Proposal would split public defender system

By Bill Rankin

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Calling Georgia's public defender program unsustainable, a legislative oversight panel is recommending that part of the system be transferred back to county control. The proposal comes four years after the state took over the program because many counties were found to be unable to provide an adequate defense of the poor.

The Georgia Public Defender Standards Council, which began operating in  2005, has struggled to stay afloat financially and has faced a number of lawsuits.

Sen. Preston Smith (R-Rome), chair of the oversight panel, said Wednesday that recent court rulings and an advisory opinion by the State Bar of Georgia gave the committee no choice but to propose giving counties renewed responsibilities. He said the proposal will be included in legislation this session.

Smith said "conflict" cases should be given back to counties so they can assign lawyers and manage the funding.

Conflict cases involve multidefendant indictments in which a state-salaried public defender, because of conflict-of-interest rules, can only represent one person. There have been more than 6,000 felony conflict cases in each of the past two years, the panel's report said. Smith said state funds now being spent on conflict cases also will be transferred to counties.

The state defender council has struggled to maintain the costs of these cases. In the past, it hired private lawyers to defend conflict cases by paying them hourly rates. But the agency could not pay all those bills. More recently, it has signed contracts with attorneys to handle set numbers of conflict cases.

The oversight panel's report said the local public defender offices -- the "core" of the state system -- have "done an extremely good job."

But their good work "has been largely overshadowed by ideological crusaders who consistently work to hijack and manipulate the system," the report said. These advocates have sought remedies "without any regard to the costs to the state" and used litigation and influence to "usurp and disregard the policies of the elected legislature in favor of compelling the state to adopt expensive and unattainable goals that exceed the requirements of the Georgia Constitution."

“Unfortunately, people accused of crimes or in need of an appeal have had to wait years to get a lawyer,” said Stephen Bright of the Southern Center for Human Rights. “The courts have had no choice except to order that people be represented. That is what the Constitution requires. That is what fairness requires.”

The report was released a day after a Fulton County judge ordered the state to provide lawyers for indigent inmates, some of whom had been waiting years for representation to file appeals.

A proposed State Bar opinion governing the handling of conflict cases makes it "completely impractical" for the state defender agency to establish in-house offices to handle multidefendant cases, the panel's report said.