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Minnesota Public Defenders grieve excessive caseloads

By ambimb

We all work hard, but sometimes, no matter how hard we work, we can’t keep up with the avalanche of new cases. That’s where public defenders in southeastern Minnesota apparently find themselves; they filed a union grievance over excessive workloads: A legislative audit report issued in February said public defender workloads in Minnesota are too high and exceed state and national standards. The study took into account how much time cases took to defend, with one case unit in the average misdemeanor, and more case units for more serious offenses. The report said that state and national standards call for public defenders to carry no more than 400 case units per year. In this district, there were 31 full-time-equivalent public defenders in 2007...continue to full post

Full post as published by Public Defender Stuff on April 15, 2010 (boomark / email).