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: What the Judge Ate for Breakfast

County public defender?s office stops taking cases

By Ron Sylvester

UPDATED: With judge’s plan to appoint private attorneys and quotes from the judge.

The Sedgwick County Regional Public Defenders office has stopped taking cases for at least two weeks, its chief said this morning.

“We have an obligation to offer ethical representation, and we just can’t keep going on like we’re have been,” Steve Osburn said. “We just had to stop the bleeding.”

Update 1: Judge Eric Yost, who presides over the criminal division of Sedgwick County District Court, said he will appoint private attorneys to fill the void and expects them to be paid by the state.

“We have an obligation under the law to make sure everyone has legal representation, and we need to do everything we can to provide that,” Yost said.

Osburn’s office lost two lawyers, who went to work for the district attorney’s office at the first of the month, and he learned last week that there wasn’t enough money to replace them. Two other attorneys are on extended medical leave. That came on top of a caseload that has been increasing for three years. Public defenders in Wichita average nearly 200 cases apiece every year. There are currently 22 attorneys in the office.

“We are hoping for permission to fill the vacancies with the reduced budget,” said Pat Scalia, director of the state’s Board of Indigent Defense Services.

This is the first time the Wichita office has had to stop accepting cases, Scalia said, although she said it has happened in other offices throughout the state.

Update 2: Yost said he will assign cases to lawyers who have volunteered to take court-appointed clients.

“But their volume is about to increase,” the judge said.

Meanwhile, judges in Sedgwick County district court are struggling to find representation for people charged with crimes who can’t afford attorneys, as required by law.

“We don’t have an answer,” said Judge Eric Yost, presiding judge of the criminal division, after getting word of the shut-down late Friday afternoon. “We don’t know what we’re going to do.”

Full post as published by What the Judge Ate for Breakfast on December 08, 2008 (boomark / email).