Dolan Media Newswire Story
Subject: Missouri public defenders study guarantees failure: Only state that spends less on indigent defense is Mississippi
Pub: Missouri Lawyers Media
Author: Allison Retka
Category:
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Issue Date: 10/26/2009 Word Count: 32
Missouri public defenders study guarantees failure: Only state that spends less on indigent defense is Mississippi
by Allison Retka
Dolan Media Newswires
© Dolan Media Newswires 2010.ST. LOUIS, MO -- The latest independent study of Missouri's public defender system reaffirmed its overloaded status and declared Missouri's indigent defense options are "headed for disaster."
The report, released Friday morning, also suggested defenders are using stricter standards for indigent defense as a "backdoor method" to limit their caseloads. For example, a defender who decides a poor person isn't eligible for indigent defense if she scrapes together $500 for a bond.
Indigent defendants might be better off staying in jail, where they have a better chance of getting a public defender, the report concluded.
This choice between counsel or custody is the "quiet constitutional crisis" boiling at the center of the public defender problem in Missouri, concluded the report, conducted by the Spangenberg Group, now a program at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., that studies indigent defense in all 50 states.
The same group conducted studies of the Missouri State Public Defender System in 1993 and 2005. Both previous studies predicted impending disaster for an indigent defense system wracked by unmanageable caseloads, low salaries and even lower morale.
"The caseload crisis ... has placed MSPD's attorneys in the cruelest of positions, one in which they are virtually guaranteed to fail, despite efforts that could fairly be described as heroic," the authors wrote in the report.
The study called for a 50 percent increase in the number of investigators and support staff for public defenders.
A quartet of state bar foundations commissioned the latest study last year and paid the Spangenberg Group $70,000 for the report. Researchers were asked to create a Missouri-specific caseload standard, so system leaders and legislators would have a concrete goal in mind as they seek to ease the caseload crisis, said Cat Kelly, deputy director of the public defender system.
But the Spangenberg Group said it couldn't deliver on that goal.
Until defenders stop doing the work of support staff, it's impossible to calculate how many cases they should be handling, they wrote.
"It is as if public defenders have been forced to practice so long in a broken system of representation that they do not know and cannot even imagine what an acceptable system of defense would permit," the Spangenberg Group wrote in its report.
Kelly said she was disappointed the group couldn't create a caseload standard, but the researchers did validate a 1973 set of standards developed by the U.S. Department of Justice, which the public defender system had been using as a guide.
Kelly said she agreed with part of the Spangenberg Group's comments on Missouri's system of indigency determinations - it would be great if someone other than public defenders could make those decisions.
"It certainly would make our lives easier," she said. "It takes time to review that application and make those determinations."
But the researchers said it's a conflict of interest for public defenders to decide whether a potential client meets indigency standards. To avoid taking on even more cases and affecting the representation of current clients, defenders "would tend to err on the side of exclusion in indigency determinations."
Kelly said Missouri public defenders don't turn away people who qualify for free lawyers under the guidelines.
The report also remarked on the system's continued lack of new funding. Missouri spent the least amount on per-capita annual indigent defense in the United States, except for Mississippi, where data wasn't available.
To reach the nationwide average per-capita spending on indigent defense, Missouri would need to additionally appropriate $16 million to its public defender system, the report concluded.
Last week, Missouri's public defenders learned they would receive just $500,000 of the $2 million in federal recovery funds the state Legislature allocated to the beleaguered system.
The report did note that public defender turnover rates have decreased because of the struggling economy and lack of job options. But the low turnover has a negative effect: "many disgruntled lawyers stayed on essentially against their will."
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