Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania Public Defense System Is Unconstitutional, Underfunded by at Least $100M, New ACLU Suit Says
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HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania has failed to live up to its constitutional responsibility to provide an effective defense to people who can’t afford attorneys and will need to spend at least $100 million to fulfill this obligation, the ACLU of Pennsylvania said in a lawsuit filed Thursday.
The group brought the suit on behalf of 17 people facing issues including little to no contact with the public defenders they are entitled to, according to the lawsuit.
It was also filed on behalf of all current and future indigent people, those accused of a crime and unable to pay for a private defense attorney. If the court approves this group as a class, any outcome will extend to all of those affected.
The suit blames the state, not the counties, for failing to properly fund these constitutionally mandated services and names Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, state Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward (R., Westmoreland) and state House Speaker Joanna McClinton (D., Philadelphia) as defendants.
At the moment, Pennsylvania only provides $7.5 million to support indigent defense. Counties must make up the rest with limited local funds, and public defenders’ offices are often shut out from funding opportunities available to prosecutors, the suit asserts citing Spotlight PA reporting.
The suit asks Commonwealth Court to rule the current public defense system unconstitutional and retain oversight until the state fully complies with the constitutional right to counsel.
Rather than seeking damages for specific plaintiffs, the suit is pursuing holistic reform, said ACLU of Pennsylvania Legal Director Vic Walczak.
“You’re trying to change how an institution works — here we’re actually talking about how 67 institutions work,” he told Spotlight PA.
Should the court rule in favor of the petitioners, Pennsylvania officials will likely have an opportunity to propose a remedy in consultation with the ACLU of PA. The process will take years, Walczak said.
In a statement to Spotlight PA, Ward spokesperson Erica Clayton said the senator had yet to receive the lawsuit and would need time to review it before commenting.
McClinton spokesperson Nicole Reigelman wrote that “McClinton started her career as a public defender and knows firsthand the value that indigent defense plays in the judicial system.”
Shapiro spokesperson Manuel Bonder, also in a written statement, highlighted the governor’s proposed and ultimately approved funding for public defense in the 2023 budget.
“Governor Shapiro is the first to acknowledge there is a long way to go — which is why he is focused on delivering real results on this critically important issue,” Bonder wrote.
Shapiro is reviewing the complaint and cannot comment further, Bonder said.
The result of the inadequate support is a system in which too few attorneys are responsible for too many cases, and ultimately cannot provide the level of defense the U.S. and Pennsylvania Constitutions demand, attorneys for the petitioners said at a news briefing Thursday morning.
“The right to counsel is not just the right to a warm body with a law degree standing next to you,” Walczak said during the briefing. “It requires a professional who has the time and resources to prepare an adequate constitutional defense.”
Pennsylvania has not provided consistent funding for indigent defense until this year. Instead, state law has made it the sole responsibility of each of the 67 counties to pay for the federal mandate, a burden many are unable to meet.
In 2023, Shapiro proposed $10 million in state funding for public defense, with the promise of consistent funding in the years to come. The legislature ultimately approved $7.5 million in December, giving most public defenders’ offices their first-ever infusion from the state. Shapiro asked lawmakers to increase that allocation to $10 million in his 2024 budget proposal.
The legislature also created a committee to allocate the money and establish statewide standards for public defense, which previously had not existed. In April, the committee announced each county’s allotment, which ranged from about $90,000 for Potter County to $141,000 for Philadelphia.
But even with this new support, each county’s allotment will not be enough to make up the deficit public defender’s offices face, according to the lawsuit, or even the playing field with prosecutors.
To reach parity with average national spending per capita, or with similar states, Pennsylvania would have to allocate hundreds of millions of dollars, the lawsuit argues, a level of spending that counties cannot accomplish on their own.
“Counties do not have the means to raise revenue in the way the state does,” Walczak said, noting counties also have to pay for competing and more politically attractive public services such as education, health and law enforcement.
“You’re talking about an agency, the office of the public defender, that serves a constituency that has no political clout,” he said. “By definition, they’ve got no resources. So, over the course of the last 50 years, indigent defense services have declined persistently.”
The ACLU of PA alleges that public defense is likely underfunded and inadequate in every county, citing a recent study from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, and singles out some of Pennsylvania’s rural and sparsely populated counties as particularly unequipped to handle their criminal caseload.
Many of the named petitioners have been incarcerated for months, according to the complaint, but received no contact from a public defender despite attempts to reach out. Others saw attorneys they had never met make legal filings or dismissals with their apparent consent, though none was ever secured.
The suit alleges a part-time public defender in Clearfield County asked petitioner David McCauley to pay him $3,500 for private representation. When McCauley declined, the same attorney showed up to a later hearing as no-cost counsel on behalf of the county public defender’s office.
