First, from the Miami Herald:
I bolded that last bit because it strikes me, with all respect to Senator Crist, as quite an insult to the private attorneys who handled cases in the past. It comes across to me as saying that 90% of cases involving the defense of the indigent really ought to be handled by only slightly-trained monkeys. And what about dependency cases specifically? Do they, by definition, need only unsophisticated legal non-talent, as a matter of state legislative policy?Less than two months before it's expected to start accepting cases, a new state legal agency for the poor has no office space in Broward and Miami-Dade counties.
On Tuesday, Broward County commissioners will decide whether to provide free space to the fledgling office. The likely answer: No way.
The Miami-Dade branch is a little further along, but it still has about two dozen positions to fill and it also has not moved into a permanent space....
For now, employees of the new state agency for Miami-Dade are working out of the private office of Joe George, an attorney hired to oversee Miami-Dade and Monroe counties.George said he has hired 15 employees and will hire up to 30 more. His office has taken two cases so far.
In Broward, only three of 28 positions have been filled. But Philip Massa, who is overseeing the new office in Broward, said it will be ready to start taking cases later this year or early next year....
''Someone who says the quality of service is going down is absolutely wrong,'' Crist said. ``The 10 percent that will require sophisticated legal talent will get it. The talent may not necessarily be on staff.''
This blog, and its parent site DependencyDefense.com, only exist because of the notion that not having full-time experienced and capable defense attorneys in dependency case not only leads to more injustice, but also increased misery among children who could have been kept at home, and vastly (really, this can barely be understated) increased costs in all other areas of what I think of as the Child Abuse Industry (more on that in a later post).
In another article from the Daily Business Review, we read (excerpted):
The state’s new Office of Criminal Conflict and Civil Regional Counsel in Miami lost his first appeal last week — but it wasn’t in court. Miami-Dade County denied his request for office space...Why does this article contradict the other one about how many attorneys have been hired so far? Probably because of something like this:
According to Philip Massa, the fourth region’s Conflict Counsel director, Broward County hasn’t committed office space either, although Palm Beach County did make a commitment...
[Jeffrey] Lewis said Escambia County already has provided him with a 3,500-square-foot office, but noted that finding office space in the remaining parts of his massive region — in cities such as Jacksonville — will likely be a challenge...
[D]irectors of the five regional offices have made little headway in attracting lawyers willing to take them up on a base salary that by statute is less than the $80,000 each director makes. Statewide, there are only about a half dozen attorneys who have agreed to work for the new office, which is supposed to have a support staff of 384 lawyers and clerical employees.
New directors George, Jackson Flyte and Jeffrey Deen did not return repeated calls seeking comment.I want to touch on a little bit more from the first article. I didn't quote it in the portion above.
For several years, private attorneys have been hired to handle cases in which the county public defender has a conflict of interest.
But that led to problems: Attorneys had a financial incentive to quickly settle cases, and some judges would dole out cases to their favorite attorneys.
Even a rotating appointment system in Broward was questionable because some judges would skip over attorneys they didn't know or trust.
''The costs for providing these services were growing out of control,'' said state Sen. Victor Crist, a Tampa Republican who pushed to create the new office.
This reinforces one thing that is clear to most of us in the dependency defense community (such as it is): the switch to the Regional Counsel system is all about money. There is nothing wrong at all about our elected representatives being fiscally prudent. My problem is that no one, certainly not Senator Crist, can speak in an affirmative and positive manner about how, exactly, this system is going to even address, much less solve, the problem of delivering quality and effective legal services to poor parents who have had their children removed by the State. I've been listening for it, and I haven't heard it.
Finally, about that bolded portion there. That may have been the case down in Broward -- I don't have enough good information about that -- but it was certainly not the case in the rest of the State. Locally, we dependency defenders were subjected to serial ISC meetings in which we were told rather clearly that our old system had to be changed because it encouraged attorneys to spend too much time on their cases. Certain attorneys from DCF delighted in the changes that the local ISC made last year specifically because it we defense attorneys would now have a very big incentive to settle (in dependency cases settling most often means simply doing everything that DCF asks you to do without one piece of evidence ever being presented). They were gleeful about how sticking it to defense attorneys would have that precise, and from their point of view, desirable effect.
Now that the new system's flaws are showing to more people, that old position is being widely forgotten, even as Senator Crist cavalierly states that 90% of cases need no sophisticated legal talent. The article above cites the "settling too quickly" problem as the reason for destroying the system under which attorneys had been accused of spending too much effort on their cases, leading to the Regional Counsels, under which all signs point to an absolutely desperate need to settle as many cases as possible as quickly as possible because of lack of manpower.
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