By: Steve Grumm

Happy FridayHolidays, dear readers.  And if the religious holidays are not your bag, I wish you a wondrous Winter Solstice Season.  According to the Wikipedias, “The winter solstice occurs exactly when the axial tilt of a planet’s polar hemisphere is farthest away from the star that it orbits. Earth’s maximum axial tilt to our star, the Sun, during a solstice is 23° 26′.” If axial tilts don’t warm your heart and make you want to be in fellowship with humanity, I don’t know what will.  Regardless of what you celebrate or how you celebrate it, I wish you a joy-filled, relaxing holiday season.  In summary, here’s what we’ve got:

• NOLA’s defender office has made serious, post-Katrina progress;
• our buddy Tom Maligno is profiled for his remarkable public-interest work at Touro Law on Lawwng Eye-laaand.  (Don’t worry, the interview is translated out of their strange local dialect and into regular English.);
• just a few miles west, is public defender hiring on the horizon in New York?;
• Legal Aid of West Virginia looking at layoffs in wake of LSC $ cuts;
• as has happened elsewhere in the country, a Northeastern PA defender announces he’s triaging the kinds of new cases he can accept;
• controversy in MA about an apparent failure to screen indigent defendants for indigence;
• an MLP in East Tennessee;
• making the case for an indigent defense system, Minnesota-style;
• Quiz: what will cause a public defender’s office to burn through cash right quick?;
• NYC legal aid lawyers hop in the bus and bring justice to Brooklyn and the Bronx;
• from the Department of Bad Timing: public defender layoffs, prosecuting attorney raises, in Central Florida;
• Houston, TX finally has a public defense program, and its chief wants you to know how their first year went.

This week:

• The Jan./Feb. edition of Mother Jones looks at the remarkable, post-Katrina progress of the Office of the Public Defender in New Orleans, which has transformed from a beleaguered to an award-winning program.  Nevertheless the OPD, led by Derwyn Bunton (whom we interviewed here in early 2010), faces new funding challenges and is pitted against a district attorney’s office which brings cases in historically high volume.

• 12.22.11 – Tom Maligno, executive director of a unique (and quite robust) “Public Advocacy Center” at Touro Law School, drops some wisdom about why/how the PAC operates.  The center houses several independent public interest law offices, which gives Touro students direct access to employers and experiential learning opportunities.  On the ABA Center for Pro Bono’s blog, Maligno notes, “Through the William Randolph Hearst Public Advocacy Center (PAC) we give free space to advocacy organizations so they have working offices within the law school. What we get in return is a plan for them to involve our students in their work. We have a mandatory pro bono graduation requirement at Touro. One of the ways students can fulfill that requirement is by working within these agencies that are all housed within the law school.  We try to select various groups so the types of organization available for student volunteers run the gamut. We work with legal services programs, immigration groups, civil liberties organization, domestic violence advocates and much more.”

• 12.21.11 – public defender hiring on the horizon in New York?  Thomson Reuters reports: “State court administrators have requested millions of dollars in funding to help legal-aid offices in New York City come into compliance with a new law limiting the number of criminal cases a public defender can handle each year…. The law, proposed by Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman in 2009, bars public-defender offices in the city from averaging more than 400 misdemeanor or 150 felony cases per attorney in any 12-month  period…. While the law creating the cap doesn’t take effect until April 1, 2014, the current state budget includes $6.8 million to allow the handful of public-defender offices in the city to hire new attorneys. The largest office, the Legal Aid Society of New York, has already hired 105 new lawyers, according to Attorney-in-Chief Steven Banks, but is still only about halfway toward its bid to meet the cap. Earlier this month, in a spending proposal for the upcoming fiscal year, state court officials requested an additional $6.4 million to come into compliance with the law.”

• 12.20.11 – following November’s LSC funding cuts Legal Aid of West Virginia is bracing for attorney layoffs.  From the Charleston Gazette: “Federal spending cuts will likely force the overburdened Legal Aid of West Virginia to lay off several lawyers in order to compensate for its annual budget woes.”  It’s not like LAWV is overly staffed right now: “Legal Aid has just 40 lawyers to handle cases in the state’s 55 counties, according to Legal Aid’s website, and demand for more lawyers is not getting any lighter.  In 2010 alone, demand for Legal Aid services increased 20 percent from the previous year.”

