A victory in SCHR's litigation to save public defense in Georgia

ATLANTA, GA - Georgia’s public defender council has scrapped an arrangement strongly criticized for degrading the quality of legal representation in Fulton County.

Last summer, amid a funding crisis, the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council abruptly shut down the Metro Conflict Defender Office. The office represented co-defendants when conflict-of-interest rules allowed a public defender to represent only one person.

The most controversial part of the closing was replacing salaried attorneys who defended less-serious felonies with private lawyers working under contract for about $125 a case.

A number of defendants and attorneys who were fired filed suit in July against the council, seeking a halt to the office’s closing. The suit called the arrangement “unconscionable and wholly inadequate.”

This week, the defender council cut ties with the lawyers working under contract and replaced them with four full-time defenders, Mack Crawford, executive director of the council, said.

Because of the new arrangement, lawyers representing the indigent defendants and former lawyers moved Friday to dismiss the lawsuit against the council, said Stephen Bright of the Southern Center for Human Rights.

The state public defender system was established in 2003 to replace county-run programs, many of which were found unable to provide adequate representation.

Counties that employed contracts struggled the most because those lawyers kept a private practice and had an inherent incentive to spend as little time as possible on their indigent cases so they could devote more time on their retained ones. In these counties, indigent defendants often languished in jail for months at a time without ever seeing a lawyer.

Bright said the council’s return to contracts in Fulton was a giant step back to what was supposed to be a bygone era in Georgia.

“Everyone with a knowledge of the disgraceful history of flat-fee contracts to provide legal representation in Georgia knew that this experiment would end in failure,” Bright said.

A Southern Center investigation of the contract system in Fulton found that many defendants received no representation at critical stages of cases, Bright said.

“Unfortunately, there is no way to correct the neglect and lack of representation that was experienced by many people accused of crime during this time,” said Bright, who filed suit against the council. “People spent extra time in jail, were not informed about their cases, entered guilty pleas without knowing what they were doing.”

Bright added that while hiring the full-time lawyers in Fulton is an improvement, more resources are needed to adequately defend the non-complex cases.

Fulton’s “non-complex” case system was set up to help move thousands of the less serious felony cases more efficiently through the court system. It typically takes nine weeks to dispose of each case

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Alford Dempsey, who oversees some of the non-complex felony calendars, said he welcomed any attempt by the council to improve the delivery of indigent defense services in the county’s court system.

“The situation is such that it needs to be improved,” he said. “I hope they do more.”