CA’s privatized public defense results in astronomical workloads

from Anat RubinCalMatters

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

In 2025, one attorney in Kings County represented almost 600 indigent people charged with crimes. That figure, which rivals some of the nation’s worst public defense cases, does not include the personal injury attorney’s personal clients.

The large number of cases in Kings is part of a new report about California’s privatized public defender systems, which leave criminal defendants in many rural counties without access to adequate representation. Two dozen California counties use flat-fee contracts to pay for indigent defense, meaning they pay private attorneys a fixed amount regardless of how much work they do on a case. The deals discourage litigation and investigating cases and are banned in other parts of the country.

“Fixed fees create a financial conflict of interest between the attorney and the client,” said Josh Schwartz of The Wren Collective, a nonprofit organization that authored the report. “The fee will always be less profitable the more time and attention is spent on each case.”

Even the most permissive caseload standards recommend no more than 150 felonies or 400 misdemeanors per year. The report, which includes data from nine counties, shows that some fixed-contract attorneys in California have more than three times as many cases.

A CalMatters investigation last year highlighted the problems with flat systems by focusing on a law firm that provides public defense in five of those counties. The firm of Fitzgerald, Alvarez and Ciummo has earned a reputation as the WalMart of public defense. Our reports found that his attorneys were less likely than other defense attorneys to investigate cases, challenge law enforcement evidence in court cases, and take their cases to trial. Defendants in those counties said they were pressured into accepting plea deals and felt their attorneys were unwilling to fight for them in court.

After the story was published, residents and community organizations in Madera County, where the firm has provided indigent defense for nearly 40 years, began advocating for changes to the local public defender’s services. In June, Madera supervisors decided to extend the firm’s contract for just six months — instead of renewing it for an additional four years — while they decide how to improve the system.

Lynette Lomeli, executive director of the Madera Coalition for Community Justice, has spearheaded some of the recent advocacy efforts in Madera County along with the local branch of the NAACP.

“I was in total shock,” she said, when she learned about Madera’s public defender’s caseload and practices. “It’s extremely hard to ignore once you see the data.”

California is one of only two states that does not provide funding for basic criminal defense to indigent people, allowing its counties to structure local public defender systems as they see fit. Flat-fee systems, which are less expensive than running a public defender’s office with state attorneys, appeal to local politicians on tight budgets.

But the model has long-term financial implications. Seven of the eight counties with the highest prison incarceration rates have flat-fee contracts. Kings County, which has the highest known number of cases in California, also has the highest incarceration rate in the state.

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