The Missouri Bar Public Defender Task Force
The Missouri Public Defender System needs help. Public defenders have too many cases to handle. To ensure that defendants receive their constitutional guarantee of effective assistance of legal counsel, the caseload must be reduced.
Today, the average caseload for a trial public defender is 305 cases. This exceeds by almost one-third the maximum caseload size of 235 cases that was determined 15 years ago by then-Governor Ashcroft and the State Public Defender Commission.
The gap between resources and demands is even more critical when you take into account that defending criminal cases is a much more complex and time-consuming activity than it was 15 years ago. The Public Defender Commission reports that some of the reasons for this are: intricate sentencing laws, bifurcated trials, complex scientific evidence, changes in immigration laws and federal sentencing rules, sexually violent predator laws and treatment courts.
In search of long-term substantive solutions, the bar created a task force to study the problem and propose and promote solutions. The concept was to get everyone to the table – public defenders, prosecutors, judges, legislators, private counsel, and the like – to examine the system and come to some consensus as to what needed to be done. That task force first met in July of 2005, and one of its first acts was to engage the services of an independent consultant to analyze Missouri's public defender system. We wanted an objective analysis, and we wanted a comparison with public defender systems in other parts of the country. The State Public Defender agreed to put all issues on the table, and to open his office up for such an analysis and the recommendations that might follow. The Spangenberg Group, the preeminent national firm in the area of indigent criminal defense, was engaged and set about the task. The report that came out of that examination starkly confirmed the cry for help from the public defender system. The system is truly in a state of crisis, on the brink of collapse. Fortunately, good news came out of that report as well – we had a very good public defender system, and we had a corps of very dedicated public defenders.
The Missouri Bar Public Defender Task Force was assigned the chore of obtaining good, verifiable information on the status of the Missouri State Public Defender System, and educating the task force so that we understand and are informed on all the issues and causes surrounding the current crisis. Having completed that task, the goal of the task force is to develop recommendations to solve what we perceive to be the problems facing the system.
The work of the task force is ongoing.