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| The bodies are piling up in small-town Wisconsin. Cries of 'we didn't know' are credible, revealing the culture where life is cheap in the eyes of police, local news coverage and a feckless judiciary. |
Destroying lives is a policy, not an accident
Madison, Wisconsin — A Wood County judge in central Wisconsin, Todd P. Wolf, was presented with a frightened 18-year-old — jailed for twelve days, pleading his innocence, and pleading for an attorney in a pre-trial (probable cause) hearing on Aug 14, 2018.
Trequelle Vann-Marcouex was charged with three felonies related to a violent and vicious home invasion in the town of Saratoga in southern Wood County during the Spring of 2018 (June 1, 2018). The three felonies are Child Abuse-High Probability/Great Harm; Armed Robbery; Burglary-Building or Dwelling, (Wood County Case Number 2018CF000450 State of Wisconsin vs. Trequelle T Vann-Marcouex).
Mr. Vann-Marcouex was not placed at the scene of the alleged crime by any witness or forensic evidence presented at a court hearing. Mr. Vann-Marcouex informed Judge Wolf he was not at the scene, (Circuit Court Preliminary Hearing Transcript).
What evidence law enforcement did have was beyond-thin, enough for an investigative lead, but certainly not enough to arrest and charge Mr. Vann-Marcouex.
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| Trequelle Vann-Marcouex, 18, did not survive the Wood County jail in central Wisconsin in 2018. The estate of Vann-Marcouex filed a federal civil rights action in Feb 2019 against Wood County. |
Mochtka testified at the court hearing that Mochtka had read police reports and spoke with another investigating officer, a Sgt Simon, in probing the June 1 home invasion and assault.
Mochtka testified that Simon had interviewed a female minor, identified by the initials MAW, who allegedly told Simon in an interview that MAW heard from another individual, Alex Jinsky who faces criminal charges in the matter, via Facebook Messenger, that Mr. Vann-Marcouex was at the scene of the crime.
That's it.
The paucity of evidence was as relevant to Judge Wolf as the fact that Mr. Vann-Marcouex had no counsel in violation of his Sixth Amendment right.
Reports Mario Koran in the journal, The Appeal:
[Trequelle] Vann-Marcouex made repeated calls to the state public defender’s office—desperate phone calls, he said, that even 24 hours before the hearing were met with indifference.
After waiting 12 days in the Wood County Jail in Wisconsin, no attorney had been appointed. At the hearing, the assistant district attorney told the judge that Vann-Marcouex had been unable to find an attorney.
'I have been calling the public defender’s office every single day, and they make it—I get on the phone with them, and they’d laugh,' Vann-Marcouex said.
Wood County Circuit Court Judge Todd Wolf proceeded anyway.
'Well, you will have to deal with them on that. I can only do the hearings that are before me and that’s where I’m at. So—all right? That will be it. He will be remanded back to the custody of the jail,' Wolf said.
Vann-Marcouex seemed bothered when he returned from his hearing and stayed quiet most of the day, other prisoners later told investigators.
Rebuffed by the obtuse Judge Wolf, a distraught Vann-Marcouex was sent back to jail, where he then hung himself that evening, dying at the hospital five days later, (Wisconsin Justice Initiative, Urban Milwaukee, World Socialist Web, The Appeal).
"It's the fifth suicide at the (Wood County) jail in the last two years (from 2018)," reports WSAU Radio.
A Saratoga resident, unrelated to the case, contacted in late May, 2019 said she was "shocked" to learn five people had committed suicide at the Wood County jail.
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Wood County Asst District Attorney Leigh Neville-Neil affirmed during the hearing that Vann-Marcouex was appearing without counsel.
The hearing before Wolf was a probable cause hearing.
A better judge than Todd P. Wolf, someone with a passing acquaintance of constitutional rights, and a more decent human being, would and could have stated and ruled:
No convincing testimony or evidence places Mr. Vann-Marcouex at the scene of these alleged crimes. Mr. Vann-Marcouex is innocent until proven guilty under the law and before this Court. Further, both the defense and the prosecutor agree that Mr. Vann-Marcouex's Sixth Amendment right to counsel has been, and is being denied. This is unconstitutional and unacceptable. This case is dismissed and Mr. Vann-Marcouex is free to go. Good-luck, and be safe. And, Ms. Neville-Neil, don't you ever bring this thin a case before this Court again, emphatically so without counsel.
