AZ: pay daze, parity parody

Public Defender Stuff carried this item out of Tucson:

County seeks big raise to slow lawyer exodus

Pima County Attorney Barbara LaWall and the heads of the county's two indigent-defense offices are so desperate to stop their lawyers from quitting that they've asked the county for a 20 percent raise for all their attorneys.

So far this fiscal year, LaWall's office has seen a 17 percent turnover rate among her attorneys, and Bob Hooker, the head of the Pima County Public Defender's Office, has seen a 22 percent turnover rate. Isabel Garcia, the head of the Legal Defender's Office, says several of her attorneys are openly seeking new jobs.

A 20 percent raise would cost the county between $2.2 million and $2.4 million...

Also in the same paper on the same day:

Defense attorneys' suit dismissed -
Judge agrees with county in dispute over unequal pay

A federal judge has dismissed a three-year-old lawsuit against Pima County filed by 45 former and current county-paid defense attorneys who claimed they were being paid far less than prosecutors. The lawyers argued that by paying them less than their prosecutorial counterparts, Pima County breached their contract, violating the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution and the rights of their clients... In their initial claim against the county, the attorneys were seeking $9.5 million in damages and back pay.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Charles Pyle sided with the county, dismissing the case with prejudice, meaning it cannot be filed again. Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry and Rick Brown, one of the attorneys who represented the county, said they were pleased with the judge's decision. "We all have better things to do," Huckelberry said...

(T)he county argued that prosecutors and defense attorneys are not "similarly situated." The judge agreed. Pyle noted the county's attorneys argued that prosecutors and defense attorneys not only do different work, but the county has a "legitimate interest in favoring the public's interest in vigorously prosecuting crime over the county's duty to provide indigent criminal defense, and that paying prosecutors more than public defenders is rationally related to that interest."

"Although the argument is an uncomfortable one," Pyle concluded, it is a rational one.

Poor criminal defendants weren't entitled to court-appointed attorneys prior to 1963, and even now they are entitled to get only "reasonably effective" representation, Pyle said. As a result, government entities "could legitimately conclude that its law enforcement obligations are of a greater priority than its obligations to provide 'effective' assistance of counsel to indigent public defendants..."

Pima County Public Defender Bob Hooker, who was appointed to his position after the lawsuit was filed, said he hopes the county is ready to move on to other things now. "I think a lot of circumstances that gave rise to these attorneys feeling the need to file a lawsuit no longer exist. If they do, then I'm not doing my job," Hooker said.

I love the quotation marks around "effective," and that's all I'm going to say about that (it's not wise to curse, particularly at judges).