• 12.20.11 – resource shortages are compelling a Northeastern Pennsylvania public defender to refuse some new cases.  From an editorial in the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader: “Chief Public Defender Al Flora Jr. said his office will limit the number of new cases it takes beginning this week. Flora pinned the problem on a shortage of funding for a sufficiently large defense staff to handle the caseload, saying, ‘We are overwhelmed right now….’  By taking this action, Flora might finally force county and state officials to confront troubling shortfalls here in money and personnel devoted to the court system. He’s justifiably perturbed at being asked to provide competent counsel without being provided the resources to supply it.  Until the dust-up can be resolved, however, the most likely casualties are – again – the people with the least.”  Flora is basically limiting case intake to juvenile and some felony matters.  Here’s additional coverage from the Associated Press.
   
• 12.19.11 – in Massachusetts, trouble with the system to screen client eligibility for a public defender.  The AP reports: ‘Massachusetts has spent nearly $48 million on free legal services for the poor without verifying whether those making the claims are truly indigent, according to a new report released Monday by state Auditor Suzanne Bump.  The report looks at the Office of the Commissioner of Probation, the agency responsible for verifying that a person claiming to be poor meets the definition established by the Supreme Judicial Court to be eligible for free legal services.  Bump’s review of fiscal year 2010 records at 27 of the state’s 70 district courts found what she called ‘near total noncompliance with the indigency verification laws, rules, and regulations.’  None of the 27 courts performed any verification of documentation at an applicant’s initial screening.  In the sample of cases pulled from these courts, only 1.7 percent contained adequate documentation that court officials performed a required 60-day reassessment, and less than 1 percent had any evidence that a required six-month reassessment had been conducted.”  More coverage from the Boston Herald.

• 12.19.11 – a new medical-legal partnership (MLP) in East Tennessee.  WDEF reports: “It’s the first of its kind in the Chattanooga area.  Erlanger Health System announces a partnership with Legal Aid of East Tennessee.  The Erlanger Health Law Partnership aims to improve the health of low-income patients….  [The] Partnership will help low-income patients with legal problems that affect their health…issues like education, the Family Medical Leave Act, Powers of Attorney, Public Benefits and Housing.”

• 12.18.11 – a column by Minnesota judge Terrence E. Conkel emphasizes the importance of public defenders’ roles in the judicial system, and the importance of providing them with the resources they need to operate effectively.  Read the column in the Jordan Independent, a/k/a the New York Times of Scott County, Minnesota.

• 12.18.11 – what causes public defenders’ offices to burn through funding right quick?  Capital cases.  To wit, in Northampton County, PA the defender’s office saw its “budget ballooning nearly 400 percent from $150,000 to $600,700,” mainly on account of having to handle four death-penalty cases in the past year.  Read more in the Express-Times. 

• 12.16.11 – NYC legal services lawyers have justice, will travel.  From WNYC: “A large truck with the words ‘Access to Justice’ written on it has been making its way through low-income communities on the outskirts of Brooklyn and the Bronx this week. Its purpose is to bring the courts and free legal services to people who often don’t have access either because of language barriers, physical disabilities or other issues. It’s the first of its kind in the state.  Lawyers from the New York Legal Assistance Group or NYLAG operate the mobile center with the New York State Courts’ full cooperation. The so-called justice on wheels truck is expected to make stops in 30 different locations a month and serve 2,000 city residents a year.”

• 12.16.11 – worst of times, best of times: public defender layoffs, and prosecutor raises, in Florida.  The Orlando Sentinel reports:  “Orange-Osceola Public Defender Robert Wesley says a combination of economic factors has led his office to lay off 11 attorneys, meaning several long-time assistants will lose their jobs by year’s end….  Factors contributing to the layoffs include: lack of natural turnover with defense attorneys finding fewer jobs available with private firms; a decline in collections from clients of Wesley’s office – normally such collections account for 30 percent of funds for operations; a number of staffers who left and then returned under the Family Medical Leave Act; and an increase in health insurance costs.”  In a strange juxtaposition, the local prosecutor’s office announced raises: “…State Attorney Lawson Lamar, just announced raises for staffers in his office, which prosecutes state-level crimes in the circuit covering Orange and Osceola….  ‘[Increased collections have enabled me to provide salary increases for the remaining majority of our team members this year,’ Lamar wrote in a statement to employees. ‘This comes at a particularly important time of year since we all saw our take home pay shrink due to inflation [and] no cost of living increases since October 2006’.” 

• 12.15.11 – in Texas, Harris County (that’s Houston) Public Defender Alexander Bunin catches us up on his newly created office’s activity.  (Houston had been using an appointed counsel system for indigent defense all the way up until last year.)  Contributing a piece to the Houston Chronicle, Bunin reviews his office’s successes and reinforces the economic and moral cases for funding a stand-alone public defense agency.