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Indigent Defense Crunch in Miami Dade County

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"Miami judge rules poor defense caseload crushing," is Curt Anderson's AP report, via the Miami Herald.The public defender's office that represents Miami-Dade County's poorest criminal defendants is overburdened by a crushing caseload and will stop accepting thousands of lesser felony cases until the situation improves, a judge ruled Wednesday. Prosecutors vowed to appeal. Circuit Judge Stanford Blake found that Public Defender Bennett Brummer's office has absorbed 12.6 percent in budget cuts over the last two years, while its criminal caseload has rocketed by 29 percent since 2004. "The evidence shows that the number of active cases is so high that the assistant public defenders are, at best, providing minimal competent representation to the accused," Blake wrote...continue to full post

Full post as published by StandDown Texas Project on September 04, 2008 (boomark / email).