Chasing Gideon Read Online Free PDF Page B

American Bar Association recommended standard of 150), while in the latter caseloads averaged 327. In Knox County, Tennessee, one attorney reported having 240 open cases, while another reported that between January and February of 2008, she had 151 clients (representing approximately 14 people per day). “In 2006, six misdemeanor attorneys [there] handled over 10,000 cases, averaging just less than one hour per case,” the authors observed. Miami was another problem region, where public defenders refused to accept more cases when their loads jumped, over the course of three years, from an average of 367 felonies per attorney to 500 and from 1,380 misdemeanors per attorney to 2,225. (See Chapter 2 for a detailed look at Miami’s situation.) In Missouri, the authors noted, public defender caseloads were so high that they were required “to dispose of a case every 6.6 hours of every working day.” The state’s public defender deputy director Dan Gralike said: “The present MASH-style operating procedure requires public defenders to divvy effective legal assistance to a narrowing group of clients,” in essence “choosing” which clients will receive effective assistance and which will not. 16
    The legal term for what happens when these overextended lawyers go into court and race through a case doing the bare minimumis “ineffective assistance of counsel.” More colloquially, unmanageable workloads mean that all across the country, public defenders cannot properly do their jobs. “Our adversarial system of criminal justice relies upon the effectiveness of counsel for both the prosecution and the defense in order to discover the truth concerning the guilt or innocence of the accused,” says one of the leading experts on the topic, California Western School of Law professor and managing director of the school’s criminal justice programs Laurence A. Benner. “A host of recent exonerations of the wrongfully convicted by innocence projects nationwide . . . have revealed there are serious flaws in our justice system,” he wrote in the summer 2011 issue of Criminal Justice . 17 He worried that the presumption of innocence—something that was necessarily backed by “a well-prepared and experienced defense counsel supported by investigators, experts, and other resources needed to mount an effective defense”—had been abandoned. Instead, he insisted, “our system has broken faith with that basic premise and forgotten its primary mission, often operating under a presumption of guilt in which processing the ‘presumed guilty’ as cheaply as possible has been made a higher priority than concern for the possibility of innocence.”
    Authors of the Justice Department report insisted that “[a]dequately supporting indigent defenders is critical to preserving the constitutional rights of individuals accused of crimes.” Others, horrified by the dire situation, eschew the cautious language of the Justice Department and describe the current indigent defense crisis more directly: “All in all, it is just massive lawlessness and indifference by the courts to a Constitutional mandate by the Supreme Court,” says Stephen Bright, executive director of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia. “But it’s hard to get folks to do the right thing on this.”
    There are all kinds of problems with the patchwork system of indigent defense in the United States, but by far the most critical is the crushing caseloads that, in essence, violate a defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel by providing it, in many cases, in name only.
    In Washington State, debates over caseload limits have dominated the reform efforts for more than a decade. The state has madegreat strides, but it was not there yet. Washington was neither the best nor the worst in the country—but fell somewhere in the middle. And within