Other counties push public defender's offices
Thomas Lindenmuth never knows what to expect in the courtroom.
He and the other attorneys who work in McAllen’s Federal Public Defender’s Office are appointed clients accused of anything from illegal immigration to drug smuggling.
“We don’t pick our clients — that’s the bottom line,” said Lindenmuth, one of 55 attorneys who represent indigent defendants in courts across the federal court system’s Southern District of Texas. “We never know what’s going to come through the door.”
But unlike Hidalgo County’s office of public defenders, Lindenmuth’s staff know they can always count on a steady stream of work.
They are part of a national system of public defenders, who represent 60 percent of the indigent in federal courts.
In McAllen, where Lindenmuth’s office is automatically appointed to all misdemeanor and felony immigration cases, he and his colleagues take on close to 85 percent of all cases.
If Hidalgo County wants to better utilize its own county-employed attorneys for the indigent, it could learn a lot by examining other such programs at both the federal and state level.
In Texas, public defender’s offices range in size from the five Bexar County attorneys who only handle cases on appeals to the 90-plus attorneys in Dallas County who took on more than 45,000 cases in adult and juvenile criminal courts last year.
Only about half a dozen offices across the nation — including Hidalgo County’s — are solely assigned to the misdemeanor courts, a national expert on indigent defense systems said. And the percentage of cases allocated to the public defender’s office ranges from as high as 90 percent in Bowie County to less than 10 percent in Hidalgo County.
While their roles may differ from state to state and county to county, public defenders generally provide a necessary and effective alternative to the appointed counsel system, said Patrick McCann. The Houston-based criminal defense attorney joined a state senator in lobbying to establish a public defender’s office there earlier this year.
Before Harris County commissioners agreed to set up that office, their county was the largest urban area in the nation without one.
There is still an outdated perception that public defenders are unqualified, overworked attorneys who are paid to quickly move cases along with a guilty plea, McCann said. Instead, they actually provide a quality, cost-effective defense that is often unmatched by private attorneys.
“If you look at the stats, a public defender’s office is very easy to defend,” he said. “The proof is around us that these things work effectively.”
McCann, past president of the Harris County Criminal Lawyers Association, sees the issue in terms other than dollars and cents.
In Harris County, criminal defense attorneys who take court-appointed cases are matched against a well-funded district attorney’s office with hordes of investigators. The district attorney’s budget is more than double the amount the county spends for indigent defense, and case loads for court-appointed, private attorneys — some of whom were making significant sums off the system — greatly exceeded national standards.
A public defender’s office is a way to even the playing field in terms of resources and funding, said McCann. But the offices will always be prone to resistance from judges who are afraid of losing cost control of a case or from private attorneys who view them as an economic threat.
In Webb County, where an office that handles 75 percent of all criminal cases is entrenched as part of the justice system, Chief Public Defender Hugo Martinez’s decision to place his attorneys in the juvenile courts last year infuriated some private attorneys.
The juvenile appointments weren’t lucrative but were plentiful enough to cause a stir among lawyers who depend on the appointments to earn extra money, Martinez said. He defended the move as providing juveniles the same service he offers in adult courts.
Still, the outcry from the attorneys last year was a far different reaction than their attitude toward indigent defense when his office was first established in 1988. Back then, rich attorneys who saw court appointments as a low-paying nuisance were permitted to “opt off” the appointment list by paying their own money into a fund set up to supplement the pay of others who did the work.
Now, more attorneys would prefer to opt into the system.
“From the attorney’s standpoint, it’s pure economics,” Martinez said. “From the judiciary standpoint, it’s politics. You can have a lot of resistance from both sides.”
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Jeremy Roebuck covers courts and general assignments for The Monitor. He can be reached at (956) 683-4437.
Jared Janes covers Hidalgo County government, Edinburg and general assignments for The Monitor. He can be reached at (956) 683-4424.
