La. Senate to Consider Indigent Defender Overhaul

    May 20, 2007
    Associated Press
    By Doug Simpson

    BATON ROUGE, La. -- Louisiana's Legislature, long attacked for ignoring deep-rooted flaws in the state's system of giving legal help to penniless criminal defendants, is finally considering an overhaul.

    Rep. Danny Martiny, chair of the House Criminal Justice Committee, is sponsor of a book-length bill that would create a new state board to take responsibility from the state's local indigent defender offices, which are now overseen by 41 independent boards around the state.

    Critics say the system is possibly unconstitutional, among the country's worst, and suffers from a lack of oversight over public defenders and poor tracking of their caseloads. Prosecutors, defense lawyers, judges and public defenders themselves have long agreed that the system is broken, but they disagreed over how to fix it.

    "We've been bickering over how this thing could be fixed for the last 15 years," said Walter Sanchez, a Lake Charles lawyer who was involved in the research and discussion that led to Martiny's bill.

    Martiny's measure would put Louisiana in line with what the American Bar Association considers 10 provisions of a functioning indigent defender system.

    The bill's backers say one key change would be imposing a state system of accountability over public defenders _ something the current system lacks entirely, with public defenders facing no oversight from the state. The measure would create the Louisiana Public Defender Board and give it power to monitor public defenders' performance and workload, and fire those who fail to meet its standards.

    Four of the board's 15 members would be legal experts from the law schools at LSU, Loyola, Southern and Tulane universities. Some will be picked by the governor, others by the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the House speaker, Senate president, president of the Louisiana Bar Association and other groups.

    Martiny, R-Kenner, has met resistance from inside his home parish of Jefferson, where the current public defenders are considered well supervised and the system is working well. All Jefferson Parish judges have opposed the bill, Sanchez said.

    But Sanchez said opponents should be placated by new provisions in the bill making clear that well-performing public defenders would not face penalties.

    "I think the resistance mainly comes from people who haven't read the bill," Sanchez said.

    The measure easily passed the House with some recognition from lawmakers that the Louisiana Supreme Court was correct when it attacked the Legislature for not fixing the way the state provides lawyers to indigent defendants. In a 2005 ruling, the high court noted that the state Constitution says the Legislature is responsible for providing a system to represent the poor in court, and added: "The Legislature may be in breach of that duty."

    The bill now awaits debate in a Senate committee.



National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL)
1660 L St., NW, 12th Floor, Washington, DC 20036
(202) 872-8600 • Fax (202) 872-8690 • assist@nacdl.org