The Arkansas Public Defender Commission would need more than double the number of attorneys on the payroll to bring caseloads in line with national standards, commission staff members said Friday.
Commissioners in December had requested caseload data after learning of a legalchallenge in another state. A federal judge ruled that the public-defender systems in two Washington state cities were ineffective because their attorneys were overwhelmed with work.
Jacque Alexander, the commission’s defense services coordinator, said a preliminary review of the workload of the 161 state public defenders showed they represented a total of 89,472 defendants in court during the year ending June 30, 2013. Of those, 15,197 were juvenile cases, 39,260 misdemeanor or district court cases, 27,543 felonies, 46 capital cases and 7,426 probation revocations.
Alexander said that number has increased from 78,000 defendants 16 years ago.
“There has been growth; there’s no question about it,” she said.
Judge Robert Lasnick of the U.S. District Court, Western District of Washington, found the system was inadequate to meet the protections under the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution; the amendment says defendants are entitled to “have the assistance of counsel.” He ordered both cities to hire additional employees and increase the amount of supervision to try to fix the problems.
According to the National Legal Aid and Defender Association, which seeks to improve the quality of the country’s civil legal aid and public defender programs, a public defender’s workload should not exceed 200 juvenile, 400 misdemeanor or 150 felony cases per year.
To handle the caseloadsaccording to those standards, the commission would require a total of 358 attorneys, with 76 dedicated full-time to juvenile cases, 98 for misdemeanors and 184 for felonies, Alexander said.
Lance McGonigal, a consultant who worked with Alexander on the review, told the commission that defenders have different work loads depending on where they practice. McGonigal said some offices were handling four or five times the amount of cases as the public defender association recommends, while others barely exceeded the group’s recommended workloads.
“It bothers me. That disparity got my attention, and it’d be nice if we can reconcile that in any way,” commission Chairman Jerry Larkowski said.
Gregg Parrish, the executive director of the commission, said the review did not consider travel time or the fact that public defenderssometimes spend most of a day visiting a single client in jail, which he said has a significant effect on how much work can get done.
The commission asked staff members to continue the review and to compare the defenders’ workloads with those in states with similar populations and square mileage, including Iowa and Mississippi. Alexander said she would also examine workloads in Tennessee, Missouri and Oklahoma.
Another report is expected by the commission’s nextmeeting in June.
Parrish said he would use the information from the review when he speaks with legislators about the commission’s future funding. But Parrish said none of the information from the review has come as a surprise.
“The public defenders that we have now working in the field are just drastically overworked … I’ve got circuit judges telling me we’ve got to have more help. And I can’t get more help unless we have the [funding for the] positions,” Parrish said.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 9 on 03/15/2014