Caseload Crisis

The honor is nice. But what he – and the rest of the Missouri State Public Defender System – could use more than anything is a bit of relief.

Hackathorn heads up the Springfield office of the Missouri State Public Defender System, and like other such offices in the state, Hackathorn and his colleagues are dealing with increased caseloads and stagnant funding.

The Springfield office, which covers Greene, Christian and Taney counties, averages 336 cases per lawyer per year, according to Cathy Kelly, training director for the Missouri State Public Defender System. The American Bar Association’s recommendation for annual caseload per lawyer is 225.

Hackathorn said that each of the attorneys working in his office have between 170 and 180 cases currently open. Among those cases are a large number of felonies, which can remain open for several months, he added.

High turnover, low funds

One area in which lack of funding comes into play is human resources.

MSPDS’s Kelly said the public defender system has experienced the equivalent of a 100 percent turnover in the past five years, Kelly said. High caseloads, low salaries, and low morale all contribute to the turnover rate.

Hackathorn said the Springfield office, which has 15 attorneys, has been fairly lucky when it comes to turnover rates; the office has only lost two attorneys in the past year.

“We have, however, seen years where there has been a mass exodus,” he said.

The entry level salary for an attorney at MSPDS is $33,792; the highest nonmanagement salary an attorney can reach is $57,298, Kelly said.

What that means, Kelly said, is that many public defenders work second jobs. Because Missouri law prohibits public defenders from practicing law on the side, she said many of them moonlight in the restaurant industry. One public defender, Kelly said, met a new client for the first time during the day – and delivered a pizza to his home that same evening.

While Hackathorn said he wasn’t aware of any Springfield office attorneys holding down second jobs, he has heard talk in the past. Generally, he added, those are the attorneys who end up leaving.

According to a 2005 study by criminal justice research and consulting firm The Spangenberg Group, student debts, which range between $50,000 and $100,000, create greater distress and frustration for new public defenders, and are another roadblock in efforts to recruit public defenders.

Chances are, though, that even if recruiting public defenders were an easy task, there wouldn’t be the money to pay them.

In its report, The Spangenberg Group noted that Missouri’s public defender program has not received an increase in appropriations since the 2000 fiscal year. And it doesn’t look like that will change in the near future.

The FY 2006 budget was $26.2 million, Kelly said. If the agency got all the funding it requested – including money for new lawyers, support staff, and student loan reimbursement programs, among other expenses – the department’s new budget would be $48.6 million. Kelly said that 184 new attorneys for the public defender trial division – at a cost of $9.2 million – would reduce caseloads to the recommended standard.

But Gov. Matt Blunt already has passed on a recommendation for the program’s budget.

“The governor did not recommend funding for any new people,” Kelly said.

Service issues

All Missouri State Public Defender clients – and up to 85 percent of all of the state’s criminally accused – are considered indigent.

While each state has different criteria for declaring a client indigent, Kelly said that Missouri’s standards are tied to poverty level guidelines. A single person must make $9,570 or less each year, with another $3,260 added per additional family member. Other factors may be weighed in at times, Kelly said, such as property ownership or the ability to raise a large amount of money for bail.

“In those cases, they can be turned down because they’re considered to have the means to hire an attorney,” she said.

But in today’s economy, strict adherence to poverty guidelines can, at times, leave a too-thin gap between the indigent and middle class.

Even those with middle-class incomes may not always have the financial ability to hire an attorney, especially when attorneys require a certain amount of money up front and can end up costing thousands of dollars, Kelly said.

“In the past, if we could clearly tell that someone who didn’t fall under the guidelines didn’t have the means, we could take on their case anyhow. With the caseloads we have now, we just can’t,” she said.

Rights at risk?

But staffing issues aren’t the only challenge facing the public defender program.

Rodney Uphoff, the Elwood Thomas Missouri Endowed Professor of Law at the University of Missouri-Columbia Law School, fears that the clients who are being served by the program aren’t getting the legal services they need. When lawyers are overworked and have no time to investigate, he said, they aren’t able to provide adequate representation.

Uphoff said that there was a very real possibility that innocent clients were succumbing to plea bargains rather than run the risk of going to trial with unprepared lawyers.

“Around the country, there are a lot of cases of DNA exoneration, which shows the legal system is far from foolproof,” he said.

Corrective measures

Public defenders are required on any case that can include a jail sentence, such as driving on a suspended license, when the defendant meets the guidelines.

One measure that could help rectify staggering caseloads, is reclassification of some criminal cases to remove the threat to jail time from sentencing – a move that has been recommended by The Missouri Bar’s Public Defender Task Force.

Also, Kelly said, members of the bar association already have been asked to take on pro-bono misdemeanor cases to help lighten public defenders’ caseloads. In 2005, bar members took on a few hundred of the estimated 88,000 misdemeanor traffic cases, she added. [[In-content Ad]]