How Pennsylvania Lets a Defendant’s Own Lawyer Argue Against Him
Hook
A Question About a Trial That Already Happened
Six weeks into representing Milique Wagner, the lawyer the state had assigned to fight for his freedom sent him a letter that betrayed a strange confusion — asking, in effect, whether Wagner had eventually taken a plea deal, as if unaware that Wagner had been convicted by a jury, had already lost one appeal, and was now years into a life sentence he still insisted was built on another man’s lie (Melamed and Purcell, 2026).
The letter carried no drama in its language. That was the strange part. A document meant to represent him read like the notes of someone who hadn’t finished reading his own file.
It was 2013 when a jury found Wagner guilty of murder in Philadelphia. He had told his trial lawyer from the start that the case rested on a lying police informant, but that lawyer never investigated it. When his direct appeal failed in 2015, Pennsylvania law gave him one more door: a Post-Conviction Relief Act petition, and with it, a new court-appointed lawyer whose only job was to find what had gone wrong at trial and fight to fix it.
The lawyer assigned to that job was Stephen T. O’Hanlon. Court records show he never spoke with the informant. He never looked into the homicide detective who built the case — a man who would later be pulled from active duty over allegations that he’d secretly paid a witness. Instead, weeks after that confused early letter, O’Hanlon filed the document that would define the next nine years of Wagner’s life: a letter telling the judge there were no meritorious issues left to raise.
Wagner asked for a different lawyer. He told the judge that letter alone proved the man appointed to help him had already decided not to. The judge said no. Wagner would put it simply, years later: he knew, from that point on, that his own lawyer wasn’t going to fight for him (Melamed and Purcell, 2026).
Nine more years passed before anyone with the power to act agreed.
In the previous installment, we examined a similar shape of institutional betrayal — a phrase, “you have made progress,” used to turn a patient’s healing into the reason her treatment was cut off. The Notebook Her Therapist Kept traced how an insurer measured a woman’s recovery instead of her need. This is the same pattern wearing a different uniform: an institution measuring the shape of a form instead of the substance it was meant to certify.
Historical Case
An Older Law About Broken Trust
The idea that a court-appointed advocate could argue against the very person he was appointed to help sounds like a modern bureaucratic accident — the kind of thing that could only emerge from overloaded dockets and underfunded public defense. But the deeper question it raises, of what a society owes someone once it has promised him an advocate, is far older than Pennsylvania’s Post-Conviction Relief Act.
In Rome, the relationship between a patronus and his cliens was one of the load-bearing structures of the entire legal system. A citizen without standing, without connections, without the resources to navigate the courts alone, attached himself to a patron who owed him, above everything else, fides — a Latin word carrying “faithfulness” and “trustworthiness” together, the sense of a bond a person could actually lean his weight on. Part of that obligation was concrete: representing the client’s interests in legal disputes, standing beside him in the forum, spending whatever standing the patron possessed on the client’s behalf.
Roman law did not treat that betrayal as an ordinary breach of contract. Fides itself was sworn under the gods’ witness, which meant breaking it wasn’t merely a legal failure but a sacrilege — an offense against the sacred order the whole community depended on. The Twelve Tables — the earliest codification of Roman law, from the fifth century B.C. — declared that a patron who defrauded his client became sacer: cast outside the community’s sacred protection entirely, fair game for anyone who wanted to kill him without consequence.1 Scholars still debate how literally later Rome enforced that particular outlawry, but the logic behind it is the telling part — this wasn’t a fine or a prison sentence. It was expulsion from the moral universe that made citizenship meaningful in the first place.
What made that particular failure different from every other kind of unfairness a legal system could produce?
The Roman jurists never fully explained their reasoning, but the shape of the answer isn’t hard to infer. A citizen who loses a lawsuit to a stronger opponent has lost to the world as it actually operates — unequal, imperfect, sometimes cruel, but at least legible. A citizen who loses because the one person he was told to trust used that position of trust against him has lost to something else entirely: a promise turned inside out, still wearing the name of protection while working as its opposite.
Nearly two thousand years later, American law arrived at its own version of the same recognition, though it took a different shape and, eventually, a narrower one. In 1963, the Supreme Court ruled in Gideon v. Wainwright that the Sixth Amendment required the state to provide a lawyer to any defendant who couldn’t afford one at trial — a promise built on the same fidelity the Roman patronus once owed his client. That same year, in Douglas v. California, the Court extended the right to a first direct appeal. But the right stopped there. Once a conviction survives that direct appeal and a person tries to reopen the case through post-conviction review — the exact stage where Wagner’s fight would take place — the constitutional guarantee simply ends. That gap is precisely where the promise of an advocate had technically been kept and practically been hollowed out.
