Reasonable Doubt: Can the Bexar County Public Defender’s Office be saved?

[Disir]

Moore emphatically believes that the County’s focus is on the bottom line, and her non-attorney overseers were more concerned with numbers rather than quality of defense. “We were having to convince non-lawyers of the rule of law and the need for public defenders,” she continued, adding “Bexar County doesn’t care about the rights of the accused because they’re politically powerless.”

Rocky Glass, a public defender hired by Moore who now heads up the Ft. Bend County Public Defender’s Office, affirmed this perspective. He started with the Bexar County office in late 2007 and stayed for two years. “They wanted numbers, ‘how can we quantify the work that you do?’” Glass said via phone in late May. “Appeals are very difficult to quantify … The Commissioners Court was thinking that the public defenders office saves money, but it doesn’t particularly save money with the appellate office … Indigent defense doesn’t necessarily mean cheap defense.” He characterized his sense of the County’s perspective as: “Poor people should just get the cheapest defense possible.”

Glass left the office to take the job in Ft. Bend. “I saw the writing on the wall,” he said, “there was all this politics going on, certain people didn’t like Angela personally … more and more people were coming to me to get things done; they were going around her and I thought that was kind of sneaky and ridiculous.”

Unmoored, the remaining public defenders continued to flounder in a sea of office politics. Dulany only briefly crossed paths with Lori Miller, the senior assistant appellate public defender (both Dulany and Robbins are assistant appellate public defenders). She left almost exactly two years after Moore, via a long, angry letter circulated to county employees. It’s referred to by both her supporters and detractors as “Lori’s Manifesto.”

Miller, who could not be reached for comment, was another original member of the Public Defender’s Office. Her manifesto states “I have grave concerns that the office is not in compliance with the laws of the State, or the framework under which the County officials originally established the Public Defender’s Office; and that, due to the interference of county middle-management, the attorneys in the Office are being forced into a situation where we must choose between acquiescing to the demands of the Judicial Services Department administrators, in violation of our ethical duties as attorneys, or face the prospect of the office being closed down and losing our jobs…”


...In an interview, Seth Mitchell, assistant to the County Manager, said of these general complaints, “I think it’s the approach that they bring to their job. If they’re looking to be offended, they’ll be offended,” and indicated that likely in every county department one could find a few disgruntled employees. When told that there were other County employees outside of the Public Defender’s Office who were similarly concerned, he said that it’s also not hard to find County employees who take issue at how another department is being run.

...Where Bexar County stands apart from every other public defender’s office is that it is, according to a recent survey completed by the Texas Indigent Defense Commission, the only one that does not report to the Commissioners Court directly and is not considered a “stand-alone” office. It is also the only office not currently headed by an attorney, whether in the chief public defender position or some comparable supervisory role.

...Perhaps here it’s worth pausing to reflect on the basic premise of the American criminal justice system: you are innocent until proven guilty, and defendants are entitled to a fair trial, not just a really cheap trial or a quick plea bargain. When one part of that system breaks down, it tilts the scales of justice. When at least 60 percent of all defendants are potentially subject to representation that doesn’t follow state law, amid the protests of attorneys and judges alike, the scales seem in danger of becoming profoundly out-of-whack. As Bunin noted, “You can’t really put a price on justice, which is what everybody wants.”

Bexar County owes it to justice to get it right this time.

Reasonable Doubt: Can the Bexar County Public Defender?s Office be saved? - News and Politics - San Antonio Current

This is a really long read but it is worth it.