Why the State of California is responsible for the public defense crisis in Fresno County
Posted on September 29, 2013 by David Carroll
( I just posted snippets of a very informative article) (there is always money for prisons but not for justice)
Pleading the Sixth: In late September 2013, more than 80% of the public defenders in Fresno County, California signed a letter protesting their working conditions, and in particular their excessive caseloads. Though some counties in California are rightfully recognized for their “best practice” approach to indigent defense services, the 6AC explores how the failure of the State of California to provide any oversight of the right to counsel services has led to a proliferation of broken systems, like Fresno County’s, throughout the state. It is long past time to put a spotlight on undue political interference in California.
California “We are discouraged and demoralized due to the decimation of staff, greatly increased caseload, lack of training, lack of mentoring, and refusal to promote anyone beyond [a mid-level attorney position] within the past five years.” Thus concluded a letter signed more than 80% (41 of 51) of the attorneys working in the Law Office of the Public Defender for Fresno County and sent on September 20, 2013, to the office’s chief public defender. The letter was then forwarded to the county Board of Supervisors and to the presiding judge of the Superior Court, as first reported in the Fresno Bee.
The letter asks the county to immediately address the fact that attorneys are over-burdened with a “staggering number of cases” that puts their clients in “imminent harm” of receiving ineffective assistance of counsel. It should be noted that the staff took its collective approach to notifying the county of the crisis because all are concerned about “being singled out for punishment should an individual complaint be voiced due to the recent termination of an attorney colleague” who refused to take on any more cases.
The letter sets out some of the most flagrant violations of nationally recognized standards of justice that this author has seen in his career, beginning with excessive caseloads.
http://sixthamendment.org/why-the-state-of-california-is-responsible-for-the-public-defense-crisis-in-fresno-county/
Fresno County felony attorneys’ average open cases (that is, those they are actively working at any given time) exceed the annual caseload standards by more than 53%. “The felony attorneys are carrying an average of 230 cases as of July 1st, 2013,” the letter declares, going on to determine that the average felony attorney handles more than 1,000 cases per year (or, 566% above national standards). To put it another way, if each attorney works 2,080 hours per year (40 hours per week multiplied by 52 weeks per year), the Fresno County public defender office averages approximately two hours and five minutes per felony case. That means an attorney has slightly more than two hours per felony case from appointment to initial interview to plea negotiations through all final court appearances, including, if necessary, trial and sentencing, if every single minute of every single working day is spent on case-related matters, and the attorney never takes a vacation, observes a holiday, or engages in professional development.
The situation is just as bad for misdemeanor representation. National standards state that an attorney should handle no more than 400 cases annually, and nothing else – a figure that approximates the number of open pending cases a misdemeanor attorney has at any one time. Annually, misdemeanor attorneys handle approximately 2,000 cases each – a caseload that leaves only slightly more than an hour per case.
That leaves California as one of only seven states that do not contribute any money for non-capital, trial-level right to counsel services.[1] This means that local government must shoulder the entire burden of providing trial-level public attorneys to the poor.
Fresno County suffered greatly from the economic recession. In his seminal work on public defense services in the state, The California Public Defender: Its Origins, Evolution and Decline, Cal-Western Law Professor Laurence Benner explains that the Fresno County Public Defender was asked to take a deep budget cut in 2010. At that point, the office dismantled its training unit, along with its legal research unit, much of its paralegal unit, and supervisory structure. With nothing left to cut, the office started letting younger staff go decreasing staff attorneys from 75 to 48. Only at that point did the office start refusing cases. “The County’s response,” reports Prof. Benner, “was to put all the primary indigent defense services up for sale to the lowest bidder.” On October 20, 2010, the county solicited proposals to privatize services.
Even as the immediate focus of reform should be on Fresno County (click here to read the 6AC letter to the Fresno County Board of Supervisors), state and national advocates need to begin the larger task of reforming all of California’s failing systems. In thinking about where to go with California, the 6AC posits this simple point: in finding the right to the assistance of counsel fundamental and essential to fair trials, the U.S. Supreme Court in Gideon made the provision of right to counsel services an obligation of state governments, not counties, by virtue of the Fourteenth Amendment. Though it is not believed to be unconstitutional for a state to delegate to its counties the state’s constitutional obligations, in doing so a state must guarantee that local governments are not only able to provide such services but that they are in fact doing so. California has no such mechanism and, as a result, counties like Fresno are allowed to do pretty much whatever they want in regards to the right to counsel, knowing that the state will do nothing about it.
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