“We don’t endorse the practices laid out in the complaint,” said Sara Jacobson, executive director of the Public Defender Association of Pennsylvania. “That’s not what clients deserve, but that’s also not what public defenders want to be able to provide.”
When there aren’t enough people available to handle the caseload, attorneys have to triage cases, Jacobson said, because that’s all their funding allows.
The complaint describes a man in Lebanon County trying repeatedly to reach his public defender by mail, only to be awoken one night after seven months of incarceration for a midnight meeting with an attorney.
“Of course that’s awful,” Jacobson said. “I know that public defender, though. She had been at the prison until 2 a.m. because she was in court all day.”
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HARRISBURG — A new task force under Pennsylvania’s Department of State has been working since February to hunt down AI chatbots that may be misleading users into believing the bots are licensed professionals.
Last week, the Shapiro administration filed what it said was the first lawsuit to stem from its AI investigations and the first enforcement action of its kind announced by a governor in the United States. Pennsylvania officials indicated there could be more to come.
The high-profile litigation comes as lawmakers across the country are pursuing, and in some cases enacting, legislation to address concerns brought on by the growing artificial intelligence industry — from banning the creation of sexual images of minors to requiring age verification for all users. A number of proposals from Gov. Josh Shapiro’s most recent budget address await action in the legislature.
The administration’s lawsuit alleges that software known as Character.AI, which creates fictional personalities for users to interact with, posed as a licensed doctor and offered medical advice to a state investigator, violating state law governing the practice of medicine. The suit was filed by Pennsylvania’s State Board of Medicine.
“We will continue to take action to protect the public from misleading or unlawful practices, whether they come from individuals or emerging technologies,” Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt said in a statement following the Character.AI lawsuit.
Shapiro made a similar promise in a statement, saying Pennsylvania will continue “holding bad actors accountable and setting clear guardrails so people can use new technology responsibly.”
The lawsuit says it stems from an investigation in which an employee with the Department of State created an account with the service and began a dialogue with “Emilie” — an AI-generated character the software described as a “Doctor of psychiatry.”
The character allegedly claimed it went to Imperial College London, had been practicing for seven years, and is licensed in Pennsylvania.
“In fact, I did a stint in Philadelphia for a while,” it told the investigator, according to the lawsuit.
The software also provided what the lawsuit said was a fake license number.
Those claims, the Shapiro administration argues, trick users into believing they are receiving medical advice from a licensed practitioner.
“Pennsylvanians deserve to know who — or what — they are interacting with online, especially when it comes to their health,” Shapiro said in a statement. “We will not allow companies to deploy AI tools that mislead people into believing they are receiving advice from a licensed medical professional.”
The lawsuit seeks for Character Technologies Inc. (developer of Character.AI) to “cease and desist from engaging in the unlawful practice of medicine and surgery.”
A Character.AI spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday that the company’s “highest priority is the safety and well-being of our users.” The spokesperson said that before the lawsuit, Character.AI already featured disclaimers warning that its AI characters are not real, and that they “should be treated as fiction.”
The spokesperson declined to comment on the lawsuit.
Pennsylvania’s lawsuit is not the first Character Technologies has faced. At least one case was brought by the parent of a minor who died by suicide. The company last year adopted a policy to ban minors from engaging “in open-ended chat with AI on our platform.”
The Federal Trade Commission last year also opened an inquiry into the company, along with six other chatbot providers, regarding how they “measure, test, and monitor potentially negative impacts of this technology on children and teens,” according to an agency news release.
It’s unclear what led Pennsylvania regulators to specifically investigate Character.AI. A Department of State spokesperson said the source of the complaint was “confidential.”
Shapiro told CNN, one of several national media outlets that covered the novel lawsuit, that his administration “challenged” the Department of State to conduct these types of investigations “to go and use this technology and see what kind of risks it posed” to Pennsylvanians.
Some details about the effort, which Shapiro first teased in his February budget pitch, are not yet public. Members of the task force are not disclosed online, and the Department of State did not answer questions from Spotlight PA asking for their names or how they were selected. A Department of State spokesperson said the task force consists of 12 of its employees.
As part of the AI fraud initiative, Pennsylvania is crowdsourcing tips on what software the state should investigate through its “Unlicensed Practice by a Chatbot” complaint system and hotline. According to the Department of State, it has received 18 complaints since it launched in February.
Pennsylvania’s moves against AI companies come as they rapidly grow their user bases nationwide, especially children and teenagers.
According to a survey last year from Common Sense Media, a California-based child safety nonprofit, more than half of teenagers access AI platforms at least a few times per month. One-third said they use or view the software as a tool to socialize, including for conversation or relationship practice, emotional support, role-playing, friendships, and romantic interactions.
