“Anyone charged with a crime that can result in jail or prison time is entitled to legal representation.

In the familiar line from the Miranda warning, “You have the right to an attor ney. If you cannot afford one, one will be appointed to you.”

But in Virginia, defendants who sign an affirmation in court that they have no funds to pay for an attorney are never told their right to a court-assigned lawyer is not free.

To the surprise of many, they received a bill from the court for that attorney if they are convicted or accept a plea deal.

Depending on the case, the initial bill runs between $300 and $600 in Richmond and across the state, far lower than a paid attorney would charge. But in felony cases, that bill can be double or triple that amount. And over time, an initial bill will steadily grow each year as interest is applied.

Left unpaid after release, that debt will hamper a former inmate’s ability to rebuild their lives, negatively affect their credit score and sometimes result in a new jail term, according to the Charlottesville-based Legal Aid Justice Center (LAJC).

“Defendants get charged a fee for their court-appointed attorney or public defender, despite the judge already having decided they couldn’t afford an attorney,” notes the 56-year-old nonprofit legal aid group that represents immigrants, juveniles, public housing residents and other low-income people.

Shining a new spotlight on the trouble that fee causes, the LAJC is now calling on the Virginia General Assembly to end this fee-based system that traps people in debt.

In a report issued earlier this month, LAJC points out that lower court judges are using the unpaid fee for a court-appointed lawyer as an excuse to end parole or re-instate a suspended sentence — flouting a 1974 Virginia Supreme Court decision that found such tactics were never justified for an ordinary debt and that collection should only be attempted when a person was able to pay.

LAJC cites the case of Shakil Ali, who had gotten a job after his release and started making monthly payments on his court debt that had reached $3,000 and included a $1,000 fee for his court-assigned attorney.

However, Mr. Ali ended up before a judge who told him to pay off the full amount in 45 days or he would be jailed for contempt of court, according to LAJC. He staved off jail time by raising the money through an appeal to neighbors and community residents.

“The state’s existing policy of charging people for court-appointed attorneys taxes low-income people for equal justice, takes money out of family budgets for basic needs, costs localities across the Commonwealth dearly and is unnecessary,” LAJC states in the report.

“Virginia can and should eliminate the court-appointed attorney fee,” LAJC concludes.

LAJC quotes a former inmate Hassan Shabazz, who wrote that, “I didn’t know I’d get charged for my attorney until after my appeal was decided! That’s when I learned I had about $650 in counsel fees, and I was shocked. I thought that’d come from the state budget, just like the money for the commonwealth’s attorney. How do you charge someone for their attorney when they were too poor to afford one?

“While I was in prison, I was making just 45 cents an hour working in the law library — and the prison was taking money out of that pay for fees,” Mr. Shabazz continued. “How am I going to buy hygiene items and decent food, especially since I wasn’t getting money from home?”

Data collected by LAJC show Virginia courts billed defendants an average of $34.7 million for assigned attorneys each year between 2019 and 2023, but collected only about $12.7 million a year, much of it from older debt.

LAJC reports that just $1 million or about 3% of the $34.7 million billed yearly in assigned lawyer fees was paid when it was initially billed.

The state and localities share any repayment, and localities that included a line item in their budgets reported receiving an average of $5,000 a year from that source, LAJC notes.

Debt that is paid later typically involves removal of money from people and family members who do not have the capacity to pay without serious hardship, LAJC states.

LAJC notes that at least one state agency has called for reform, the Office of the Virginia Auditor of Public Accounts. The state auditor did so in 2013 after conducting a review of Virginia courts’ collections of debts defendants accumulated.

So far unheeded, the auditor’s review concluded that court debt should be stratified, with judges putting greater emphasis on people’s ability to pay and showing greater recognition that some of that debt is simply un-collectable and should be written off.

And such debts live on for decades under state law. General district courts are entitled to pursue collection for 30 years while the debts imposed by circuit courts are collectable for 60 years, LAJC notes.

LAJC is not the first to call attention to this issue. In 2021, the Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis, a think tank that seeks to advance racial and economic justice, did so in report titled “Set Up To Fail: How Court Fees Harm Black Communities and Punish Poverty in Virginia.”

With Democrats once again holding majorities in both the House of Delegates and the Senate, LAJC is hopeful change can gain traction in the 2024 session.

In a summary, LAJC states that “court-appointed attorney fees create a needless penalty on Virginia families who can’t pay.”

In the view of LAJC, “public defenders should be well paid and indigent defense should be well-funded; this is critical in our adversarial court system for the promise of equal justice to become a reality. Just like libraries, police, and firefighters, indigent defense should be funded as a public necessity, without cost to the Virginians who are assisted.”

LAJC states that “the solution is to follow the lead of such states as Delaware, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Jersey and New Mexico that have eliminated that fee. It’s now time for Virginia.”