Experts: Harris Co. Taking Risks With Lawyer Appointment System

It's the kind of journalism that is becoming increasingly rare for newspapers and almost never seen on television.  Today, Houston's KHOU-TV has the above-styled report.  It's reported by Mark Greenblatt, and it's a must-read.  LINK

Judges in Harris County gave attorney Jerome Godinich more than $250,000 of work in each of the county’s last two fiscal years, assigning him to work for defendants who can’t afford their own lawyer.

The defendants were charged with anything from drug possessions to capital murder. 

But some national experts say the way Harris County judges select attorneys to do this kind of defense work raises serious questions.

“I regard it among the most flawed system of a major metropolitan area in the country,” Indiana Law professor Norm Lefstein said. 

What's at issue is attorney case loads. You see national and state laws agree that if you are charged with a crime, you have a right to an attorney, even if you can’t afford one.

But here in Harris County, the judges select lawyers for the indigent, rather than an independent body.    What’s more? The 11 News Defenders have discovered no one seems to be minding the store from courtroom to courtroom in Harris County, allowing many attorneys to take on so many cases experts warn it may be endangering the rights of the accused.

“You have to care about it if you care about justice in Harris County,” said Lefstein, who also used to run the public defenders office in Washington D.C.  He says Harris County is the largest metropolitan area in the nation without a public defenders office. It also has a number of attorneys who exceed nationally recognized defense attorney case load limits developed by the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals with funding from the U.S. Department of Justice.

In fact, a KHOU analysis of Harris County data from fiscal years 2002-2009 reveals nearly all of the top earning attorneys, who each made more than one million dollars over that time period, also exceeded those national case load recommendations or nationally-recognized recommendations about capital crime case loads.

“The more you do and the quicker you do, sometimes the more slipshod you do it, the more you are rewarded,” said Lefstein, who in addition to his position as director of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, also served as an Assistant United States Attorney and as a staff member in the Office of the Deputy Attorney General of the U.S. Department of Justice. He also served as Chair of the American Bar Association’s Section of Criminal Justice in 1986–1987.

More recently, the National Right To Counsel Committee asked Lefstein to serve as a lead reporter for a new 213-page report, “Justice Denied”, released in April and detailing research on what it calls “the pressing indigent defense crisis in America.”   

The report in question is, Justice Denied: America’s Continuing Neglect of our Constitutional Right to Counsel, the issuance of which was noted here.

Here's more from the KHOU report:

In relation to Harris County, Lefstein expressed concerns about the lack of any form of oversight regarding the workload an attorney can end up with as he accumulates appointments from court to court.  

“It raises all kinds of risks,” he said.

Take Jerome Godinich, who made $1.5 million since fiscal year 2002.  In 2008 he had activity on at least 177 felony cases.   However, the National Advisory Commission recommends taking on no more than 150 cases per year, with the attorney taking on no other kind of work or cases in any other court or on private retainer. But that very same year, Godinich also had activity on at least 6 capital murder cases. 

National experts like Lefstein and others say an attorney should handle no more than 3 capital murder cases in a year, and nothing else.

“He’s running an enormous risk,” Lefstein said.

KHOU attempted to contact Godinich for comment numerous times without any response from him.   So we went to the Harris County Courthouse, where we found him.

KHOU: I just wanted to know- do you think your case load had anything to do with why you’ve missed some important filing deadlines?

Godinich: No.

You may remember Godinich’s name, as the Houston Chronicle previously reported that he missed crucial filing deadlines in not one, but two death penalty appeal cases he was involved with in the last four years.

Related articles are in StandDown's indigent defense category index.