Defense Attorneys Fear Shift To Public System
Worcester lawyer Sean McGinty is worried.
For almost 21 years, he’s defended people accused of criminal offenses who couldn’t afford to pay for a lawyer. Doing that work represents about 80 percent of what he does. But a new proposal by Gov. Deval Patrick would move the job of defending the indigent away from private bar advocates like McGinty to a new organization of state-employed public defenders.
“I’d have a lot of trouble paying my bills,” said McGinty, who is president of the Bar Advocates of Worcester County.
Patrick’s office proposed the change as a cost-cutting initiative, arguing that it would save the state $45 million a year. The proposal would also convert the existing Committee for Public Counsel Services, which falls under the judicial branch of government, to a new Department of Public Counsel Services, under the executive branch.
But local lawyers who handle public defense work say the proposal is a threat not only to their practices but also to the quality of representation clients receive.
Discount Rate
McGinty said he doesn’t get rich doing bar advocate work. The job pays $50 an hour for cases in district court and $60 an hour in superior court, with a rate of $100 for a small percentage of cases including murders.
With no secretary or support staff, McGinty says he does alright, though his stepson’s tuition bill has been a bit of a blow to his budget.
Richard Eustis, a supervising attorney for the Bar Advocates of Worcester County who has a practice in Southborough, said most lawyers who work as bar advocates do it despite the pay level. He said many lawyers can bill as much as $300 an hour if they stick to clients who pay out of their own pockets.
“Most of our panel members are motivated by a strong interest in doing public service work serving the indigent, the belief that the constitutional right to counsel that rich and poor are afforded is an important right,” he said.
Eustis also said it’s hard to see how Patrick’s proposal would save the state money. Right now, less than 10 percent of the lawyers who defend poor clients are state employees. The vast majority of the defense work is done by about 3,000 private lawyers across the state. Considering the rates paid to those lawyers, Eustis said, the state would be hard-pressed to pay for staff lawyers’ salaries, pensions, office space and other expenses out of the same pool of money while also saving $45 million, as Patrick predicts.
“His suggestion that this will save money for the state in the long run is simply not credible,” Eustis said.
He said the likely outcomes are that either the state would have to hire more lawyers than it’s budgeting for, or the staff lawyers would end up carrying too many cases and be unable to perform their jobs well for any client.
Legal Projections
But Jay Gonzalez, Patrick’s secretary of administration and finance, said the administration developed a conservative plan assuming lawyers’ caseloads would be only 80 percent of the maximum suggested by the American Bar Association and the U.S. Justice Department and including all the expenses beyond salary that the state would have to pay. The calculations anticipate that the staff lawyers’ salaries would be $45,000 per year, the average for the 200 public defenders currently working directly for the state.
Gonzalez said the administration numbers support adding 1,000 new lawyers to the state payroll.
In response to critics who say contracting the legal services saves money, Gonzalez said that hasn’t been the state’s experience.
“They have not, apparently done the same cost analysis that we have,” he said.
While the state’s 3,000 private indigent counsel lawyers generally work for the state only part time and have relatively low billing rates for the work, Gonzalez said more than half of them end up billing more in a year than the state pays for the average full-time public defender.
Jim Gribouski, of Glickman, Sugarman, Kneeland & Gribouski in Worcester, said he handles only murder cases through the public counsel system. The $100 per hour the state pays for that work is a significant drop down from his usual hourly rate of $275, and he said he considers it somewhat pro bono work.
“This, I guess, is my way of giving back,” he said.
McGinty said if the governor’s proposal went through, clients could lose the experienced lawyers they may sometimes be assigned under the current system.
“Who’s going to take those jobs?” McGinty said. “People with little or no experience.”
Eustis said some bar advocates might be willing to move over to the public system, but he hasn’t spoken to any who would consider that course. Instead, he said, most say they would try to shift their practice to other areas or even leave the legal field altogether.
“In a legal market which is already saturated with attorneys, and in an economy in which many people are already suffering, the thought of 3,000 bar advocates across the state trying to make a shift in their practice — it’s not encouraging,” he said.
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments