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).

Unequal Defense, Chapter V: Enter the Equalizer

Things are looking way up for one of the young murder defendants in Grant County, Washington:

"A Grant County Superior Court judge appointed Michele Shaw to Jake Eakin's defense, replacing another court-appointed lawyer who had asked out of the case because of slow payment. Shaw represented the Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway, and has handled several high-profile juvenile murder cases, including Barry Loukaitis, a 14-year-old convicted in 1997 of killing his teacher and two classmates at a Moses Lake school."

No joy for the co-defendant, at least not yet. Memo to Randy Smith, his lawyer who's four years out of law school, who asked, 'what does it help to bring in a lawyer from out-of-town?': us small-town practitioners need to buck up and swallow our country pride some times. It can do a lot of good to bring in outside talent, especially if they've done this a few more times than we have and are better at this than we are.

Unequal Defense, Chapter IV (in a seemingly never-ending story)

The injustice keeps flowing like a mighty stream in Grant County, Washington. Today the Seattle Times reports on a first-degree murder case with two 12-year-old defendants, in a criminal justice system where "(t)he trial judge has been censured for incompetence, the prosecutor has been convicted of a drug felony, and the county's public-defense system is the subject of a class-action lawsuit." The boys will be the youngest murder defendants tried as adults in Washington state, and trial begins September 14.

It's a well-researched, well-written, truly horrifying read. You ought to click over to the article to get the full sense of disaster unfolding. If you don't, let me at least pass on one bit of advice for the aspiring public defender: if you have been practicing for all of four years, you have 110 felonies in your caseload, you get a murder case involving a 12-year-old, and more experienced colleagues and experts are volunteering to help out you and your client, your best response is not going to be:

"What does that help, getting an attorney in from Portland, or Seattle, or Timbuktu? How does that help? Is there something about my law degree that is somehow less because I have an office in Grant County? I find that a little offensive. Maybe I'm young and cocky, but I think I'm pretty good."

Tool. Get over yourself. It's about the client, not about you.

(Previous posts about The Black Hole of Ephrata are Chapter I, Chapter II, and Chapter III.)

Unequal Defense, Chapter VI: The Gathering

"A lawsuit alleging that Central Washington's Grant County provides inadequate representation to criminal defendants received a crucial boost yesterday when a judge ruled that the plaintiffs can be lumped together into a class-action proceeding."

"In support of their motion for class certification, the attorneys challenging Grant County wrote: 'Hundreds of indigent people face criminal proceedings in Grant County at any given time. They share the same concerns and fears, namely, that they will be left in the lurch by lawyers, who are too overworked, underpaid, under-experienced, or under-supervised to offer effective assistance (or even return phone calls).'"

(In an ultimately related story, more on the current Grant County murder case involving two 12- and 13- year defendants can be found here.)

Unequal Defense, Chapter III

A disgraced contract public defender in central Washington may not get to keep his new job as victim-witness coordinator with the Grant County prosecuting attorney after all. According to an opinion letter from the state bar, Guillermo Romero cannot work in a law office in any capacity after having being disbarred on July 22.

"If he has to go, it would be a shame, because he's done a great job for us," the county prosecutor said.

Unequal Defense, Chapter II

Another shoe has dropped in the contract public defender scandal in Grant County, Washington (just a few miles from Yakima, where I practiced in 1994-97). Previously, the Seattle Times had published a rogues' gallery of bad lawyers and judges up in 'Ephrata/Soap Lake/Moses Lake' (as they say on Northwest Public Radio). The guy who was the low bidder on the public defender contract there made a ton of money for himself through some imaginative caseload management. He had a good thing going even if the clients didn't, and profited mightly, at least until he was disbarred this past May.

Now a second Grant County p.d. has been disbarred, in part for collecting fees from p.d. clients he was supposed to represent for free. Luckily for him, he's found a job that doesn't require a bar license, with the Grant County Prosecutor. In Ephrata, attorneys are being "conscripted" to represent indigent defendants. See how much money the county ultimately saved by contracting out p.d. services instead of taking them in-house?

My county commissioners don't allow me to take private clients, and I love it. Once I spent a hapless seven months in private practice, and I remember the twinge of a dilemna when the secretary paged me to say, there's a public defender client on line one, and a paying client on line two, but it never occurred to me to charge my p.d. clients to do what the county had already paid the firm to do. Good riddance to the bottom-feeders of Moses Lake.

"Unequal Defense: The Series"

A rural contract public defender did a very bad thing, and wouldn't you know it, he graduated from the same law school as me...

Part of an excellent Seattle Times series from earlier this year on how to, and how not to, live up to Gideon.

Public defender heritage

It didn't all start with Gideon, you know. Via Capital Defense Weekly:

Babcock, Barbara Allen, "Inventing the Public Defender", American Criminal Law Review, October 2006

Clara Foltz, one of the first women lawyers in the United States, was also the first to propose a public defender... As actually enacted in the Progressive Era twenty years after Foltz first proposed it, the public defender was less concerned with individual advocacy than with more generalized fair process. The history of the public defender reveals the tension between the models of zealous advocate and responsible public official, a tension both present at the creation and perhaps inherent in the office itself.

Bonus quote:

Without equal access to the law, the system not only robs the poor of their only protection, but it places in the hands of their oppressors the most powerful and ruthless weapon ever invented.

- Reginald Heber Smith — Justice and the Poor, 1919

See also Jerold Auerbach, Unequal Justice : Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America (New York: Oxford, 1976)