Public defender system in tug-of-war

From the Florida Times-Union:

Georgia’s ailing public defender system, once praised as a national model for providing legal representation to poor defendants, is now in a legal tug-of-war with critics who say it has failed to live up to its promise.

Lagging support from Georgia legislators and rounds of budget cuts have already led the system’s director to scale back programs and fire dozens of staffers. But it was the decision in June to close the 21-member Metro Atlanta Conflict Defender Office that triggered the legal battle.

Critics sued the system’s director. They will ask a Fulton County judge today to force the office to stay open, arguing that the system is undergoing a “Walmartization” by firing full-time attorneys and replacing them with contract attorneys.

“This would be a giant step back to what is supposed to be a bygone era in Georgia,” said Stephen Bright, director of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights, which filed the legal challenge.

It’s a painful fall for the public defender system, hailed in legal circles as groundbreaking when it was created in 2003 to replace the patchwork of systems across Georgia’s 159 counties.

To defense attorneys and their traditional Democratic allies, it was a progressive way to guarantee standard legal representation to Georgia’s neediest for the first time. It also appealed to Georgia’s ruling Republicans by offering a way to avoid what legal experts said could be a costly federal challenge.

Under the old system, some counties assigned indigent defense cases to attorneys with little experience or knowledge of criminal defense. And lawmakers heard horror stories about defendants waiting days - even weeks - before seeing an attorney.

Since the statewide system was established, however, frustrated legislators who worried about financial mismanagement have sought to rein it in. They cut funding from $42 million to $35 million over the past three years.

“Left unchecked, it will continue to grow into another unaccountable burgeoning state bureaucracy and the taxpayers will be left holding an empty bag,” said state Sen. Preston Smith, who chairs his chamber’s judiciary committee.

The budget cuts have forced some belt tightening. About 40 staffers were fired amid the first round of cuts in May 2007, and system director Mack Crawford - himself a former state legislator - warned he would have to furlough hundreds of staffers until a fresh infusion of cash came in this March.

Crawford has said he had little choice but to close the metro conflict office, which handles multi-defendant cases, and fire its 16 lawyers and five investigators. The council received $5.4 million from the state for conflict cases - a drop from the $9 million it spent last year on similar cases.

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