California knows little about the workload of its public defenders

from Anat RubinCalMatters

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A new account in the state legislature would require counties to report basic information about public defender services, such as how many cases attorneys handle, in an effort to force California to confront its public defender crisis.

The proposed law comes after a series of CalMatters investigations revealed gaps in California’s public defender systems. Ours the reporting showed that statewide public defender offices lack defense investigators, who are often the best defense against wrongful convictions. We also found that attorneys in several rural counties there were astronomical loadsand were less likely than other defense attorneys to challenge prosecutors’ evidence in motions and take their cases to trial.

“As a government, we can’t look the other way and rely solely on our journalistic partners to really expose and peel this onion and see how bad it is,” said Assemblyman Nick Schultz of Burbank, who co-sponsored the bill. He said the nationwide data may “reveal an even bleaker picture”.

California has a constitutional obligation to ensure that poor people accused of crimes, who make up more than 80 percent of defendants, receive effective representation. But the state has left that responsibility entirely in the hands of its 58 counties, which spend collectively almost twice as much for chasing people as for protecting them.

California is one of only two states that does not provide any funding or oversight to probation-level public defenders. There are no minimum standards and reporting requirements. The resulting patchwork of local systems is full of inconsistencies.

Many of the state’s rural areas have outsourced their public defender services to fixed-fee contracts, paying private attorneys and firms a fixed amount regardless of how many cases they handle or how much time they spend on each case. A bill to ban these arrangementswhich demotivate investigation and lawsuits, was stopped last year. Seven of the eight counties with the highest incarceration rates in the state have flat-fee contracts.

“There are dire signs in some jurisdictions of lawyers handling 300, 400, 500 or more cases a year, including hundreds of felonies,” said Josh Schwartz, a researcher at the Wren Collective, a nonprofit that advocates for criminal justice reform. The proposed bill mandating data collection, he said, “would be a huge step toward bringing the caseload crisis that we know is happening into the public eye.”

The bill, introduced by Assemblyman Joaquin Arambula of Fresno, would require each county to report elementary data every two years. Arambula previously sponsored legislation that led to a comprehensive load study by the California Public Defender Services. The study, which was released last year, called California an “outlier in failing to collect and publish comprehensive, aggregated data on county-based public defense systems.”

“This bill is a necessary first step in understanding the scope of this issue,” Arambula said. That would require lawmakers to “face that truth and identify the inconsistencies so that we can ultimately address them.”

Many contractors in counties with flat fee systems already collect workload data to report to county supervisors. And most of the institutional public defender offices use case management systems that track this data, although each county uses its own metrics.

The California State Association of Counties opposes the bill and asked lawmakers to include text that would make compliance with the reporting requirements contingent on state funding. The organization also opposes the flat fee ban and characterizes the measure as an unfunded state mandate. Arambula said his office is asking for $30 million to help counties pay for the data collection.

Scott Bali, a retired Fresno County public defender, told the Assembly’s public safety committee in April that criminal defendants want lawyers who have “time to read the police reports … maybe meet with you in jail and hear your side of the story.”

“Will they talk to me and help me with this problem? The answer to those questions is workload,” he said. “How busy are these lawyers?”

The bill passed the Assembly Local Government and Public Safety Committees with unanimous support and is now before the Appropriations Committee.

Schultz, a former prosecutor, said the high caseload and lack of investigators undermined the entire justice system.

“We need to make sure we’re making the investment to have a sufficient number of capable and qualified lawyers who can actually hold prosecutors accountable and make them prove their case,” he said. “It has to start with the data.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.