Legal Malpractice

Legal Malpractice Case against your Public Defender

By (Andrew Lavoott Bluestone)

The poor deserve an adequate criminal defense as much as anyone else.  While everyone gets an attorney when arrested, even if they cannot afford one, publicly funded legal Aid or 18b attorneys don't always get sufficient funding to handle large caseloads/  Who suffers? 

Here is a case from Seattle in which an innocent man sat in jail for months after his accuser recanted.  Apparently, [we really don't have the details] his publicly funded public defender did nothing to handle his case.  The Seattle Times reports: "A Grant County man has been awarded $3 million for spending months in jail because of poor work by his public defender.

Felipe G. Vargas was awarded more than $3 million payable by his public defender by a U.S. District Court jury in Spokane after spending more than seven months in the Grant County Jail, falsely accused of child molestation.

Grant County public defender Thomas Earl allegedly pocketed much of his fee for representing Vargas, instead of spending it to mount an adequate defense, the jury decided. Vargas' alleged victim recanted three days after Vargas was arrested in November 2003, but authorities took no steps to free Vargas from jail."

The Washington Injury Blog reports: "Vargas was arrested and placed in jail in November 2003 where he remained for seven months although his accuser recanted three days later. Vargas' court-appointed attorney was Grant County Public Defender Thomas Earl. Earl was working under a contract which paid him $500,000 annually. In finding Earl negligent in his representation of Vargas, the court heard testimony that Earl did not hire experts and investigators to clear Vargas, in part because of his case load, but also because he had a financial incentive not to spend money on services to defend Vargas. Earl was eventually disbarred.

A legal ethics professor at Seattle University, John Strait, testified in the trial calling flat fee contracts, "illegal and unethical for any attorney to enter into." Court watchers across Washington State believe that flat fee contracts for people needing court-appointed lawyers does not provide indigents a fair representation because defenders like Earl may not properly defend a client due to their own profit motive. In September, the Washington State Supreme Court barred any Washington lawyer from working under a contract such as Earl's."

Full post as published by New York Attorney Malpractice Blog on February 02, 2009 (boomark / email).