Getting legal representation will take longer for hundreds of criminal defendants in Missouri’s largest county now that its judicial circuit has instituted a waiting list that supporters say is the only way to reduce the massive caseloads that its overworked public defenders have been handling.
St. Louis County’s waiting list went into effect Jan. 2 following an order by the county’s presiding judge, Gloria Reno. Her review last fall found that public defenders — lawyers who are assigned to defendants who can’t afford private attorneys — were juggling far more cases than they could logically handle.
“The court finds that at present, the proposed wait list can be implemented and managed without unduly endangering community safety or causing undue disruption to the effective administration of justice in St. Louis County,” Reno’s order stated.
The list was requested by the St. Louis County public defender office and had the support of Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell, who called it in a November court filing “the least-bad alternative available.”
Stephen Reynolds, who heads the county’s public defender office, said some of his attorneys were handling up to 140 cases. All told, the county’s 21 public defenders handled about 4,100 cases during the most recent fiscal year, he said. Even homicide cases piled up — the roughly 60 pending murder cases are assigned to 10 public defenders.
The county’s plan calls for people accused of Class A or B felonies — murder, rape, armed robbery — to get attorneys immediately. Those charged with lesser crimes will wait for a lawyer “as workload permits.” The court also plans to use private attorneys who are willing to takes cases that normally go to public defenders.
Civil rights groups say the waiting list will mean that many people will linger even longer in jail before they go to trial.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri filed a lawsuit in 2017 alleging that Missouri’s heavy caseloads for public defenders violated the rights of indigent defendants. A judge has yet to sign off on a proposed settlement.
Meanwhile, attorney Tony Rothert said the ACLU is “exploring options” over St. Louis County’s decision to institute a waiting list.
“People can’t afford a lawyer, can’t afford bond to get out, and are just sitting in jail waiting, without legal representation,” Rothert said. “That is not the situation we’re supposed to have in this country.”
Missouri lawmakers approved the use of public defender waiting lists in 2013, and St. Louis County is the latest of several jurisdictions to have implemented one. Circuits covering Kansas City, Springfield and Columbia also use such lists. The Kansas City Star recently reported that more than 4,000 Missouri defendants are on waiting lists, some of them jailed for months.
The judicial circuit that includes Springfield, Missouri’s third-largest city, has used a waiting list since 2017, District Defender Rod Hackathorn said. Before the list, some of the district’s public defenders were handling more than 200 cases.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” Hackathorn said. “All of our clients are getting much better representation. More cases are going to trial, so I think it’s a good thing in that way. It’s bad, though, in that you have people waiting on an attorney. That’s never a good thing.”
The crux of the problem is a lack of funding for the Missouri system, Rothert said. Missouri ranks next-to-last, ahead of only Mississippi, in per capita spending for public defenders.
But experts say the other issue is simply the massive number of people accused of crimes. Incarcerations have risen steadily in Missouri and elsewhere for decades, though some recently elected prosecutors, including Bell, have vowed to cut back on prosecutions of low-level crimes such as marijuana possession to focus on more serious offenses.
“People are waking up, left and right, that there’s too much incarceration and that affects public defender caseloads, it affects the quality of justice,” Reynolds said.
Rothert said that if prosecutors would stop pursuing minor crimes and the Legislature would provide more funding, “then we’d have a constitutional system.”
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January 11, 2020 at 02:04AM
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St. Louis County adopts waiting list for public defenders - Missouri Lawyers Media
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