Blog
Fees & Fines

by Matthew Gruchow 

The Argus Leader (VA)

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."

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Officials are acting much too slowly on a pressing problem: the epidemic of suspended or revoked driver's licenses in Wisconsin. The problem is wreaking havoc in Milwaukee County and elsewhere in the state.

By grounding workers, the problem slows the economy and exacerbates poverty. By punishing being broke more than bad driving - the single biggest reason for voided licenses is failure to pay fines - the suspensions betray American ideals. What's more, the glut of suspensions is clogging the courts and undermining respect for the law, particularly in Milwaukee's inner city, where the voided licenses are rife.

Lawmakers must end this epidemic by voiding the many laws that mandate or permit the suspension or revocation of driver's licenses for offenses unrelated to bad driving.

In Milwaukee County, suspended or revoked licenses saddle one of every eight driving-age residents, more than half of whom never held real licenses to begin with. The state voids even nonexistent licenses - which hampers getting a real one.

State lawmakers and Gov. Jim Doyle must do the following:

Opt out of a federal law that requires at least a six-month suspension of driver's licenses for all drug offenses. This law is likely making Wisconsin more dangerous than it would be otherwise by thinning the already slim chances of former drug offenders of obtaining work. According to the New York City-based Legal Action Center, 27 states already have opted out of the law.

Require the courts to grant indigent or low-income defendants reasonable installment payment plans in lieu of the automatic suspension of their licenses. The statute should permit defendants with licenses already suspended to reopen their cases and to pay by installment.

Allow state courts to do as municipal courts are now allowed to do: sentence indigent defendants to community service in non-criminal traffic offenses.

Encourage courts to collect overdue fines through holds on income tax refunds. Even poor people get such refunds, through the earned income tax credit - that is, if they're allowed to get to their jobs.

Reinstitute universal driver's education in the public schools. This will better enable poor kids to obtain driver's licenses. The program could be paid for by a surcharge on drunken driving convictions. Besides teaching motoring skills, driver's ed instills such values as the importance of maintaining a valid driver's license.

Bar courts from charging fees to reopen driver's license cases. Perhaps peg fines to ability to pay, as some other countries do.

Step up funding for agencies helping poor residents gain valid licenses, such as the Center for Driver's License Recovery and Employability, housed at the Milwaukee Area Technical College's downtown campus.

Public and private agencies should take these steps:

Agencies involved in boosting employment should milk driver's license data to identify participants who need help in getting valid licenses, as advocated by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Employment & Training Institute. The lack of such a license is the No. 1 barrier to employment, even bigger than the lack of a high school diploma or of day care.

The state Department of Workforce Development should require that Wisconsin Works agencies aggressively seek to help their clients repair any driver's license problems.

An ETI study showed that only 7% of released inmates had valid licenses, and most have license suspensions or revocations. The Department of Corrections should help its population to obtain valid driver's licenses upon release.

Local governments should take these steps:

They should forbid the use of driver's license suspension for non-payment of fines.

Yes, needy offenders must be held accountable - but through installment plans, community service or tax holds. The Milwaukee Common Council must take action, but that alone won't be enough.

Suburban police are stopping many Milwaukee residents who lack driver's licenses. So suburban governments should adopt this policy, too.

The Milwaukee Common Council should end the quaint practice of requiring residents to pay for the privilege of parking in front of their homes - a practice that disadvantages both the upscale east side and the poverty-stricken inner city, where off-street parking is relatively scarce.

Yes, such fees, and the parking tickets that result from failure to pay, are a lucrative source of city income. But they're also an unfair tax because of the burden they put on the poor. Failure to pay tickets can result in the suspension of a vehicle's registration. And driving with such a suspension can lead to the suspension of driver's licenses.

Finally, private employers have a role to play. For some reason, more and more employers seem to require a driver's license for prospective employees whose jobs don't entail driving. Employers should require a license only if it's related to the job.

Unfortunately, in the 1980s and '90s, politicians turned to the suspension of driver's licenses to punish all manner of wrongdoing not related to driving. The result was an explosion in such suspensions.

The suspensions may be achieving their intended effect in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods. But they are certainly not working in poor communities. Instead, they are blocking access to a possible escape hatch from poverty: jobs.