A South Georgia public defender office routinely fails to provide any meaningful legal representation for adults accused of crimes and allows juveniles to face their charges without any representation at all, a lawsuit filed Tuesday alleges.
The suit targets the judicial circuit composed of Ben Hill, Crisp, Dooly and Wilcox counties and constitutes a serious challenge for Georgia’s decade-old indigent defense system. Among the defendants are Gov. Nathan Deal, the head of Georgia’s defender system, judges, prosecutors and all of the commissioners in the circuit’s four counties. The suit says the circuit needs more defenders.
Children appearing in juvenile courts often find there are no public defenders to represent them, yet their cases proceed on toward resolution, the suit said. Adult defendants languish in jail for months after arrest without seeing a lawyer and do not receive the most basic elements of legal representation, the suit alleged.
“The right to counsel — essential for fair trials, equal justice, reliable verdicts and just sentences — is routinely violated or reduced to a hollow formality in the Cordele Judicial Circuit,” the suit said.
Travis Sakrison, executive director of the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council, declined comment late Tuesday, saying he had yet to see the complaint.
Unlike most other counties, the four counties in the Cordele circuit provide no funding for additional public defenders to help with excessive caseloads, the lawsuit said. The office has three full-time defenders who handled almost 1,400 cases in 2012.
The lawsuit was filed in Fulton Superior Court by the mothers of four juveniles charged in the Cordele circuit and by four adult defendants prosecuted there. It seeks class-action status on behalf of all the circuit’s indigent defendants facing similar situations.
One of the plaintiffs, a 16-year-old juvenile defendant identified only by his initials, W.M., was charged with taking Halloween fangs worth $2.97 from a Crisp County Wal-Mart. When W.M. appeared in court, no public defender was there to assist him, the suit said.
Without warning W.M. of the dangers of proceeding without a lawyer, the juvenile judge allowed the teenager to admit to the offense. She sentenced him to nine months of probation, 40 hours of community service and required him to pay $50 in court fees and $2.97 in restitution.
In the circuit’s Superior Courts, adult defendants are able to spend only a few minutes with their public defenders before entering guilty pleas in assembly-line fashion, the suit said. These defendants are processed without any meaningful conversations with counsel and without their cases being investigated, the suit said.
The plaintiffs are represented by four lawyers from the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta and eight attorneys from the Washington law firm Arnold & Porter. A half-century ago, Arnold & Porter represented Clarence Earl Gideon, whose landmark case prompted the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that states must provide counsel to indigent defendants facing serious offenses.
“The public defender office needs more attorneys, more training and more oversight to effectively represent the poor adults and children who are prosecuted in the Cordele Circuit every day,” said Southern Center lawyer Atteeyah Hollie.
In March 2003, the Southern Center sued the Cordele circuit’s indigent defense program to highlight the need to reform the state’s defender system. The lawsuit, which was later settled, helped prompt lawmakers to enact a statewide public defender system, replacing a hodgepodge of uneven and underfunded county-run programs.
Under the 2003 act, the state must provide three public defenders for the Cordele office. After the law’s passage, the circuit’s four counties voluntarily chipped in with funding for additional defenders.
In 2008, however, the circuit’s counties reduced the supplemental funding and dropped the number of county-funded positions to one, the suit said.
The next year, Cordele’s chief public defender, Tim Eidson, asked his counties to restore the funding and urged them not to cut the remaining county-funded position, the suit said. If his office lost that “essential” position, Eidson told county commissioners, it “would cease to function in a manner that would be able to adequately handle indigent representation.”
By 2010, the counties cut funding for the remaining attorney, who was largely responsible for juvenile cases, the suit said.
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