Tucked away in a piece of Floyd County’s history, 10 lawyers are working to shape the future.
The Rome Judicial Circuit Public Defender Office opened for business Jan. 1, 2005. Several staff changes and growing pains were ironed out before a team of attorneys settled into the basement of the yellow-brick Floyd County administration building on East Fourth Avenue, to take on the task of defending Floyd County’s indigent population.
Just more than a year later, the newly minted Georgia Public Defender Standards Council is preparing to release its first annual report since the circuit public defender offices it created opened for business.
GPDSC Director Michael Mears summarizes the report — which he expects to be ready for release Monday — rosily, saying that even with certain “logistical problems,” the state is “pleased with the way things are going.”
But in Rome, the public defender system has replaced a functional indigent defense system designed by Floyd County officials for Floyd County.
Just before the January 2005 handover, six contracted attorneys were being paid a flat rate — $3,380 per month per contract, with two of the lawyers doubling up — to keep up with the indigent clients assigned to them on top of their own private practices.
The county also funded a juvenile-defense attorney and a case manager to serve as a liaison between attorneys and their indigent clients in jail.
Local officials are now working to uphold one-size-fits-all state regulations that work much differently.
The transition
Both Superior Court Chief Judge Walter Matthews and District Attorney Leigh Patterson have said the contract system in Floyd County operated smoothly and provided well for the needs of local defendants.
But a number of advocacy groups and elected officials, looking at Georgia’s system as a whole, saw a disparity among local, county-run programs and therefore a need to set and maintain standards for the provision of indigent defense at the state level.
The Chief Justice’s Commission on Indigent Defense was established by a Georgia Supreme Court order Dec. 27, 2000.
Their work was followed by the Georgia Indigent Defense Act, signed into law by Gov. Sonny Perdue on May 22, 2003. The new law created the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council to establish and regulate a statewide indigent defense program.
The GPDSC’s central office opened Jan. 1, 2004, Mears said. Since then, he continued, the council has started 43 circuit public defender offices and eight conflict defender offices — including one in Rome, which is used when a conflict of interest prevents a public defender from working on a case — and in the process has hired more than 750 full-time employees and taken on more than 184,000 cases.
Teddy Lee Henley, one of Floyd County’s former contract attorneys, began his work as the Rome Judicial Circuit public defender in July 2004.
He then hired his six administrative staff members, nine attorneys — Chief Assistant Public Defender Ronald Shedd, seven more attorneys to work in Superior Court and another one for the office’s juvenile court division — and two investigators.
Quality standards
All of the state’s offices are expected to adhere to certain standards in order to fulfill indigent defense reformers’ vision. Floyd County’s office, for one, aims to maintain adequate funding, quality services for its clients and expedite the local judicial process.
When the office opened, Henley said, old cases that were inherited put the total number around 4,000 — or 400 per attorney.
In an effort to control quality of representation, GPDSC caseload standards dictate that each attorney can take on a limited number of cases per year — either 150 felonies, 300 misdemeanors, 250 juvenile delinquency proceedings, 60 juvenile dependency clients, 250 civil commitment cases or 25 appeals to the state’s Supreme Court or Court of Appeals.
But according to Mears, the council is “still working on caseload standards. You can’t come up with a precise number of what a public defender’s caseload is going to be.”
GPDSC is working on a “weighted system” that would take complexity and time as factors in determining the mix of cases a given attorney can take on in a year, Mears said. “You have to look at these numbers and you have to adjust based on weights.”
For this reason, he said, consequences for not meeting standards are not really an issue. “The first thing is to find out the problem and what caused it,” he said. Before imposing any kind of sanction, he said, “we’ll try to correct it or prevent it.”
Caseloads in Floyd County were lower in the year before the switch to the public defender system, Henley said, partly because of the fact that state regulations for determining indigency are less stringent than Floyd County’s old contract system.
Previously, he said, defendants could qualify for representation if they were at 100 percent of federal poverty income levels. Now, he said, they can earn twice that much and still be eligible in felony cases.
“And we’re encouraged to err on the side of representation,” he added.
Additional resources
Henley said the system now gives him the chance to handle more cases.
Under the old system, he said, “I had a private practice, and at times there were conflicting interests.”
Now, he said, “I can devote my full attention to my (indigent) clients. ... It’s much more efficient. I’m much more prepared when I go to court.”
Henley attributes the increased efficiency to having a full office staff plus research tools, a centralized data exchange and investigators.
Public defenders also no longer need to obtain a judge’s approval for funding expert witnesses. Instead, the state has set aside money for that and has even put together a list of experts for public defenders.
Training standards for attorneys are another major resource offered by the GPDSC. Although there are no quantitative measures as to how many years of trial experience a public defender needs, Mears said, all are required to attend the same state-sponsored training sessions and are therefore all starting out on the same foot.
Shedd said he appreciates the uniformity. “It’s so much better because you have your attorneys under one roof, subjected to the same training, the same kind of rules,” he said. “There’s a bare minimum you’ve got to meet.”
Effects on ‘the system’
Having competent attorneys isn’t enough, however, as the state requires those attorneys to show they are serving clients to the best of their abilities.
One of the most important measures of good representation is how quickly cases move through the court system; and according to statistics provided by the Floyd County District Attorney’s office, the percentage of pending cases that are completed — or “disposed of” — has increased slightly between 2002 and 2005.
Approximately 44 percent of all felony cases and 53 percent of all misdemeanor cases were disposed in 2002 under the old system. In contrast, the numbers had increased to 52 percent of felonies and 70 percent of misdemeanors disposed by 2005.
Bobby Turpin, one of the new public defender’s investigators, has worked out of Floyd County Jail as a case manager under both the old contract system and the new system. Turpin, whose duties as a “middleman” between attorneys and incarcerated defendants have not changed greatly, says there has been a marked change in expediency.
The GPDSC requires that all defendants are given the opportunity to apply for Public Defender assistance within 72 hours of their arrest. Turpin’s job is to coordinate first-appearance hearings in the jail’s courtroom, at which time he informs defendants of their right to an attorney and determines whether they want to apply for indigent defense.
He gets those applications — which each require a $50 fee collected by the state — to the Public Defender Office, which then follows up with documentation requests to confirm qualification.
If a defendant does not decide immediately to apply for assistance, Turpin said, he or she can do so later — even from a jail cell — by writing him a request. Inmates can communicate any concerns or questions, in fact, and those that Turpin cannot answer he is able to deliver to the appropriate attorney’s office.
“People have a way to communicate if they want — to gripe, complain or request anything; they have someone to talk to,” he said.
Turpin says he receives an average of 100 letters per day, many of which are bond reduction requests. “Some days we’re overwhelmed and some days we’re not, but we always get an answer,” he said.
An increased number of public defenders to work with and an established procedure make the job possible, Turpin said. “We’re all joined together and we’ve got procedures and we’re all moving in the same direction now,” he said.
