research required or prepare appropriate motions, and their ability to take cases to trial is compromised.
A Texas defender from a small city who reported hav- ing 100 misdemeanor cases and 300 felony cases last year, reported, there are “only 1-2 misdemeanor trials a year for the entire county.”
In Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, for example, a lawyer who had about six months of experience told a site team member that generally the lawyers have reviewed the file before coming to court for the preliminary hearing, and they arrive early and talk to the officers and the prosecutor. An- other lawyer explained that she will review the files for a few minutes each the night before, then meet with the client for about five minutes in court, negotiate a possible deal with the police officer, and discuss the deal with her client. One attorney described the process as a scramble, and an- other mentioned that with seven clients, seven officers, and seven DAs in one morning, “[y]ou have to be on your toes the whole session.” A law professor recently spoke with a lawyer working in a defender office with crippling caseloads, who “candidly re- ported that, prior to the increase in cases in her office, she had conceived of her role as looking for the single issue that would give her client a plausible argument to make in her defense.” With case overload, the same lawyer “now looked for the one issue that she could identify to convince her client to resolve the case short of trial.” 156 A respondent to the survey from Nassau County, New York, admitted, “[m]ost interviews happen on court days in the courthouse. Motions are filed but are discouraged by the court and by the fiscal restraints.” The Spangenberg Group report on indigent defense in New York 157 also noted defi- ciencies in how misdemeanor cases are handled:
Across the country, over burdened defenders reported taking approximately one in every hundred cases to trial or even less. If a defender does take a case to trial, it cuts even fur- ther into the amount of time available for the remainder of her cases. Even a trial that lasts a day or two severely affects the lawyer’s ability to prepare the other cases. Meet and Plead In many jurisdictions, cases are resolved at the first court hearing, with minimal or no preparation by the defense. Mis- demeanor courtrooms often have so many cases on the docket that an attorney has mere minutes to handle each case. Because of the number of cases assigned to each defender, “legal advice” often amounts to a hasty conversation in the courtroom or hallway with the client. Frequently, this con- versation begins with the defender informing the defendant of a plea offer. When the defendant’s case is called, he or she simply enters a guilty plea and is sentenced. No research of the facts or the law is undertaken. This process is known as meet-and-plead or plea at arraignment/first appearance. “[C]lients are forced to make VERY difficult decisions with very little investigation or discussion … due to the number of clients and the short notice we have when appointed.”
31
In the city court, one public defender re- ported an open caseload of 800 misde- meanors; she has so many clients that her voice mail cannot hold all of their mes- sages. Another reported 800-850 open cases in the arraignment part in that court. We were told that the city court cases are “triaged” and not all are fully investigated. The Monroe County Public Defender described the situation to the Commission as “outrageous.” 158
— A Tennessee public defender.
According to Professor Adele Bernhard, “In 2000 in New York City, assigned counsel lawyers handled 177,965 new defendants in the Bronx and Manhattan. 124,177 of those cases were disposed of at the first appearance — most by a plea of guilty entered after no more than a 10-minute con- sultation with their lawyers.” 159 Similarly, Professor Steven Zeidman, who directs the defender clinic at the CUNY School of Law, reported that “somewhere in the vicinity of two-thirds of all misdemeanor cases are ‘disposed of’ at the accused’s very first court appearance.” 160 The Justice Department published a story about a rural California county contract defender who assigned all mis- demeanor cases to one associate. 161 “She carried a case- load of between 250 and 300 cases per month. She was expected to plead cases at the defendant’s first appearance
Crippling caseloads make it all but impossible to take cases to trial. As one supervising lawyer in Cook County, Illinois, noted, her attorneys “do go to trial, but not as often as they could if the numbers were lower. … [M]ost trials are bench [trials] and only last a couple of hours.” A line defender in Cook County confirmed her assessment, stating, “You can try cases [but only] with severe triaging.” One of the Chicago supervisors stated at the May 9 conference in New York that most of the attorneys fresh out of law school want to take cases to trial, but “they tend to get beaten down by the system.”
One defender in Washington reported handling 900 cases in a year. Of those 900, he performed only eight jury trials and one bench trial (a trial rate of 1 percent).
Problems
The Terrible Toll of America’s Broken Misdemeanor Courts
Made with FlippingBook Online document maker