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A new bill in the state Legislature would require counties to report basic information about public defender services, such as how many cases attorneys handle, in an effort to compel California to confront its public defender crisis.
The proposed legislation comes after a CalMatters investigative series exposed failures in California's county-based public defender systems. Our reporting showed that public defender offices across the state lack defense investigators, who are often the greatest protection against wrongful convictions. We also found that lawyers in several rural counties had astronomical caseloads, and were less likely than other defense attorneys to challenge the prosecutors’ evidence in legal motions and take their cases to trial.
“We cannot as a government look the other way and rely exclusively on our journalistic partners to really uncover and peel back that onion and see how bad it is,” said Assemblymember Nick Schultz of Burbank, who is co-sponsoring the bill. He said statewide data might “reveal an even more bleak picture.”
California has a constitutional obligation to ensure poor people accused of crimes, who account for more than 80 percent of criminal defendants, receive effective representation. But the state has left that responsibility entirely in the hands of its 58 counties, which collectively spend almost twice as much on prosecuting people as they do on defending them.
California is one of just two states that don’t provide any funding or oversight of trial-level public defense. There are no minimum standards and no reporting requirements. The resulting patchwork of local systems is rife with disparities.
Many of the state’s rural counties have outsourced their public defender services through flat-fee contracts, paying private attorneys and firms a fixed amount, regardless of how many cases they handle or how much time they spend on each case. A bill that would ban these arrangements, which disincentivize investigating and litigating cases, was put on hold last year. Seven of the eight counties with the state’s highest jail and prison incarceration rates have flat-fee contracts.
“There are dire signs in some jurisdictions of attorneys handling 300, 400, 500, or more cases in a year, including hundreds of felonies,” said Josh Schwartz, a researcher with the Wren Collective, a nonprofit organization advocating for criminal justice reform. The proposed bill mandating data collection, he said, “would be a massive step towards bringing the caseload crisis that we know is occurring into public view.”
The bill, introduced by Assemblymember Joaquin Arambula of Fresno, would require each county to report rudimentary data every two years. Arambula had previously sponsored legislation that led to a comprehensive workload study of California’s public defender services. The study, which was published last year, called California “an outlier in not collecting and publishing comprehensive, aggregated data on its county-based public defense systems.”
“This bill is a necessary first step in understanding the scope of this issue,” Arambula said. It would require legislators to “face that truth head on, and to identify disparities so that ultimately we can address them.”
Many of the contractors in counties with flat-fee systems already collect caseload data in order to report it to county supervisors. And most of the state's institutional public defender offices use case management systems that track this data, though each county uses its own metrics.
The California State Association of Counties opposes the bill, and has asked legislators to include language that would make compliance with reporting requirements contingent on state funding. The organization also opposes the flat-fee ban, and has characterized that measure as an unfunded mandate from the state. Arambula said his office is requesting $30 million to help counties pay for data collection.
Scott Baly, a retired Fresno County public defender, told the assembly’s Public Safety Committee in April that criminal defendants want attorneys who have “time to read the police reports … to maybe meet you in the jail and listen to your side of the story.”
“Are they gonna talk to me and are they gonna help me with this problem? The answer to these questions is caseload,” he said. “How busy are these lawyers?”
The bill passed the assembly’s Local Government and Public Safety committees with unanimous support and is now in front of the Appropriations Committee.
Schultz, a former prosecutor, said high caseloads and a lack of investigators undermine the entire justice system.
“We need to make sure that we're making the investment to have a sufficient number of capable and qualified attorneys who can actually hold prosecutors to account and make them prove the case,” he said. “It has to start with the data.”
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
