Indigent defense

Few taxpayers hound their elected officials demanding better legal representation for indigent criminal defendants. The cause won’t win a candidate many votes, although providing the poor with competent counsel is a constitutional obligation.

Attorneys with the Clark County public defender’s office handle huge felony caseloads, and private attorneys are paid thousands of dollars per month to take on hundreds of other clients who can’t be represented by a public defender because of a conflict of interest. Defendants are routinely run through the Regional Justice Center like cattle, sometimes having no contact with their counsel until they appear in court for the first time. Earlier this year, a Review-Journal investigative series examined problems with the county’s system of contracting attorneys for the poor, including a lack of minimum qualifications for lawyers.

A board empaneled by the Nevada Supreme Court in response to the Review-Journal series is recommending solutions to these problems. And on Tuesday, they issued a mighty expensive proposal.

The commission of lawyers, judges and local government officials advised limiting county public defenders to 192 felony cases per year. On average, Clark County public defenders currently handle nearly 400 per year. The Clark County public defender’s office would have to double the number of attorneys on its payroll to meet this standard, or outsource cases to private attorneys to ensure compliance. That would require a similar increase in county prosecutors, courthouse staff and judges.

“It could bankrupt us,” said Assistant County Manager Liz Qullin, one of three panel members who voted against caseload limits.

Although the commission’s intentions are good, caseload caps are the wrong approach. For starters, applying the same limits to public defenders with vastly different skills doesn’t make much sense. An experienced public defender should be able to manage more than 192 cases, while that number is probably too high for a newbie right out of law school.

It’s also a massive unfunded mandate. Where would Clark County come up with the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for this plan? The parks budget has already been stripped bare to bail out University Medical Center.

A far better recommendation from the commission was its support of perfomance standards for public defenders. Training and supervision can boost the quality of indigent defense faster than adding more warm bodies.