The Indianapolis Star reports today on the public defender standoff in Marion County. Some quotes:
Marion County judges appointed private attorneys to represent 42 children in juvenile court on Monday, exacerbating the county's financial troubles that led the public defender's office to stop accepting new cases last week.Meanwhile, the Boston Globe reported here on June 29th, in a story headlined "Suit seeks pay raise for public defenders: Ability of indigent to get aid seen at risk":Each private attorney will bill the county $90 an hour. That's a lot more than newly hired public defenders in juvenile court earn. They make $33,094 a year, or about $16 an hour, plus benefits.
"This is another example of the creation of a crisis and the failure to provide leadership," Juvenile Court Judge James Payne said. "We in the court are left to figure out how to create a system in a matter of days."
Citing oppressive caseloads in the juvenile court, the public defender's office stopped accepting new clients Friday, forcing judges then to appoint private attorneys to 17 youths accused of crimes.
Local judges are preparing paperwork that would effectively require the county to pay for new public defenders if local leaders can't come up with the answers.
A sweeping lawsuit filed yesterday with the state's highest court says that Massachusetts, a pioneer in guaranteeing legal counsel to poor criminal defendants, is reneging on that promise as private lawyers refuse to take court-appointed cases because of paltry pay rates.The Mississippi lawsuit was the subject of two Indiana Law Blog entries in 2003. Although the links to the newspaper stories may no longer work, the quotes provide the gist. See this entry from Arpil 16, 2003 and this one from May 7, 2003 (the final item).The lawsuit against the state, which was brought by a law firm that has filed similar complaints elsewhere in the nation, says the number of private lawyers who take such cases has fallen by more than 200 in the past five years, largely because Massachusetts pays the attorneys only $30 an hour in most cases, the lowest statutory rate in the country.
As a result, the suit said, children and poor people are struggling to obtain lawyers in criminal and civil cases, and the system "teeters on the brink of collapse." The suit, which seeks certification as a class action on behalf of children and poor litigants, asks the Supreme Judicial Court to appoint a special master to study the system statewide. * * *
"Our view is that there's a systemic failure, and we're asking the court for systemic relief," said Joshua C. Krumholz, a lawyer with Holland & Knight. "It's at the point of crisis." His firm has been involved in similar suits in other states that led to higher pay for some court-appointed lawyers, including in Florida, Mississippi, Alabama.
Arnold & Porter was the firm involved in the Mississippi suit. Here is a well-worth-reading article on their site, reprinted form The American Lawyer. Here are a few quotes from the story:
No outraged protesters gather at the Supreme Court on Gideon's anniversary; fanatics don't post Internet hit lists of "providers" of legal services; and federal judges aren't overseeing sweeping implementation plans for indigent defense programs in recalcitrant states. In fact, to this day the Court has offered remarkably little guidance on how the states should organize representation of the poor.See also this chart of defense systems in the various states.Predictably, that has led to a patchwork system among the states. There are three basic ways that states provide indigent defense services: appointing private lawyers; bidding out for contract lawyers; and maintaining full-time public defenders. A study released in 2000 by the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics showed that 27 states fund all or most of their indigent defense programs. Twenty-two others are funded primarily at the county level or through a mix of state and county funds (Alabama uses court fees to fund a county-based system. See "Defense Systems.")
The burden of defending indigent cases is huge. The 2000 bureau study, for example, conservatively estimated that, in 1999, public defense lawyers in the nation's 100 most populous counties handled about 4.2 million cases. Nationwide, the bureau estimates that about 80 percent of all criminal defendants in state court are indigent. That means that of the roughly 1.2 million people tried on felony charges last year in state court, more than 900,000 were represented by public defenders of one kind or another.
Lack of sufficient funding to handle that burden is the perennial lament of public defense advocates, and the numbers support their concerns. A comprehensive 1986 survey conducted by the bureau showed that indigent defense received slightly more than $1 billion in state, local and federal funding, as opposed to $3.2 billion for prosecutors, $13 billion for corrections, and $22 billion for law enforcement. The 100-county study released in 2000 showed that, though spending on indigent defense had increased greatly during the previous decade, it still constituted less than 3 percent of the counties' criminal justice budgets.
[More] Here is an update to the Mass. lawsuit referenced above, from the July 3, 2004 Boston Globe:
The state's highest court ruled yesterday that dozens of poor criminal defendants in Hampden County are being denied their constitutional right to counsel because they cannot find private lawyers to represent them at low pay rates.And an update from the Mass. paper, The Republican, dated July 14th, reports:The Supreme Judicial Court said that the defendants have suffered ''severe restrictions on [their] liberty and other constitutional interests." The ruling came only two days after the state public defender agency had urged the justices to let Hampden judges raise the hourly pay rates for lawyers who take court-appointed cases,
But the court stopped short of ordering that hourly rates in the county be raised, which would provoke a showdown with the Legislature, which sets the rates.
Instead, the court ordered representatives of Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly and the public defender agency to appear Thursday before Justice Francis X. Spina.
Spina will weigh the possibility of releasing defendants who have been held without bail in jail for more than seven days without counsel. He is also considering dismissing charges against some defendants, but could reinstate them if lawyers are provided.
William J. Leahy, the chief counsel for the Committee for Public Counsel Services, was delighted with the ruling.
''The SJC has ruled . . . that the right to counsel for indigent defendants in Massachusetts is going to be enforced, no ifs, ands, or buts," he said. ''And if the price of the state not funding the right to counsel is the release of defendants from bail or the dismissal of criminal cases, then that is a price the court is willing to order."
SPRINGFIELD - The state agency that oversees legal representation for the poor yesterday submitted to the state Supreme Judicial Court the names of 79 defendants in Hampden County it counts as not having lawyers.Posted by Marcia Oddi at July 27, 2004 09:20 AMWilliam J. Leahy, the chief counsel for the Committee for Public Services, said the Springfield office of the agency is not taking new cases because the 10 staff lawyers already are handling 350 cases - 20 cases over the maximum caseload limit for the office. * * *
The full Supreme Judicial Court July 2 ruled that about 50 poor criminal defendants in Hampden County are being denied their constitutional right to a lawyer because private lawyers are turning down cases, saying the state's reimbursement rates are too low. Private lawyers, called bar advocates, handled cases for the poor in addition to the Committee for Public Services lawyers, called public defenders.
The court assigned Francis X. Spina, an associate justice of the state Supreme Judicial Court, to find a way to resolve the issue.
At the full court's direction, Spina is considering the possibility of releasing suspects who have been held in jail without bail for more than seven days, because they do not have lawyers. He also is weighing whether to drop charges against other defendants, though those charges could be reinstated if lawyers are found.