American Bar faults Alabama on indigent cases

Birmingham News - Carla Crowder February 11, 2005


Report says system inadequate, spotty

Montgomery defense lawyer Steve Glassroth remembers his encounter, not so long ago, with a defense attorney for an indigent man who didn't recognize his client in the courtroom less than a week before trials were set to start.

"He told the judge he couldn't find his client, and he'd been sending him letters," Glassroth said. "The client got up and said, "Here I am.'"

Those kinds of situations are emblematic of Alabama's indigent defense system, which an American Bar Association report described as an inadequate, underfunded, patchwork setup with no state or federal oversight.

One of 22 states examined by the association, Alabama has a system of providing legal counsel to poor people so haphazard that not enough data exists to completely examine it, according to the report.

The report comes during the 40th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Gideon vs. Wainwright, which established the constitutional right to counsel in state criminal proceedings. The association conducted hearings on the states' performance in 2003, and the report was released today.

In Alabama and most other states, the broken system could be fixed with adequate funding, the report says.

"I've heard a number of criminal defense attorneys say the promise of Gideon is not realized in the state of Alabama," said John Pickens, executive director of the Appleseed Foundation's Alabama Center, which helped with the report.

For example:

Contract defenders are "basically doing nothing" because they often just enter guilty pleas.

Lawyers with little experience are assigned homicide cases.

The center examined files of contract defenders, lawyers hired for a set monthly fee to handle indigent cases for a judge, in four circuits.

Of 1,585 completed cases, 82 percent were guilty pleas. Lawyers took only 53 of the cases to trial.

The report also stated that, in 99.4 percent of the 1,867 examined cases, the lawyers filed no motions requesting funds for experts or investigators.

`It's a disgrace':

"That is shocking. It sounds to me, at least the circuits where those studies were conducted, the lawyers should not be called lawyers, they should be called shipping clerks because all they're doing is shipping their clients off to the penitentiary," said Glassroth, who's worked to improve indigent defense. "It's a disgrace." The circuits examined were Montgomery County; Autauga, Chilton and Elmore counties; Marshall County; and Lee County.

Court-appointed defense lawyers are paid $40 an hour; the rate increases to $60 an hour when they are in the courtroom. They also collect $25 to $30 an hour for the costs of maintaining offices.

To cope with the state budget crisis, however, Gov. Bob Riley this year proposed eliminating the overhead payments and shifting that $14 million into Medicaid, a proposal opposed by defense lawyers.

The shift would cut by 30 percent indigent defense funding, including lawyers who represent children in abuse and neglect cases, said Bill Blanchard, a Montgomery lawyer who is legislative chairman for the Alabama Criminal Defense Lawyers Association.

"The entire culture is starting to realize that the quality of justice you get in these kind of cases depends on having well-trained, well-funded attorneys. Here we have our governor trying to reduce the funding for indigent defense and basically turning their backs on the poorest and most disadvantaged," Blanchard said. "The primary thing we're talking about is delivery of legal services to the poor. This is a time we're seeing on a daily, a weekly, a monthly basis where cases are being reversed because they don't have adequate representation." The association's report also cites undue political influence and apathy on the part of judges as impediments to improvements in Alabama. Contracts are awarded based on cost, not experience.

Several lawyers said the best solution to Alabama's fractured system would be a single, well-funded public defender's office. A handful of counties, including Shelby and Tuscaloosa, use a public defender's office. Efforts to establish one in Jefferson County have failed because of a lack of funding.

Tuscaloosa's office is staffed by 10 lawyers, several with years of experience. "We're able to operate in an efficient manner, in that this is all we handle and all we do," said Jim Roberts, assistant public defender and president of the Alabama Criminal Defense Lawyers Association.

E-mail: ccrowder@bhamnews.com