MLM Counties News. Notices. Need-to-know Information.
The director of the state’s public defender system Friday sent a scathing letter to Gov. Jay Nixon demanding $10 million in a supplemental budget and threatening litigation.
Director Michael Barrett on July 31 had called for an unspecified increase in funding after a U.S. Department of Justice report said a lack of representation for children factored in constitutional due process problems at St. Louis County Family Court.
The report said the court often deprives children of constitutional rights and discriminates against black children in delinquency proceedings. A summary cited a “staggering caseload of the sole public defender.”
“This finding cannot come as a shock,” Barrett said in the letter, which was first reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “For years, the Missouri State Public Defender (MSPD) has warned that the rights of poor Missourians are being violated throughout the state because MSPD’s resources are too few and the caseloads too high.”
A spokesman for Nixon did not immediately return a phone call.
A 2014 American Bar Association-commissioned study showed the resource issue was a statewide issue, Barrett said in the letter, which also cited a 2013 National Juvenile Defender Center report that he said found the state’s indigent defense system was in crisis.
Nixon’s office not only failed to act to respond to the reports, it made matters worse, Barrett said, referring to Nixon’s previous veto of $3.5 million in funding. After the release of the ABA study, the Legislature approved the money to contract to private attorneys for so-called “conflict-cases,” those that involve two clients in the same district. Lawmakers overrode the veto, but the governor then withheld the money and proposed reducing the system’s 2016 funding by the same amount to make the withholding permanent.
“Candidly, your administration’s lack of effort to address the problem coupled with the steps that you have personally taken to maintain the status quo leaves the impression that you are not so much uninformed as you are unconcerned,” wrote Barrett, who served as deputy general counsel for Nixon’s office before moving to the public defender system.
A study of Idaho’s public defender workload was met by the formation of a task force but no budget action, Barrett said.
“Thankfully, after several years of budgetary inaction, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit,” Barrett wrote. “It is my strong preference that this ongoing and egregious matter is resolved in traditional fashion, without having to resort to the legal wrangling that will only conclude what the DOJ and ABA have told us – that the state is not meeting its obligations to its citizens under the U.S. and Missouri Constitutions.”