Biblical Lens
Scripture does not require that every catastrophe be interpreted as divine judgment; it does, however, insist that societies eventually reveal the moral conditions under which they have chosen to live.
The word Scripture uses for the kind of advocate a person can actually trust is, itself, a legal term borrowed from the ancient courtroom. In John’s Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples that after he departs, the Father will send them “another advocate” — the Greek is parakletos, one called alongside to help, a word ancient readers would have recognized from the law courts as a term for someone summoned specifically to stand at a defendant’s side.
Christianity’s central claim about God’s posture toward humanity is not, first, that of an impartial judge weighing a case from the bench — it’s that of an advocate who chooses to stand on the defendant’s side of the room.
“And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever.” (John 14:16)
The word “another” matters here. It assumes a first advocate worth being compared to — one whose faithfulness set the standard the second was sent to match, not to fall short of.
First John returns to the same word and the same courtroom picture, but shifts the scene to the moment of failure itself — not a hypothetical defense, but an advocate standing ready for someone who has already done wrong and has nothing left to argue in his own favor.
“But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father — Jesus Christ, the Righteous One.” (1 John 2:1)
The prophet Micah, writing centuries earlier into a society he described as unraveling at every level of trust, warned that even the closest human relationships could no longer be assumed safe ground.
“Do not trust a neighbor; put no confidence in a friend. Even with the woman who lies in your embrace guard the words of your lips.” (Micah 7:5)
Micah isn’t arguing that trust itself is a mistake. He’s naming the moment a true Advocate becomes necessary in the first place — the collapse of every nearer, human guarantee is exactly what makes the more distant, divine one worth naming at all. The same book turns, only a few verses later, from that collapse toward a God who “does not stay angry forever because he delights to show mercy” (Micah 7:18). The Advocate Scripture describes is defined by never becoming what Wagner’s letter became — an argument for the prosecution, filed under the name of the defense.
None of this claims that every underfunded public defender acts in bad faith, or that Pennsylvania built its system with cruelty in mind. But it is worth sitting with the fact that ancient thinkers, with far less legal machinery than the modern Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, already understood that an advocate’s betrayal deserved a different category of concern than an advocate’s mere defeat.
Pattern Insight
What the Letters Add Up To
Wagner’s case was not an isolated failure by one overworked attorney. A joint investigation by The Philadelphia Inquirer and ProPublica reviewed 250 of the city’s reversed convictions and sentences in violent felony cases since 2018 and found that Wagner belonged to a group of at least fifty people whose court-appointed lawyers had told a judge there was nothing left to fight for — only for those same convictions to be overturned later, frequently for the exact reasons those lawyers had dismissed (Melamed and Purcell, 2026).
The mechanism has a name in Pennsylvania practice: a Finley letter, after Dorothy Finley, a woman convicted of robbery-murder in 1979 whose own court-appointed lawyer asked to be released from her case rather than argue it. When her case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987, the justices ruled that a person has no constitutional right to a lawyer once a case moves past direct appeal into post-conviction review2 — which left states free to decide what, if anything, an appointed lawyer at that stage actually owes the client. In dissent, Justice William Brennan warned the ruling would leave indigent defendants with what he called a meaningless ritual, while defendants who could afford private counsel would still receive a genuine review of their claims. Finley died in prison a decade after her case set the precedent that now carries her name.
The paperwork required to file a Finley letter today is minimal — a description of what the lawyer reviewed, a list of the client’s claims, an explanation for why each one fails. An examination of invoices covering eighty-three homicide cases in which lawyers filed these letters found that roughly three-quarters of the time, the appointed attorney never arranged a phone call with the client, never contacted the original trial lawyer, and never obtained the police or prosecution’s file — even though that file has been one of the most reliable sources of new evidence in overturned convictions for years. Judges, for their part, approved the lawyer’s work in more than nine out of every ten of these filings, regardless of how little investigation the record actually showed (Melamed and Purcell, 2026).
Two other men caught in the same mechanism show how little the pattern depends on the specifics of any one case. One was fifteen years old when he was arrested for murder; his trial lawyer never met with him even once, and the appointed post-conviction lawyer still found his guilt “overwhelming.” Another spent nearly seventeen years in prison after a judge threatened a witness into keeping his original testimony — an issue the appointed lawyer rejected before a federal court later called it a clear violation of the man’s right to counsel. He came home in December, after his children had grown up entirely inside the years he lost.
