Public defenders refuse clients due to overwhelming caseloads
In an article today, the NY Times highlights the growing crisis in public defender's offices around the country, in states which are not providing funding to adequately represent the indigent.
Public defenders’ offices in at least seven states are refusing to take on new cases or have sued to limit them, citing overwhelming workloads that they say undermine the constitutional right to counsel for the poor.
Most defendants cannot afford to retain a criminal defense lawyer, but Gideon and the Sixth
Amendment requires that the state must provide people with effective counsel before a person can be prosecuted. The key is that every person is entitled not only to a lawyer standing with them in court, but they are entitled to the effective assistance of counsel, which is impossible when the system requires the public defender to support caseloads of 400 or 500 defendants. It is not possible to investigate cases and do legal research with this type of caseload, nor is it possible to try every case that should be tried.
The ethics rules require that an attorney limit his or her caseload to an amount that is manageable, and taking on too many cases is malpractice. But public defenders are put in a difficult position, when they do not necessarily have control of how many cases they receive, and they know that every person must have representation.
In several states public defenders have filed lawsuits and in some cases have been authorized by judges to stop taking cases until the state adequately funds indigent defense.
“In my opinion, there should be hundreds of such motions or lawsuits,” said Norman Lefstein, a professor at the Indiana University School of Law and an expert on criminal justice.“I think the quality of public defense around the country is absolutely deteriorating,” Mr. Lefstein said, asserting that unless states spent more on lawyers, the courts would force them to delay trials or, as has happened in a few cases, threaten to drop charges against unrepresented defendants.
The most immediate impact of the rushed justice, Mr. Lefstein and Mr. Carroll said, is that innocent defendants may feel pressure to plead guilty or may be wrongfully convicted — which means the real offenders would be left untouched. Appeals claiming inadequate defense are very difficult to win, experts say.
An alternative to spending more on defense would be not arresting and charging so many people. Not prosecuting victimless crimes, such as drug possession, gambling, prostitution, and, arguably, non-felony DUI, would free up resources for both the prosecution and the defense. Costly space in jails and prisons would be emptied and we could refocus on treatment and prevention as well as the prosecution of violent crimes that actually have victims. Less prosecutions, less money would need to be allocated to the defense of indigents. In the meantime, States have got to adequately fund indigent defense and when they do not, public defenders should be refusing cases.