At least five states have enacted laws restricting chatbots or requiring disclosures, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. California, for example, requires companies to disclose to children that they are interacting with AI. Pennsylvania is not one of them, but the state medical board alleges Character.AI’s actions violated existing law.
In his February budget address, Shapiro called on the General Assembly to take action on artificial intelligence. He urged lawmakers to prohibit chatbots from creating sexually explicit or violent content of minors, mandate that developers require age verification from users, and detect when children mention self-harm or violence. He also wants companies to frequently notify users they’re not interacting with a human.
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Lawmakers have not yet adopted those proposals.
House Communications & Technology Committee Chair Joe Ciresi (D., Montgomery) said the body’s staff is “constantly” meeting with Shapiro’s office to discuss how lawmakers should address growing concerns from the public regarding AI.
Ciresi’s counterpart in the GOP-controlled state Senate, Tracy Pennycuick (R., Montgomery), did not respond to questions about the Character.AI lawsuit, Pennsylvania’s AI Task Force, or her staff’s coordination with Shapiro.
Two years ago, Shapiro signed a bill banning ownership or distribution of AI-generated sexual images of children and non-consenting adults, which Pennycuick had sponsored. Last year, he signed another Pennycuick bill criminalizing the use of AI to create a nonconsensual “digital likeness” (including deepfakes) to “defraud or injure” another person.
Pennycuick’s now pushing for legislation that would require disclosures and restrictions for chatbots when they interact with children. In the legislative memo, Pennycuick pointed to past lawsuits filed against chatbot developers to argue “heartbreaking cases underscore the urgent need for safeguards to protect children from unsafe and unvetted AI systems.” Her proposal passed the state Senate in March but has not advanced through committee in the House.
Lawmakers have also been working to address another aspect of the AI industry, the growth of data centers and backlash to them in some communities. In Shapiro’s February budget address, he said, “no sector of our country’s economy is growing faster than data centers and artificial intelligence.” He announced incentives for data center developers to follow stricter environmental and transparency standards.
BEFORE YOU GO… If you learned something from this article, pay it forward and contribute to Spotlight PA at spotlightpa.org/donate. This story was funded in part thanks to the support of the Lancaster County Local Journalism Fund. Learn more about how we are supported here.
Hersheypark in Pennsylvaniacould be forced to close this summer amid a dispute between the site’s operators and union employees, according to a report.
The amusement park is scheduled to open seven days a week starting May 21 in a shift from its weekend-only operation before the summer, despite a looming vote among employees about whether to go on strike.
Over 200 union maintenance employees at Hersheypark, The Hotel Hershey and Giant Center rejected a contract offer from Hershey Entertainment & Resorts on May 7, according to Inside the Magic. The park’s operators described the proposal as their “last, best and final” offer.
Over a three-day period this week, employees will vote on whether to strike after rejecting the offer, which is the third from the park’s operators. A strike could close the park just in time for the start of the busy summer season when families head on vacation.
The list of employees considering going on strike includes ride mechanics, electricians, plumbers, welders, painters, machinists, utilities technicians, carpenters, garage auto mechanics and sign artists.
In mid-March, the union and Hershey Entertainment & Resorts agreed to extend a former contract for 60 days to allow for continued negotiations.
According to Inside the Magic, union workers are seeking fair wage increases, more affordable care plans and higher pay premiums for less-desirable shifts. The union has also said that it will reject new contract offers that lower professional standards, devalue skilled trades or open the door to lower wages in maintenance roles in the future.
The Independent has contacted Hershey Entertainment & Resorts for comment about the possible strike.
Hersheypark, located 15 miles east of Harrisburg, is the largest amusement park in Pennsylvania. Founded in 1906, the 121-acre site boasts more than 70 rides, a water park with 17 water attractions and an 11-acre North American Wildlife Park, according to Hersheypark’s website.
It’s named for and themed in conjunction with the popular candy company.
However, a different park in the Keystone State was named as the top amusement park in the U.S. on TripAdvisor’s Best of the Best list.
It was Knoebels Amusement Resort in Elysburg, 42 miles north-northeast of Harrisburg, that topped the list. In doing so, the little-known park was ranked higher than Dollywood, Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, Disney’s Hollywood Studios and Universal Islands of Adventure that also made the top 5.
“It’s got it all: roller coasters, kid-friendly rides (bumper cars, a haunted mansion), swimming, camping, a mining museum, and even a championship 18-hole golf course,” TripAdvisor wrote. “The accommodating staff, clean facilities, and fun attractions make for a memorable family-friendly visit.”
Knoebels is the U.S.’s largest free-admission park, although tickets for individual rides cost a fee.
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