Milique Wagner always insisted that his 2013 murder conviction was built on an informant’s lie. But Wagner said he couldn’t persuade his trial lawyer to investigate that, even after the informant confessed to the murder and testified that Philadelphia police and prosecutors knew the truth.

In 2015, Wagner’s appeal failed, and he faced life in prison.

But Wagner had another chance at freedom under a state law that allowed him to get a new court-appointed lawyer to help him challenge his conviction. Court records show that the attorney never spoke with the informant or looked into the detective on the case, who made headlines after being benched for secretly paying a witness. Instead, Wagner’s lawyer urged the judge to shut down his client’s petition, writing in June 2017, “There are no meritorious issues that could be raised.”

Wagner would remain in prison another six years before prosecutors acknowledged that police had hidden evidence suggesting that the informant had committed the murder and the detective was corrupt. Although Wagner maintains his innocence, he agreed to a plea deal for third-degree murder that allowed him to leave prison.

The opposition Wagner faced from his own lawyer is permitted under Pennsylvania’s Post Conviction Relief Act, the law that allows people in prison to raise newly discovered evidence or argue that their previous lawyer mishandled the case. The state provides a lawyer in these cases, but with a catch: The attorney can argue against the client’s claims and withdraw from the case by filing what’s known as a “no-merit” letter.

A Philadelphia Inquirer and ProPublica investigation found case after case in which court-appointed attorneys did minimal work to examine their clients’ claims and rejected what later turned out to be legitimate legal issues. The findings reveal that Philadelphia’s post-conviction system repeatedly delayed or denied justice for wrongfully convicted people who then spent years or decades behind bars.

The news organizations reviewed 250 of Philadelphia’s reversed convictions and sentences since 2018 in violent felony cases. Wagner was one of at least 50 people whose lawyers said there was no basis to challenge their cases, only for judges to later decide they deserved new trials or sentences.

While in some cases the exonerating evidence did not emerge until years after the no-merit letter was filed, a majority were tossed out based on issues the PCRA lawyers overlooked or rejected.

Three years of invoices appointed attorneys submitted to the court, covering 83 homicide PCRA cases in which the lawyers filed no-merit letters, show the extent of lawyers’ efforts.

Those attorneys did not arrange a single phone call with the client, contact the trial lawyer or obtain the police or prosecution case files about three-quarters of the time. Those case files have been a key source of evidence in overturned convictions since Philadelphia’s district attorney began making them available to lawyers six years ago.

Lawyers Did Little Before Declaring Cases Meritless

Homicide cases are the most serious ones a lawyer can handle. But many lawyers handling homicide Post Conviction Relief Act cases never spoke with their clients before rejecting their claims. Here’s how often they took basic steps in 83 cases.

In some cases, records show the attorneys rejected their clients’ claims just days or weeks after being appointed and submitted filings with factual errors, including the wrong defendant’s name. They filed no-merit letters despite red flags, such as a client’s co-defendant having already been exonerated or a detective who locked the client up having been arrested for assaulting witnesses or tampering with evidence.

Daniel Anders, the administrative judge who oversees Philadelphia’s court-appointed counsel system, did not respond to requests for comment.

Judge Barbara McDermott, who oversaw many PCRA cases before recently retiring from Philadelphia’s Court of Common Pleas, defended the system and said it is working as intended.

“We’re never going to be a perfect system, but within the system we’ve had we’ve done the best we can,” she said, adding that no-merit letters play an important role in shutting down pointless challenges. “At some point, there has to be finality to cases.”

In Pennsylvania, a person looking to challenge their conviction starts by filing a PCRA petition, often handwritten on a state-issued form. If it’s a person’s first PCRA, a judge will assign a lawyer to amend it.

Robert Dunham, a lawyer who spent years training attorneys across the state to litigate death-penalty appeals, said appointed lawyers are too often limiting their review to the issues their clients raised. He said the job is to reinvestigate the entire case to catch things previous lawyers missed.

“[The clients are] not lawyers. In many cases they are impaired,” Dunham said. “They don’t have the ability to conduct a factual investigation because they’re in jail.”

Stephen T. O’Hanlon, the attorney appointed to Wagner’s case, sent no-merit letters to nine clients who would later have their convictions or sentences overturned. That was more than any other attorney identified in the Inquirer and ProPublica examination, but O’Hanlon also handled among the most PCRA cases.

Five of the nine cases were later overturned in state or federal court based on issues with the trial or plea he rejected or did not raise.

O’Hanlon said the attorney code of ethics prevents him from making arguments he knows to be false or frivolous and that, in each case, the judge and prosecutor agreed with him at the time.

“Yes, it’s good that they got off on some kind of five-years-later technicality,” he said, “but it’s wrong to suggest there was any problem with” the no-merit........

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