Public Defenders Price Tag: $2.6M: Counties Must Pay When Clients Can’t
by Matthew Gruchow
Court-appointed lawyers and public defenders are expensive, and counties - and their taxpayers - are picking up most of the costs when clients fail to meet their financial obligations.
Supplying defendants with their Constitutional right to a lawyer cost Minnehaha and Lincoln counties more than $2.6 million last fiscal year. Of that, only a little more than $830,000 was recovered from the clients represented. Those two counties make up the Second Judicial District.
As both Minnehaha and Lincoln counties see their populations grow, they will see more crimes, more court costs and more lawyer fees, and they eventually will need to make tough budget decisions, Lincoln County Commissioner Jim Schmidt said.
"The trickle-down effect is that you cut services," he said. "Out of whose cookie jar do you take to meet that obligation? And that will be a very, very difficult decision to prioritize that."
The rate of recovery in 2006 wasn't any better than last year. The Second Judicial District reported $2.42 million in court-appointed attorney expenses, according to the Unified Judicial System reports. That year, they collected $692,493, or about 28 percent, of that balance.
There are few tools available to county governments to collect outstanding lawyer fees.
Schmidt and Minnehaha County Commissioner Jeff Barth said the primary way the counties collect legal fees is by a lien on any property owned by a client. But payments on those liens either do not come or trickle in over years, they said.
"If you have property, we put a lien on your property, and we ask that you pay it, but we don't collect very much," Barth said.
The issue is complicated by the economic status of those who often use public-defender services, Barth said.
"We do have a collections agency, and sometimes they do go to court, but a lot of these people don't have anything," Barth said. "There's nothing you can do."
In Minnehaha County, Barth said the commission will review the liens, reduce some of their amounts or forgive them entirely.
More aggressive steps to collect legal fees from clients could make the problem worse, Schmidt said. The repayment of lawyer fees often is a condition of probation or sentencing, and failure to pay can bring clients into court again, where they again must rely on a court-appointed lawyer.
"We wouldn't want to put them back into the position to be back in trouble, back into court, because of court costs," he said.
Two private lawyers
The problem of uncollected attorney fees appears to have little effect on operations within public defenders' offices.
In Lincoln County, which contracts with two private lawyers for public defender cases, both are paid a flat rate each month for their services, regardless of how many hours they work.
For now, that is a cost-savings for county taxpayers, said Bill Golden, one of Lincoln County's public defenders.
"I take the risk that over the next two years, it's going to be real, real busy," he said. "If it slows down, then that would be the county's risk."
Phillip Peterson, the other lawyer on contract with Lincoln County, said how much a county can recover in legal fees potentially affects him only at contract renegotiations.
"The higher the rate of reimbursement, the better the county commissioners feel about it if I'm asking for a raise," he said.
So far, unpaid legal fees have not affected contract negotiations, Peterson said.
The Minnehaha County Public Defender's Office declined to comment for this story.
Rising workload
Golden and Peterson said the chief complication between their duties as public defenders and the county's payment for their services is workload. It keeps going up.
Peterson said his caseload has quadrupled since he began public-defender duties in 2000. That sort of increase in caseload requires more money to manage, to where it could become too burdensome on county governments, he said.
"And attorneys are going to get out of it, because there's more and more caseload, and the pay doesn't keep up with the caseload," he said.
In Lincoln County, that could become a big problem in the next decade, he said.
Schmidt said he sees Lincoln County forced to create a full-time public defender's office in five to seven years.
But with the option of more aggressive bill collection all but ruled out, county governments can only look for new revenue streams to keep up with the financial obligations of those growing court systems, Barth and Schmidt said. That could include cutting programs, reducing the budgets of other agencies and increasing property taxes, they said.
"But to use more aggressive collecting, if you will, just won't work," Schmidt said. "It's too hard to squeeze any more money out of these people, because it's simply not there."