies, drug offenses and misdemeanors in Augusta, Bath, Wiscasset, Portland and Rockland superior courts. He was banned from representing state defendants for at least a year in December 2019.

L’Heureux was found guilty by a jury of assault and sentenced to a week in jail in December 2019, according to court records. He did not inform MCILS of the assault case in York County when he applied in August 2019, according to a termination letter by Pelletier. 

L’Heureux did not return a request for comment. Andrus said he had no comment about L’Heureux’s recent approval to be a court-appointed lawyer.

The Legislature is considering three bills to reform MCILS, including a plan to open the state’s first trial-level public defender office, and add personnel for training, oversight and auditing of attorneys. If passed, the changes would cost $11.7 million next year and $12.9 million the following year. 

Gov. Janet Mills has not included substantial reforms for MCILS in any of her budget proposals this year.

Seacoastonline staff contributed to this report.

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Samantha Hogan

Samantha Hogan focuses on government accountability projects for The Maine Monitor. She joined the newsroom as its first full-time reporter in 2019 with Report for America. Samantha was named the 2021 Maine’s Journalist of the Year by the Maine Press Association, and spent 2020 reporting on Maine’s court system through the ProPublica Local Reporting Network. Her reporting on county jails recording and listening to attorney-client phone calls won the Silver Gavel award from the American Bar Association and was also a semi-finalist for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting in 2023. Samantha previously worked for The Frederick News-Post and interned twice for The Washington Post.
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