Blog #156 IMAGINE: 100 Criminal Defendants DISMISSED… Massachusetts out of control

By FLINT MCCOLGAN | flint.mccolgan@bostonherald.com

UPDATED: July 22, 2025 at 6:42 PM EDT

More than 100 Boston Municipal Court criminal defendants had their charges dismissed Tuesday due to lack of legal representation — including a number of serious assault and domestic battery cases.

“Today is an unprecedented tragedy for the victims,” Suffolk Assistant District Attorney Amelia Singh said at the end of Tuesday’s Boston Municipal Court hearing.

By the end of the roughly three-hour hearing, about 125 cases were dismissed — and only three were preserved by securing a defense attorney.

The dismissals “present a clear and continuing threat to public safety,” Suffolk DA spokesman James Borghesani said in a statement following the hearing.

“Our prosecutors and victim witness advocates are working extremely hard to keep victims and other impacted persons updated on what’s happening with their cases,” Borghesani continued. “These are difficult conversations. We remain hopeful that a structural solution will be found to address the causal issues here and prevent any repeat.”

The Lavallee Protocol

The BMC hearing considered the first set of cases to have reached the 45-day mark without a lawyer on record. Those cases have to be tossed.

That is due to the “Lavallee Protocol” that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the highest court in the state, set in motion on July 3 due to the huge backlog of unrepresented cases in the state.

Throughout this month, indigent defendants — or those unable to afford their own attorneys — without representation have been released from jail if they had been detained for more than a week without representation, based on another prong of the protocol.

And as the ongoing “work stoppage” of bar advocates — or those private attorneys who take on the cases of defendants too poor to afford their own attorneys — continues with no end in sight, Tuesday’s round of dismissals will surely be followed by hundreds more.

Bar advocates stopped work in late May to push for higher pay rates, which are established by the state Legislature. The SJC ruling came after the Committee for Public Counsel Services filed there on bar advocates’ behalf and for guidance on how to handle the backlog.

The CPCS is the public entity that employs staff attorneys to represent indigent defendants, but those staff attorneys handle only 20% of the cases, whereas private bar advocates — in a system organized by CPCS — handle 80% of such cases.

Bar advocates receive $65 per hour for district court-level criminal cases, according to data provided by CPCS. These are the attorneys who have stopped working.

Sean Delaney, an attorney who also works as a bar advocate and describes himself as on the frontlines of the dispute, told the Herald earlier this month that there has been a “degradation of the right of counsel in Massachusetts. … And the reason for that has been the steady decline in attorneys who are continuing to do this work because of the woefully insufficient pay that we’re getting.”

“It’s unsustainable for any recent graduate willing to come in to do this very important work at $65 an hour,” he said. “Many of them are saddled with exorbitant student loans, before you even get to food and shelter.”

On Tuesday, Delaney told the Herald that “there is one entity that could fix it, and that’s the state Legislature.”

The hearing

Over roughly three hours, BMC Chief Judge Tracy-Lee Lyons went through case after case across the entire municipal court network, not just from the Central Division where the hearing took place.

Except for a few where it was determined that the defendant had a private attorney or the matter was a probation one, which wouldn’t be affected by the protocol, Lyons was forced by the protocol to dismiss the case, usually with the same words:

“CPCS has made a good faith effort to secure representation but has been unable to do so,” she said with only minor variation across the many cases. “This case shall be dismissed without prejudice. All fees and fines are waived.”

The cases dismissed were often on crimes like drug possession or shoplifting, but many were on more serious charges including a variety of assault charges. Those include general assault and battery, and then specialized A&B charges like those against police officers or against family members.

There was one bar advocate at the hearing who took on three of the cases, who described the charges in each as “substantial.”

“These people are charged with serious offenses and they’re being held, and in my view, they should have counsel,” attorney Robert Glotzer said.