In Georgia, lawyers abandoning the poor

YOUNG HARRIS — Across Georgia, poor people accused of crimes are being abandoned by their lawyers because there is no money to pay their legal fees.

There are also 10 death-penalty cases proceeding to trial with $1.1 million in expected billings. But there is no money to pay for those cases, either.

At its Tuesday meeting, the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council’s board grappled with a familiar problem — a mountainous stockpile of unpaid bills.

Just a few weeks ago, the council’s board was on the legislative endangered list.

Influential lawmakers, irritated by some board members’ complaints about inadequate funding, pushed legislation to strip the board of its authority. The bill would have replaced the board’s current, policy-making members with new members serving only in advisory roles.

The bill passed the Senate and a key House committee but was withdrawn from the House floor on the session’s final day.

Tuesday’s meeting, at the Brasstown Valley Resort & Spa, was the first time the board convened since the legislative session. Once again, members heard more sobering reports about the financial plight of the state indigent defense system.

The council’s main problem is its inability to pay the bills for “conflict” cases. These are multi-defendant cases in which a state-salaried public defender can represent only one person because of conflict-of-interest rules. Private attorneys are hired to represent the co-defendants.

Many bills from these cases, which number in the thousands statewide, have not been paid because of budget shortfalls.

In response, exasperated lawyers are asking to withdraw from cases, and judges are letting them do it. Making matters worse, no one is telling the council about these defendants who are now lawyerless, the council’s executive director, Mack Crawford, said.

The council has already been hit with one lawsuit, filed in Elbert County.

It says hundreds of indigent defendants unable to afford their own lawyers are not being provided representation as required by law.

Council board member David Dunn, a circuit public defender in LaFayette, said the council must pay its bills.

Not long ago, Dunn said, private attorneys in his circuit gladly accepted conflict cases. “But they haven’t been paid in years,” he said. “They won’t take the cases anymore. No one wants to take them anymore.”

Help could be on the way. Lawmakers put in $1.6 million in the council’s fiscal year 2010 budget for the council to pay its outstanding legal bills for these conflict cases. This money should help pay many of the bills, Crawford told the board.

But the capital cases are another matter, he said.

“I don’t know how to address this because the money is not there,” Crawford said of the pending capital cases.

Crawford suggested that Gov. Sonny Perdue could ask the Fiscal Affairs Committee to help solve the problem. The panel has the power to shift money approved for one purpose at the defender council to another purpose within the agency.

Bert Brantley, a Perdue spokesman, said the governor would consider such a request. But he said the governor would have to weigh the request with the demands on an already tight state budget.

Last week, lawyers representing capital defendant Frank Ortegon Jr., accused of multiple killings at a Forsyth County farmhouse, asked for the dismissal of Ortegon’s indictment because legal bills aren’t being paid, Cumming lawyer Jeffrey Purvis said.