Assigned counsel and SB 139
Over the last couple of months, I've written a number of
posts about the proposed reforms to the indigent defense system here in
Cuyahoga County. (For those of you who
can't seem to get enough of my keen wit and lucid prose, click on Indigent
Defense over in the bar on the right under Topics, scroll down to the post of
August 8, and read up from there.) That's
not the only proposal on the subject out there, though; there's a bill in the
legislature that would radically change the way indigent defense is handled in
the entire state. You can read the
proposed bill here. (No keen wit and lucid prose, trust me.) You can read the legislative summary of the
bill here. You can read my summary, and my take on it,
here.
What the bill
does. Basically, the state takes
over all the payments, and the Ohio Public Defender decides how it's
spent. The OPD determines what system a
county will have: all assigned counsel,
all public defender, whatever. Without
going into detail, there are some provisions of the proposal that seem to
suggest that assigned counsel will be limited to cases where the public defender
has a conflict, or cases where "the workload of the county public defender is
of such size or complexity as to threaten the quality of representation of the
client by the county public defender."
(Notably, the legislation doesn't specify who gets to make that
call. That shouldn't lead to much
litigation, do you think?)
I think uniformity is a good thing, in several respects,
compensation being one of them; there's no reason why a lawyer handling a child
rape case in Crawford County should get more or less than an attorney handling
a child rape case in Franklin County. And there should be some standardization of
qualifications, although that needs some work, too; the present qualifications
are too heavily dependent upon trial experience, and given how few cases go to
trial any more, you could make a decent argument that other skills --
interpersonal skills, especially with the client, negotiating, case analysis --
are just as important to achieving the best outcome.
But there's a big difference throughout the state, even in
large counties, in how an assigned counsel system would work. In Franklin County, any court hearing that a
lawyer would have -- from municipal to Supreme -- all takes place in a three-block
radius. That makes it easy to have the
same lawyer represent the client from initial appearance on. Here in Cuyahoga County you have twelve
separate suburban municipal courts, and driving from one to another can take
forty minutes; that kind of "vertical representation" simply isn't feasible here.
There are certain advantages to having an assigned counsel
system. It's a good way to bring young
lawyers into the practice of criminal law, and it provides a broad base of
quality representation. I don't see the
justification for doing away with it, and I don't see the advantage of a "one-size-fits-all"
policy on indigent representation.
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