A team of researchers who analyzed one hundred Finley letters filed in Philadelphia homicide cases for a Harvard Law Review Forum study concluded that the pattern amounted to routine disloyalty toward clients in the highest-stakes cases the system handles.3 That is a striking word for a peer-reviewed legal journal to choose. It suggests the researchers weren’t describing an occasional lapse in an otherwise sound system, but a structural feature the system has learned to tolerate — as this series noted in the case of a man freed only after twenty-seven years on death row, certainty is cheapest for the person who never has to sit with the consequences of being wrong.
What does it mean for a safeguard to become the very obstacle it was built to prevent?
The deeper pattern here isn’t unique to Pennsylvania’s courts. Any institution that measures its own success by how efficiently it disposes of cases will eventually reward the disposal over the defense — because dockets clear either way, and only one of those two outcomes requires the harder, slower work of actually looking. Insurance reviewers measure improvement instead of need. Overburdened caseworkers measure paperwork completed instead of families reunited. And in Philadelphia’s post-conviction system, judges measured a well-formatted letter instead of the investigation that letter was supposed to represent — approving the form of diligence in place of the substance of it, because the form was what actually crossed their desk.
Nothing in this pattern requires anyone involved to be a villain. A lawyer carrying dozens of post-conviction cases at once has every practical incentive to file the fast letter rather than run the slow investigation — a structural pressure, not a moral failing, and one the no-merit letter’s minimal paperwork requirements do nothing to resist. The lawyer in Wagner’s case has said, in his own defense, that judges and prosecutors agreed with his assessment at the time in every one of his contested cases — and in a narrow, procedural sense, that’s true. The system worked exactly as designed. None of this suggests most of Pennsylvania’s — or America’s — court-appointed lawyers operate this way; most likely investigate seriously, and most Finley letters likely describe exactly the meritless claims they reject. What the data shows is a minority pattern large enough, and consequential enough, to deserve scrutiny rather than a system in wholesale collapse.
The paperwork in cases like Wagner’s looks, on its surface, indistinguishable from paperwork filed by a lawyer who did the work carefully — the same letterhead, the same legal boilerplate, the same judge’s signature of approval at the bottom. That is precisely what should trouble a reader more than outright malice would. A machine built to fail people quietly, through paperwork everyone signs off on, is harder to name and harder to fix than a single corrupt actor ever was.
Closing
What the Certificate Couldn’t Undo
Wagner spent his years inside learning to work with his hands. In 2022, he stood in a red graduation gown at the State Correctional Institution Frackville and held up a certificate for completing a carpentry program — a skill built entirely on the principle that a structure is only as trustworthy as the frame nobody sees once the walls go up.
He would need that principle explained to him by no one. He had already lived the alternative: a legal structure that looked sound from the outside — a lawyer assigned, a letter filed, a judge’s signature affixed — while the frame behind it held nothing at all.
It took the conviction of the corrupt detective who had built the original case, and a district attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit willing to reopen what a court-appointed lawyer had already called meritless, before anyone in an official capacity agreed that Wagner’s letter to his own lawyer back in 2016 — the one asking him to look into that detective — had been asking the right question all along. He came home this past January, thirty-seven years old, married, helping care for an aging grandmother, rebuilding a life the system had spent thirteen years arguing he didn’t deserve back.
He has said he’ll represent himself in court from now on, if it comes to that. Not out of confidence in his own legal skill, but because the alternative — trusting the process to assign him another advocate — is a door he has already watched close from the inside.
Every generation rediscovers the same arithmetic: a promise of help is only as real as the willingness of the one who made it to follow through on the harder days. The Romans wrote that discovery into their earliest laws. A man in a red gown, holding a certificate for work done with wood and nails, wrote it into a decade of his own life before anyone with the power to help him noticed he had been right from the start.
1. Alan Watson, Rome of the XII Tables: Persons and Property (Princeton University Press, 1975), on the patronus–cliens fraud provision, Table VIII.
2. Pennsylvania v. Finley, 481 U.S. 551 (1987).
3. Jennifer Merrigan et al., “The Finley Failure: An Empirical Account of How Finley No-Merit Letters Foster a Culture of Unethical Lawyering and Undermine the Rule of Law,” Harvard Law Review Forum, Vol. 139 (2026).
4. Samantha Melamed and Dylan Purcell, “With a Chance at Freedom, They Faced an Unexpected Obstacle: Their Own Lawyers,” The Philadelphia Inquirer / ProPublica, May 19, 2026.
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