THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

New Orleans is becoming a laboratory for the study of malfunctioning justice. The latest step involves the Orleans Public Defenders Office which has announced that it will refuse new cases because of a massive overload of current cases caused in part by reduced funding, attorney retirements and, to add insult to injury, a hiring freeze. This has resulted in a suit by the ACLU with the purpose of fixing a fucked up system.

In Louisiana the majority of local public defender offices’ budgets are cobbled together from defendants’ fines and fees, mostly from traffic tickets.

In the past year, cuts in state-appropriated funding, combined with a decline in revenue from local fees, have affected how those district offices can represent the poor. So far, four Louisiana parishes, including Orleans, have established waitlists for the indigent.

The OPD handles the vast majority of the city’s cases — serving more than 22,000 indigent clients last year — and needed 70 lawyers and an $8.2 million budget to “protects its clients’ constitutional rights,” according to estimates found by an American University report in 2006.

As of December, it had about 50 lawyers and a $6.2 million budget.

The unreliable funding scheme has led to emergencies like the one in Orleans Parish, forcing offices to resort to measures like refusing clients, according to Buskey and other lawyers behind the suit.

“We do hope in the end to help OPD and other defenders throughout the state,” he said. “We hope to ensure a guaranteed and stable funding system for public defenders so we don’t have these recurring crises every few months or every year.”

This wasn’t the first time the public was warned of impending constitutional crisis due to what Bunton termed an “unreliable” user-pay system.

During a December hearing with Criminal District Court Judge Arthur Hunter, Bunton made an unusual request for judicial mercy, asking the judge to stop assigning new indigent defendants to his office until the caseload crisis is resolved.

Ultimately, Hunter refused to grant the request, but not before several witnesses testified on Bunton’s behalf. They included renowned defense lawyer Barry Scheck, a co-founder of the Innocence Project.

He cited his own research on the effects of inadequate defense on wrongful convictions. “The failure to have an adequately funded defense team … not only endangers the innocent, but it undermines public safety,” he said.

On Thursday, Buskey said the expert testimony “speaks volumes” about what’s going on in Louisiana and elsewhere in the country. Similar lawsuits have been brought in the past year against public defense systems in California, Idaho and Washington.

“I think we agree wholeheartedly. The summary of the whole testimony is you can’t run a public defender system like this,” he said. “You can’t seriously call this a functioning criminal justice system.”

So long as there are Republicans in a position to block it, systemic reform will remain a long term goal but without reform arrest becomes cruel and unusual punishment for those unable to pay for a lawyer.