Legal News

ABC: Budget Cuts Causing ?Crisis? in Public Defenders? Offices

By Dan Slater

Last week, we noted the NYT report that, due to budget cuts by the state legislature, Georgia’s defender system will close the Metro Conflict Defender Office, leaving about 1,850 defendants in the lurch. Now, ABC is reporting that public defenders from Kentucky to Minnesota to Miami are saying budget cuts are leaving them unable to handle misdemeanor and, in some instances, serious felony cases.

Public defenders in Minnesota, Kentucky, Florida and Georgia say they will not be able to handle all their cases beginning next month. In many cases, that would mean turning cases over to private defenders — the kind of solution that some believe can result in poor representation for indigent defendants. In Atlanta, for instance, the local district attorney, Paul Howard, told ABC that a proposed plan to pay lawyers $200 for a plea bargain and $600 for a trial could diminish the quality of representation. “I have seen a system where lawyers are simply collecting checks rather than representing people in a quality manner,” he said.

“It is an impending legal crisis in our state,” Joseph Lambert, the chief justice of the Kentucky Supreme Court, told ABC News. “Without adequate defense counsel, the public simply cannot be confident that persons are not being wrongfully convicted of crimes.”

But the refusals, reports ABC, have raised the prospect that judges could hold local defenders in contempt for refusing to take cases. A 2006 opinion from the ABA says lawyers representing indigent defendants should withdraw if their caseloads prevent them from providing “competent and diligent” representation. That opinion reportedly appears to conflict with state law, which says that judges may not allow a public defender to withdraw from a case based only on inadequate funding or excess workload.

In either case, some think the stink being made by public defenders amounts to stem budge cuts through the back-door. Victor Crist, a Florida senator and the chair of the state’s justice appropriations committee, said the public defenders were trying to circumvent the legislature and force the budget issue into the courts. “I think what they’re doing is greedy,” he said. “This is nothing more than a power play on their part to try to take the decision making out of the legislature and put it in the courts in terms of funding.

“But at who’s expense?” he said. “Do we cut the schools? Do we cut health services? Everybody has had to share in the reductions.”

Photo: iStockPhoto

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on June 16, 2008 (boomark / email).