PUBLIC SAFETY

Lawsuit: Indiana county's public defender system 'set up to fail poor people'

Allen County officials are facing a civil rights lawsuit accusing them of violating poor defendants' constitutional right to adequate legal representation.

Kristine Guerra
kristine.guerra@indystar.com
Allen County officials are facing a civil rights lawsuit accusing them of violating poor defendants' constitutional rights.

Calvin Wilson was charged with battery, a Class A misdemeanor, on July 6. He was given a court-appointed attorney on the same day.

But he did not meet his public defender until after a hearing two weeks later. Since then, Wilson had only brief interactions with his attorney, and all of them happened during court hearings. Court records say his attorney has not done much work on Wilson's case, other than to request postponements.

These allegations are part of a federal lawsuit now facing Allen County officials, whom Wilson faults for a public defender system that he says violates indigent defendants' rights to an adequate legal defense.

Poor people charged with misdemeanor crimes — some carrying a punishment of up to a year in jail and thousands of dollars in fines — are often left without "legal advocacy," said David Frank, a private attorney representing Wilson. In many cases, Frank said, defendants meet their attorneys for only a few minutes in court and are almost immediately told to plead guilty to get a more lenient sentence.

"That is the extent of your representation," said Frank, of the Fort Wayne law firm Christopher C. Myers & Associates. "They rarely meet (their clients) outside the courtroom. They rarely investigate the crime. They rarely do legal research."

This lawsuit comes only a few months after a similar one was filed in Johnson County.  A group of inmates facing felony charges there say they've received little to no assistance from their court-appointed attorneys, according to court records. Some accuse the Johnson County public defenders of forcing them to accept plea deals.

Indiana inmates accuse public defenders of mishandling cases

Unlike the Johnson County case, no individual attorneys were named as defendants in the Allen County lawsuit.

The lawsuit, which seeks class-action status, was filed on Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Indiana against Allen County and governing bodies in charge of setting aside tax dollars and approving staffing levels for the public defender's office. The Allen County Council, Allen County Board of Commissioners and Allen County Public Defender Board are named as defendants.

Members of the county council did not respond to a request for comment. The board of commissioners declined to comment, citing pending litigation. The county's chief public defender, Randall Hammond, who is not a defendant in the case, did not return a call from IndyStar.

Wilson referred questions to Frank. His criminal case is scheduled for a jury trial in March.

Frank said the source of the problem isn't the attorneys, but a system that makes it physically impossible for public defenders to give their clients adequate legal services.

Allen County, Indiana's third-most-populous county, contracts private attorneys to serve as full-time and part-time public defenders. Hammond, the chief public defender, also is contracted by the county and maintains a private practice in Fort Wayne.

Part-time public defenders earn between $8,000 and $24,000 annually, regardless of how many cases they handle or how much time they devote to each case.

Only three, sometimes four, part-time public defenders handle more than 1,500 misdemeanor cases every year, court records show. One part-time public defender handles double, triple and sometimes  even quadruple the maximum number of cases allowed by state standards, court records say. This number does not include cases from their private practices.

In 2014, for instance, a public defender's misdemeanor caseload ranged from 343 to 560 cases, according to court records. The maximum should be 150 cases a year for one part-time public defender.

The situation is different in Marion County, which has a more adequately staffed public defender agency. But because of the excessive number of caseloads in Allen County, situations like Wilson's have become common, Frank said.

Indigent defendants often aren't adequately informed of their legal rights, the lawsuit says. Attorneys rarely invest more than an hour on a case, and they rarely meet with their clients outside of court, according to the 18-page complaint.

Such scenarios violate the sixth and 14th amendments of the U.S. Constitution, the complaint says.

"If you or someone in your family was charged with a crime, whether or not you think they actually did it, under our system of justice, that person is at least entitled to a fair shot," Frank said.

The lawsuit also alleges that Allen County officials have long been aware of the problem of excessive caseloads, but "have taken little or no action to properly fund, regulate, or manage public defense in Allen County."

"I'm not here to fault the attorneys or even the chief public defender," Frank said. "The problem is that the system is broken, that it's set up to fail poor people charged with crimes."

Call IndyStar reporter Kristine Guerra at (317) 444-6209. Follow her on Twitter: @kristine_guerra.