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A lawsuit over the resources for indigent criminal defense would be a “last resort,” said public defender leader Michael Barrett, who said that a scathing letter to Gov. Jay Nixon did not threaten litigation, as Missouri Lawyers Media had characterized it in an Aug. 10 story.
“That [a lawsuit] would be a terrible result. A last resort, and I don’t want it,” Barrett said in an email. “But providing indigent criminal defense to poor people is one of the few constitutional obligations that our government has, and the state has not been fulfilling it for some time.
“At some point, we look like Charlie Brown and the football thinking that this is finally the year the state is going to meet its obligation.”
Barrett, director of the Missouri State Public Defender system, said he didn’t threaten to bring a lawsuit himself in an Aug. 7 letter to Nixon that asked for $10 million more in funding.
“I just wanted to make sure the governor was aware that there were other avenues out there and those were less desirable than fixing the problems ourselves,” Barrett said in a phone interview.
In the letter, Barrett cited studies of public defender workloads in Missouri and pointed to Idaho as an example. A study of Idaho’s public defender workload was met only by the formation of a task force, he said.
“Thankfully, after several years of budgetary inaction, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit,” Barrett wrote to Nixon. “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.”
Barrett had a meeting with representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union in the last few months, he said in a phone interview. (The Kansas City Star reported about the meeting with the national office of the ACLU in a July 19 article).
ACLU of Missouri spokeswoman Alona Sistrunk said the organization had no comment.
Barrett said the meeting was informational: he told the ACLU about some of the issues in Missouri that were “very similar,” to those mentioned in the Idaho lawsuit.
Idaho State Public Defense Commission members were named with the state’s governor as defendants in that federal lawsuit, a potential class action with people who allegedly appeared before judges on criminal matters without a lawyer present.
Scott Holste, a spokesman for Nixon, said in an email that the Missouri public defender system budget increased by $2.4 million from fiscal 2010 to fiscal 2015, to $38.4 million. In the 2016 fiscal year, the expenditure level is anticipated to increase $1.1 million over 2015, he said in the email.
Barrett provided a chart that showed $1.1 million of increases since 2009 went to contract private attorneys in cases where a public defender had a conflict, and $500,000 to support staff. Combined with spending for costs such as court reporter fees and mileage, that accounted for a total of $2.1 million of the increases in fiscal 2009, 2011 and 2013. None was dedicated to adding attorneys.