This of course did not happen.
Wolf went so far as to advise Vann-Marcouex that "you really don't have to do anything here today," (p. 4, hearing transcript); and that Vann-Marcouex should not ask any questions of, or cross-examine any witnesses, (Circuit Court Preliminary Hearing Transcript).
Really?
Mr. Vann-Marcouex advised the Court near the end of the hearing, "I don't understand how this is enough evidence. I wasn't even there" [at the alleged crime scene].
"Okay. That will be something you can discuss with your attorney," replied Wolf, perhaps forgetting that Vann-Marcouex did not have an attorney as Wolf was informed multiple times at this very hearing minutes earlier by the both the asst. district attorney and Mr. Vann-Marcouex.
Disregarding his ethical obligations to impartiality, Judge Wolf was unquestionably biased in favor of the prosecution, and hostile against Mr. Vann-Marcouex. "... I have to make a decision in the light most favorable to the state," said Wolf twice, (p. 17, Circuit Court Preliminary Hearing Transcript).
No, Wolf most certainly was not compelled to render a decision most favorable to the State. Not in this case, and certainly not in principle.
The Wisconsin Code of Judicial Conduct demands that judges "shall act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary," (SCR 60.03 A judge shall avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety in all of the judge's activities).
But what are impartiality and the Sixth Amendment right to counsel worth when a judge declares his fealty to the cause of the prosecution?
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The estate of Mr. Vann-Marcouex has filed a civil rights action against Wood County for violations of the young man's constitutional rights for negligence with respect to the suicide. See The Estate of Trequelle Tyreke Vann-Marcouex v. Wood County, United States District Court of the Western District of Wisconsin.
The scant local media coverage in Wood County on this case focuses on mental health as a cause of suicide, omitting police, proseucutorial and judicial misconduct as the culprits that literally terrorize defendants. See Hoff, Wisconsin Rapids Tribune (Dec 2018).
Terrorized defendants without counsel are circumstances to be avoided in this country, lest we become a police state.
Writes Mario Koran in The Appeal:
The right to counsel is a core protection for people facing criminal charges, but in Wisconsin, that right is largely theoretical. The state has one of the most underfunded indigent defense systems in the country, but the underlying problem is neither new nor unique to Wisconsin. Half a century after the U.S. Supreme Court established a right to counsel regardless of a person’s ability to pay in Gideon v. Wainwright, chronically underfunded public defender offices bend under the weight of impossible demands and heavy caseloads across the country.We're there. There is little integrity in our justice system.
'The fundamental problem is that while the Supreme Court has said that everybody has the right to an attorney when there’s a possibility of a jail sentence, it’s an unfunded mandate. There’s no uniform system for providing the counsel. It’s left to the states and many states leave it to the counties,' said Norman Reimer, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
'And there isn’t a great constituency,' he continued. 'There’s no lobby really similar to what law enforcement has going and so many places around the country just woefully underfunded it. And Wisconsin is certainly right up at the top of the list.'
Wisconsin established its state public defender office in 1965. Initially created as a system to provide counsel in post-conviction appeals, the state public defender, or SPD, today operates as a private-public system of staff attorneys stationed at 35 offices across the state, with overflow cases contracted out to private attorneys.
In 2018, private attorneys handled roughly 40 percent of more than 140,000 cases SPD opened, according to Randy Kraft, spokesperson for Wisconsin’s state public defender’s office.
That number also included fixed-fee contracts for private attorneys who are paid per case instead of hourly. Attorneys who accept fixed-fee cases must have a law license in good standing with the Wisconsin Supreme Court and, depending on the case type, may need additional requirements, Kraft said.
Reimer said fixing the problem is more complicated than simply hiring more SPD staff attorneys. An SPD office must outsource some cases; the office cannot, for example, represent co-defendants due to the potential conflict of interest. While 23 states have public defense systems funded primarily by the state, almost all states have some blend of private-public systems for providing defense, according to Reimer.
