If you can’t afford a lawyer in Florida, as in the rest of the country, you get assigned one – often a public defender. But when public defenders go up against state attorneys, is it a fair fight? The amount of money spent by the state on each side of the ledger is anything but equal.
This year, the state appropriated about $600 million to pay for the overhead costs and salaries of nearly 9,000 employees who work in public defender’s or state attorney’s offices in Florida’s 20 judicial circuits. Each office also gets an allocation for what’s called a due process fund – that’s the pot of money used to pay for expert witnesses and DNA work and other evidentiary parts of a court case. But Broward County Public defender Howard Finkelstein says it’s nowhere near enough.
“In the 1960s during the Cold War there was a concept called mutually assured destruction. And what that meant was, we would not shoot atomic bombs at Russia, because they would shoot them at us. Well we have that same sort of rational going on here,” Finkelstein said.
Finkelstein adds because of budget constraints, the salary he can offer to the lawyers who work for him is limited. He says that’s also true for the state attorney’s office. What that means, he says, is both offices have young, inexperienced, overworked attorneys.
“That is another equation for disaster. You do not want to build a check and a balance system of oh okay, well the public defender is so in experienced and maybe incompetent, but it’s okay because the prosecutor is just as inexperienced and maybe just as incompetent.”
Finkelstein says lately, his office has been winning quite a few cases. Why? He says it’s because his young public defenders are better trained than the young state attorneys. And he says that’s because of the training program he uses in his office. Right now, about 140 lawyers work in Finkelstein’s office, but between 30 and 40 of them are going through the training program he’s created. He’s dedicated two experienced attorneys in his office to oversee them, but that presents him with a catch-22 – train the young lawyers or have the experienced ones do the time in court so there isn’t a backlog?
“It can’t all be about whittling the cases down, but having a whole bunch of people who are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but don’t know nothing about nothing.”
But Finkelstein after he’s invested time in training a young lawyer, it’s usually not long before he or she is moving to another job in the private sector with better pay. Finkelstein says his small budget means he has to keep salaries low. So besides personal fulfillment for acting as a public servant, there’s not much else to encourage his workers to stick around.
Meanwhile, nearly 400 miles away, in one of the state’s smallest judicial circuits, in Live Oak, things don’t seem all that different. Blair Payne, the public defender there employs just 31 people, but he’s got a smaller budget as a result. Which leaves him, just like Finkelstein, with lawyers just out of school. Payne says he’s doing his best to, in his words, “make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”
“And, all the sudden, they’ve been there a year and a half, two years and they’re constantly looking for other opportunities.”
But even if you get past the staffing challenges, there are the geographical ones, Just ask Live Oak State Attorney Jeff Siegmeister. He covers about one percent of the state’s population, but 7 counties.
He says his biggest problem is finding a way to put a person in each of the communities he’s supposed to serve.
“I have an attorney assigned to Lafayette County, the smallest county. However, I can’t afford to have a full-time secretary and a receptionist and an office space in Mayo to answer to those people.”
And Siegmeister says he doesn’t like the way his budget concerns affect the job he does. He says he and state attorneys around Florida are expected to raise a piece their budgets through grants, their share of the money the community takes in from traffic tickets and other sources.
“Our goal should be justice. We’re only prosecuting the people we should. We’re expending the funds when necessary. You don’t cut someone short of victims’ rights because it’s cheaper. But by the same token we’ve now put a dollar sign. We have a vested interest in raising money.”
And Siegmeister says being a good steward of the people’s money means paying attention to his own budget and to Blair Payne’s.
“He shouldn’t lose because we don’t fund his experts. I shouldn’t win or give up because it costs too much. But those are side effects of our decision. So, personally, I do consider the cost.”
And while Siegmeister says that can’t be the only factor he’s considering, it causes him to think twice about death penalty cases, which are often more expensive to try.
Typically public defender’s budgets are quite a bit smaller than state attorney’s budgets. In fact, the Florida Legislature’s Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability says public defenders got less than half the cash that state attorneys did in the current state budget. But House Criminal Justice Appropriations Chair Charles McBurney says that’s not what he’s thinking about when he helps draft the numbers.
“I will ask them what are your needs for the upcoming year and why. And then just dig down into the details and figure out why. I’m not focused in on the ratio so much as I am the functionality of what needs to be done.”
As an ex-prosecutor, McBurney says he knows from firsthand experience there’s no way the state will ever be able to compete with the salaries the private sector offers. But, he suggests some of the state’s expected surplus could be directed to public defenders and state attorneys.
Follow Regan McCarthy on twitter @Regan_McCarthy
