New Orleans Puts Poor on ‘Waiting List’ for Lawyers, Suit Alleges

The Orleans Indigent Defender Program office in the Criminal Court building in New Orleans in 2006. Funding for Louisiana’s public defender program relies in great part on fees assessed on traffic tickets.

A federal lawsuit filed late Thursday accused the cash-starved public defender’s office in New Orleans of placing poor people arrested in connection with crimes on a “waiting list,” leaving them in jail without access to lawyers.

The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in New Orleans by the American Civil Liberties Union, argues that Louisiana suffers from “chronic underfunding” of its public defender program, which is paid for by a system, unique in the nation, that relies in great part on fees assessed on traffic tickets. Critics call the funding source highly unreliable.

Without access to a lawyer, the lawsuit says, the plaintiffs in the suit, Darwin Yarls Jr., Leroy Shaw Jr. and Douglas Brown, who were arrested on separate felony charges, had no one to challenge the arrest and bail conditions, investigate the charges or negotiate with prosecutors.

The suit comes on the heels of declaration on Monday by the Orleans Public Defenders office that it would begin to refuse to take some felony cases — including attempted murder, some kinds of rape and armed robbery — because it was underfunded and overloaded with cases.

The lawsuit said that on July 1, the office imposed a hiring freeze because of a $1 million shortfall from the previous fiscal year and then lost a “significant number of attorneys.” That in turn, led to rising caseloads for the remaining lawyers that was “well above” standards set by the American Bar Association.

Named as defendants are Derwyn Bunton, the chief district defender for Orleans Parish, and James T. Dixon Jr., the Louisiana state public defender. But both men have said that the current funding plan is flawed.

Louisiana’s troubled public defender program was overhauled as civic reforms swept the state after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Mr. Dixon said the state established the statewide Louisiana Public Defender Board in 2007, which set more stringent standards for public defenders’ offices. These standards required more training and the hiring of more lawyers, investigators and support staff members.

“It comes at a cost,” Mr. Dixon said. “Now our fear is that we’re going to be sliding right back to where we were.”

The other glaring problem, Mr. Dixon said, is the unreliable stream of money from parking tickets. He said that the Legislature does provide a yearly appropriation, but that a fee attached to parking tickets and other violations constitutes the bulk of the funding for local indigent defense.

In 2012, Mr. Dixon said, the Legislature agreed to increase the fee that the offices receive from parking tickets and other violations to $45 from $35. But the number of tickets has plummeted since 2009.

As a result, he said, 12 of the state’s 42 public defender districts have now taken steps to deal with budget shortfalls and case overloads. The steps, which vary from office to office, include instituting waiting lists and hiring freezes, and refusing some new cases.

The reliance on fees, Mr. Bunton said on Friday morning, “is inadequate, unreliable and unstable.”

“We’re the only state in the country that tries to fund its Sixth Amendment obligation this way,” he said, “and it doesn’t work.”

In 2012, the Sixth Amendment Center noted that Louisiana’s indigent defense system was the only one in the nation that “relies primarily on locally generated, nongovernment general fund appropriations to fund the right to counsel.”