But because Wisconsin pays just $40 an hour to private attorneys who represent poor clients—lower than any other state in the nation—finding attorneys willing accept cases has become increasingly difficult.
Many say the hourly fee is too low to cover basic overhead costs. A 2018 report by the Sixth Amendment Center, which advocates for defendants’ right to counsel, calculated the average overhead rate for attorneys in Wisconsin to be $41.79, suggesting private attorneys actually lose money by taking SPD cases.
The report warns that the current system often leaves the least experienced attorneys to deal with the most complex cases, and incentivizes attorneys to prioritize plea deals that may be against their clients’ best interests out of concern for time.
Worse yet are fixed-fee contracts, the report says, which set fees lower than the amount appointed attorneys earn, regardless of the time they spend on cases. The Sixth Amendment Center recommended that Wisconsin scrap fixed-fee contracts. Kraft said fixed-fee contracts are on the decline, but SPD is statutorily required to offer them.
As a result, people accused of crimes wait weeks or months, often in jail, while SPD searches for private attorneys willing to represent poor clients.
A lengthy stay in jail can mean losing work, housing, and, sometimes, lives. Another defendant hanged herself in the Wood County Jail just eight months before Vann-Marcouex, after the court delayed finding an attorney to take her case.
Even if a defense attorney cannot be found, the Wood County court will often move forward with the case. The judge in Vann-Marcouex’s case moved forward with the preliminary hearing despite the fact that Vann-Marcouex qualified for a public defender and wanted one.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that at any critical stage of court proceedings in which a defendant’s liberty at stake—which would include preliminary hearings—a defendant is entitled to an attorney, according to David Carroll, executive director of the Sixth Amendment Center.
'The fact that they moved forward with a preliminary hearing without counsel when the defendant wanted an attorney is a clear constitutional issue,' he said.
Jonathan Barnett, the attorney appointed to Vann-Marcouex’s case on the day he hanged himself, said the practice in Wood County is to schedule unrepresented felony defendants for their preliminary hearing within the statutory time limit of 10 days for those who are in custody. A staff member for Wood County Clerk of Courts confirmed the practice is still in place.
It’s not clear if Vann-Marcouex knew he had been finally appointed attorney before he died. One cellmate told an investigator Vann-Marcouex hadn’t called the public defender’s office the day of his hearing 'because he didn’t feel like it would get him anywhere.'
Vann-Marcouex told the same cellmate he 'felt tricked into proceeding to his pretrial without representation,' according to investigators.
Kraft said SPD does not track how many people sit in jail awaiting an attorney. But a survey conducted in 2017 found significant delays in appointing counsel across the state.
In Marathon County, at the southern edge of Wisconsin’s Northwoods, it took on average 80 phone calls and 17 days for the public defender’s office to find a private attorney willing to take a case. SPD’s Ashland office made an average of 39 calls and defendants waited 24 days for an attorney.
SPD legislative liaison Adam Plotkin told Wisconsin Public Radio his office has had to make up to 800 calls for some cases.
And because cases in rural counties draw attorneys from as far away as Madison and Milwaukee, courts in urban areas are starting to see a secondary effect, Kraft said. Urban court calendars get logjammed when attorneys travel to far-flung counties to take cases nobody else will.
In Vann-Marcouex’s case, Kraft said SPD staff members made over 300 calls before they found a private attorney willing to accept it. Because SPD represented one of Vann-Marcouex’s co-defendants, the office had to look for private counsel to represent him.
There had been plenty of warning signs in Wisconsin before the situation reached this moment.
In 2011, when the Wisconsin Supreme Court denied a petition to raise the rates for court-appointed attorneys, justices cautioned that the state was heading toward a 'breaking point.'
'The resources available for the defense of poor people accused of crime has fallen alarmingly, potentially compromising our constitutional responsibility to ensure that every defendant stands equal before the law and is afforded the right to a fair trial guaranteed by our constitution,' justices wrote in their order.
'If this funding crisis is not addressed we risk a constitutional crisis that could compromise the integrity of our justice system.'
Cowboy judges Todd P. Wolf are part of the problem but this constitutional crisis has been engineered by other politicians hostile to the constitutional rights and value of life in Wisconsin.
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