41 Jobs Slashed From Georgia Public Defender’s Office

From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Faced with a funding shortfall, the state’s public defender agency has eliminated 41 full-time jobs — about a 12 percent reduction in its workforce.

Among those losing their jobs are 14 lawyers across Georgia. The layoffs are expected to increase the caseloads of the remaining defenders.

The statewide system was created in 2003 to replace underfunded county-run programs that provided legal representation for indigent defendants in criminal cases. Lawsuits alleging constitutional violations were filed against a number of county systems before the statewide system was established.

Some of the layoffs were necessary because the General Assembly trimmed the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council’s budget request for fiscal year 2008 by $2 million, the council said in a statement released Monday. The council said it had already anticipated making some cuts because of increased health insurance costs, the need to change the way it handles cases with multiple defendants and the mandatory addition of public defenders in court circuits with new judgeships.

The council voted May 3 to cut its budget by $4.25 million so it could operate within the $35.4 million budget it received from the Legislature for 2008.

Among the job reductions were nine administrative positions from the central office in Atlanta, 22 positions from the council’s conflict defender offices and four positions in the Office of Capital Defender, which handles all death-penalty cases, the council said.

read the entire article at the Journal-Constitution…

Meanwhile, public defender blogger Audacity’s job is safe:

Apparently they aren’t funding the state funded positions (compared to county funded positions) at my old office, so people are gonna have to work without pay unless the county decides to cough up the money and get reimbursed by the state later… and considering that my old job was a state funded position, it looks like I left at a good time.

Once this week is over, I’ll post some coherent thoughts on the whole subject.

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