Indigent defense on trial tomorrow
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008Lawyers from the Southern Center for Human Rights will be in court Thursday morning arguing that cuts made by the state have gutted the system to provide public defenders to the indigent.
The Georgia Public Defender Standards Council, which was formed in 2003 to handle indigent defense all over the state, hasn’t been fully funded since Republicans took over the General Assembly in 2005. As CL pointed out in a cover story on the issue, the Republican leadership got a lot of hay out of criticizing the indigent defense system for budget over-runs that the legislature actually created by underfunding the agency in the first place.
Stephen Bright, president of the Southern Center, says the decision to fire 21 public defenders in Fulton County on July 31 will throw the system into chaos.
“We are in perpetual crisis because the funding is so inadequate – the state funding for indigent defense overall is only about 1/3 of what’s needed; for capital cases it’s less than half,” Bright says via email.
The issue was first raised because of the expense of the Brian Nichols murder case. Now it has shifted to the Metro Conflict Defender Office, which represents co-defendants when conflict-of-interest rules mandate that a public defender can represent only one person in a case.
