Orleans Parish public defender says he may refuse cases if funding is not increased
Not exactly the strongest statement, but it's a start:
The head of the Orleans Parish Public Defender's office said he may have to start refusing cases after a one-time allocation from the city of New Orleans dries up, with no funding included in next year's budget.
I've advocated for a while now that lawyers, including public defenders, should refuse to accept appointments when adequate funding is not made available or when their case loads are so high that they are ineffective by default. When the South Carolina Commission on Indigent Defense announced that they would no longer pay appointed attorneys due to the legislature's lack of appropriation of indigent defense funds, I and other defense lawyers filed motions to halt the prosecution of our clients until funding was made available, and to release them from jail.
By and large, the public is not concerned with the rights of people who are accused of crime (until it happens to them), and when the voting public is not concerned politicians are not concerned. The only thing that will get the attention of the public and the legislature is when prosecutions stop because attorneys ethically refuse representation or because judges begin releasing people who cannot be prosecuted.
When a public defender's office cannot afford to hire enough attorneys to handle the numbers of accused that are being arrested and prosecuted in our prison obsessed culture, or cannot afford to hire enough staff to conduct any meaningful investigation of clients' cases, or when funding is not made available to retain the experts needed to defend a client, they have an obligation to refuse to accept cases until funding is made available - if the state is going to prosecute citizens in the numbers that it does, it must pay the tab.
Friday I had a preliminary hearing in Conway, and as usual was depressed and angry when the judge announced that all public defender clients' hearings were waived. All stood and gave their names to their court one at a time so that they could be marked off the list; the judge explained that public defenders' case loads were too high to expend time on a preliminary hearing, and then they were excused one at a time.
A post by Monroe Freedman at Legal Ethics Forum sums up what needs to happen before we will see change in funding of indigent defense - I haven't read Ordinary Justice yet and Freedman did not give a link to Becker's review so I can't say for sure that he was referring to indigent defense, but however Freedman meant his words, they ring true in this context as well:
In addition, as Mr. Becker recognizes, “the criminal justice system would collapse.” So much the better. The fact is that the administration of justice has long been in a state of collapse – a fact that we lawyers and judges have been covering up by maintaining a pretense of ethical conduct and of due process of law. As a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Justice told me, the only way to force real reform is to bring down the system. Nothing short of that will command the attention of the media, the public, and public officials, and force the allocation of the resources that are necessary if we are to live up to our professional and constitutional claims.
