A Snapshot of Indigent Defense in Georgia

"Death case defendant sues for lack of lawyers," is Bill Rankin's report from the January 1 issue of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

A murder defendant who says it is “unconscionable” for him to have been denied legal representation for eight months is suing the head of the state’s public defender system.

“This is surely an unprecedented deprivation of counsel in modern times,” said the lawsuit, filed Wednesday for Jamie Ryan Weis by four prominent Atlanta lawyers.

Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against Weis for the Feb. 2, 2006, killing of Catherine King in her Pike County home.

Since April, Weis has been sitting in jail awaiting trial without lawyers to represent him. The lawsuit was filed after trial judge Johnnie Caldwell scheduled a Jan. 5 hearing on the case.

“It’s frustrating,” Pike County District Attorney Scott Ballard said. “Everybody wants the defendant to be well represented. We’ll be ready to prosecute just as soon as they’re ready.”

The suit was filed in Fulton County Superior Court against Mack Crawford, director of the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council, and Gerry Word, acting head of the capital defender’s office.

Both Crawford and Word said they had yet to see the complaint and declined comment Wednesday afternoon.

Weis’ case has highlighted the budgetary problems plaguing the state’s public defender system.

Weis’ two appointed lawyers, Bob Citronberg and Tom West, were removed from the case in November 2007 when the cash-strapped defender system did not have the money to pay them.

Two local public defenders were ordered to take over the case.

But the two defenders objected, saying they already had crushing caseloads and had neither the time nor the resources to defend a capital case.

At a court hearing in April, an agreement was reached to return Citronberg and West to the case, provided that Crawford sign a contract allowing them to be paid. But that has yet to occur.

"Long Held in Capital Case, Man Sues to Get a Lawyer," is the New York Times report by Robbie Brown.  It appeared in the January 2 issue.

“There’s nothing more fundamental and more important to somebody facing the death penalty than adequate counsel,” said one of the lawyers, Stephen B. Bright, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights. “The idea that somebody would go even one week without a lawyer is unthinkable.”

And:

James E. Coleman Jr., an expert in criminal law at Duke Law School, who is not involved in the suit, said the absence of a defense lawyer for any period of time created an unfair advantage for prosecutors. Defense investigations should begin immediately after a suspect’s arrest, Professor Coleman said, so witnesses’ memories do not fade and evidence does not disappear.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he said. “I think the state has violated this man’s constitutional rights and undermined his chances of receiving a fair trial.”

Robert Blecker, a professor at New York Law School who supports the death penalty, said the lawsuit raised worrisome questions about the fairness of Mr. Weis’s trial.

“When it comes to the death penalty, money should never be the issue,” Professor Blecker said. “In this story, money seems to have become the issue, and that’s what’s so troubling.”

Georgia’s public defender system has long struggled for financing from the state legislature, especially in recent years with more than $2 million spent in the highly publicized case of Brian G. Nichols, who was sentenced last month to life in prison for killing four people in his escape from an Atlanta courthouse in 2005.

"State takes defense funds for poor," is the title of an OpEd that appeared in the December 16 issue of the Journal-Constitution.  It's by a Georgia public defender, Robert Rutledge.

Now that there is some closure to the Brian Nichols case, it’s time to examine what has been happening to the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council over the past few years.

The legislators who have been attacking the council, which funds indigent defense in this state, are not trying to develop an efficient public defender system. They have been capitalizing on the Nichols controversy to snatch money from the council’s designated sources, which have nothing to do with taxes.

The standards council is funded by a $50 application fee per client, increased fines for those convicted of crime and court costs paid by civil litigants. Compare, however, the intake from the council’s sources with the amount of funds given to it for indigent defense. In 2006-07, for instance, the state collected about $43 million from the council’s designated sources. The Legislature then gave the council approximately $33 million and kept the rest.

Where is the rest of the money going? The legislature has not offered to fully fund the council with all the money from its designated sources in return for efficiency and transparency. And it has not dismantled or modified the designated sources in order to save lawyers and their clients the court costs, fines and fees that are supposed to be funding the council.

Simply put, the General Assembly is taking the council’s money and spending it elsewhere under the thin guise of improving the system through discipline, while at the same time crippling any of the council’s efforts to make any truly necessary improvements.