The Missouri Public Defenders office is praising lawmakers after this week's vote to restore funding to the defender system.
The General Assembly overrode Gov. Jay Nixon's veto of $3.47 million intended to pay private attorneys to handle cases where the public defender has a conflict.
Historically, when there is a criminal case involving co-defendants who are indigent, one defendant is represented by the public defender's local office, while the co-defendant is assigned a public defender from another circuit.
But the effort to avoid conflicts of interest aggravates each office's current caseload, because the conflict public defender must leave the assigned county to travel to another county to attend court appearances, make jail visits, conduct investigations, interview witnesses and take depositions - all for a single client.
"One of the reasons a statewide public defender system is able represent so many individuals for such a limited cost, compared to what private attorneys would charge, has a lot to do with efficiencies attributable to economies of scale," said Cat Kelly, public defender system director. "When an attorney is forced to leave the jurisdiction where 99 percent of his or her caseload is located, to represent a single client, those efficiencies go away."
The state funding was added to the budget on the heels of an independent report, prepared by the accounting firm RubinBrown on behalf of the American Bar Association, to determine how long public defense attorneys were spending on specific case types and how many hours actually should be spent on those case types.
The study used 25 weeks of time-entry logs and input from both the public and private bar.
The results revealed that, for every case type, public defenders were not spending the amount of time required to provide effective assistance of counsel - and this was tied to the number of cases each attorney was assigned to handle.
Despite the report's findings, Missouri prosecutors questioned its conclusion that public defenders were "overworked."
"Missouri's prosecutors are skeptical of claims by the public defender management that their attorneys face a caseload crisis," said Stone County Prosecutor Matt Selby, president of the Missouri Association of Prosecuting Attorneys. "The Missouri State auditor shared our suspicions, saying public defenders overstated their workload."
Selby pointed out that last year, the Legislature passed a law with the support of prosecutors and public defenders that created a "safety valve" for public defenders. It allowed them to seek relief from trial judges if they were overburdened by caseloads.
"We are not aware of any instance where public defenders have sought relief from their allegedly oppressive caseloads," Selby said.
Still, Douglas Copeland, Missouri State Public Defender Commission chairman, said, "This year the Legislature has performed in true Missouri fashion - they required the public defender system to "Show-Me' the data - objective evidence that our caseloads were unmanageable - and when we did, they acted."
Kelly added: "This will reduce the amount of time clients needlessly spend incarcerated, waiting for their case to be heard.
"This (veto override) action by the Legislature demonstrates not only support for the role of the public defender, but an acknowledgment that an individual's right to the effective assistance of counsel is a pillar of our system of justice."