Like many state agencies, Missouri's public defenders are waiting to see how Gov. Eric Greitens handles the lawmaker-approved state budget before the new state business year begins July 1.
The Legislature approved $46,808,524 for the Public Defender system's operations in the 2017-18 business year - $1 million more than the amount appropriated for the 2016-17 business year that ends June 30, and $2 million more than Greitens recommended in his budget proposal.
But the lawmakers' budget amount is only about two-thirds what the system requested.
State Public Defender Michael Barrett noted Friday that Greitens continued a $3.5 million withhold then-Gov. Jay Nixon made last July on the system's funding for the current business year.
"If you go back three years, $6 million has been left on the table for the Public Defender system," Barrett told the News Tribune after the Public Defender Commission's quarterly meeting.
"If we just got what was appropriated to us, it wouldn't be what we need - but it would be night-and-day from what we have to operate on."
In 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the federal Constitution's Sixth Amendment guarantees Americans the right to have a lawyer represent them, as a fundamental right essential to a fair trial, and the state must provide that lawyer if the defendant can't afford their own attorney.
After mixed success with a plan using private-practice attorneys to defend poor people accused of crimes, Missouri created the statewide public defender system in the 1980s.
"We generate costs on the state when we're underfunded," Barrett said. "Our practical contribution to the state is, we help the state (decide) who needs to go to prison, at considerable taxpayer expense - and who can be dealt with through probation, or who is innocent on the merits of their case."
Every year, Barrett said, Missouri ranks eighth highest nationally in its statewide incarceration rate.
"When you look at our prison population, 50 percent are non-violent compared to violent" ones, he said.
By helping the courts keep non-violent people out of prison, Barrett said, public defenders actually help save the state money - and leave space for violent people to be housed without requiring the state to build more prisons.
"If you invested money in us (public defenders) - which is the obligation of the state - you wouldn't have to spend all these millions of dollars," he said.
State prison spending has grown from $575 million in 2006 to more than $725 million last year, he noted.
"Nobody is looking at this comprehensively," Barrett said. "We're not looking at what's driving the costs."
Barrett last year sued Nixon over the $3.5 million withhold, but Cole County Circuit Judge Jon Beetem dismissed it in November, ruling Nixon had the constitutional authority to withhold the money.
Barrett and the Public Defender Commission have appealed that decision to the Missouri Supreme Court.
Barrett said two years ago the system had 74,000 cases - "which is a heck of a lot of cases" - and that jumped 12 percent to 82,000 cases last year.
"We just reported today that it since has grown another 2 percent," he said. "Our caseload, on average, is 150 cases per public defender at any given time of the year. That means, if you just divide the number of cases by the number of lawyers, we are spending - including overhead - just $350 per case. Would you want to hire a lawyer who spent $350 on your case?"
Failing to increase the budget means eventually office closures or turning away cases, Barrett said.
Although he's been the system's director only a couple of years, Barrett acknowledged the system has been talking about funding and caseload problems for years.
The state, Barrett and the commission are defendants in a separate lawsuit filed March 9 by the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Missouri.
That suit, originally filed in the Cole County Circuit Court but later transferred to the U.S. District Court, argued Missouri's public defender system budget "is shockingly inadequate" and has failed "to provide the resources required to adequately represent poor people accused of crimes in Missouri" for more than two decades.
Among other things, that lawsuit asks the court to require the state to make sure all indigent criminal defendants and juvenile respondents in the state get "constitutionally adequate legal representation" by the Public Defender system.
The case currently is set for a two-week federal court trial next year.
"The state's shooting themselves in the foot here when they keep us at the bottom nationally," Barrett said. "We're second-to-last in the United States. They're running the risk of being under a court mandate - because they just didn't want to work with us."