Minnesota Public Defenders grieve excessive caseloads

We all work hard, but sometimes, no matter how hard we work, we can’t keep up with the avalanche of new cases. That’s where public defenders in southeastern Minnesota apparently find themselves; they filed a union grievance over excessive workloads:

A legislative audit report issued in February said public defender workloads in Minnesota are too high and exceed state and national standards.

The study took into account how much time cases took to defend, with one case unit in the average misdemeanor, and more case units for more serious offenses.

The report said that state and national standards call for public defenders to carry no more than 400 case units per year.

In this district, there were 31 full-time-equivalent public defenders in 2007. Each had a weighted caseload of 689. In 2009, there were 27 full-time-equivalent public defenders carrying 745 case units each.

The evaluators for the legislative report said that during their site visits, they saw public defenders under such time pressures that they often had about 10 minutes to meet each client for the first time, evaluate the case, explain the client’s options and the consequences of a conviction or plea, discuss a possible deal with the prosecuting attorney and allow the client to decide how to proceed.

Some of the public defenders in this district have refused to accept new case assignments.

It sounds a little dire. The “smart-ass, sailor-mouth public defender” at not for the monosyllabic should know — she’s one of the PD’s who filed the grievance.

The bottom line is that when we’re overloaded, we can’t do our jobs, and if we can’t do our jobs, the Constitution gets trampled. Good luck, brothers and sisters! We’re with you!