"Hundreds kept jailed for months pretrial," is Lise Olsen's latest Houston Chronicle report, examining the state of indigent defense in Harris County. Here's an extended excerpt:
Brisby Brown spent 17 months jailed in Harris County, serving time for a crime for which he was never convicted, all the while complaining his rights to an adequate defense and a speedy trial were ignored.
Though there was no trial and no judgment, there is a price. Brown is one of thousands of indigent inmates who collectively cost Harris County taxpayers about $24 million each year. In Brown's case, the public paid his jail keep and his lawyers' bills for well over a year before charges of drug possession were abruptly dropped in June.
More than 100 private attorneys were assigned by judges to represent inmates who could not afford a lawyer in felony cases in 2008. Sixty of them received more than $100,000.
Yet, no one in Harris County is centrally assigned to oversee those attorneys or monitor their caseloads or complaints. None of the lawyers are routinely required to document the hours or provide details on how much they worked on each case, according to the county auditor's office and interviews with judges and attorneys.
At least 54 court-appointed attorneys handled more than a nationally recommended limit of 150 felony cases in 2008. Brown's lawyers juggled more than 1,000 clients each year while representing the 30-year-old Houston native, who had a lengthy history of drug arrests, an analysis of Harris County case records by the Houston Chronicle shows.
As Harris County studies how to launch its first-ever limited public defender's office, Brown's case and others like it raise questions about whether the current patchwork defense system fails the poor by allowing hundreds of people accused of crimes to languish too long in jail, forcing some to serve sentences prior to conviction or accept pleas regardless of guilt or innocence.
Gerry Wheeler, a retired criminal justice researcher who oversaw the county's pretrial services program years ago, argues the system is so out-of-whack that punishment — lengthy stints in jail — precedes a trial for the poor.
“The accused quickly learn in Harris County, Texas, that the punishment is pretrial incarceration,” he wrote in a report for Harris County Commissioners who unanimously approved a public defender experiment last week.
More than half of the overcrowded Harris County jail's 10,000 inmates are waiting to go to trial. As of July, as many as 500 accused people unable to post bail had waited a year or more in jail as their cases wound their way through the clogged Harris County courts — twice as long as the county's own consultants say those cases should take to process, a Chronicle analysis of jail inmates found.
Earlier coverage of indigent defense issues in Harris County is here and here; related posts in the indigent defense category index.
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