Just passing it on

Some of this news article is not quite accurate, but it's something of interest anyway. An excerpt, if you don't want to hit the link and read the whole thing:

The newly created "conflict counsel" system, which is intended to serve as a second public defender's system in Florida, is unconstitutional and the conflict counsels and their lawyers should stop representing clients, a circuit judge ruled Thursday afternoon. The ruling could halt many criminal cases, as criminal defendants who had conflict counsel lawyers assigned to them would no longer have legal representation.

The system was set up this year by the Florida Legislature as a way to save money. Legislators said it cost too much to operate the previous system of paying private lawyers to represent indigent defendants when the public defender had a conflict in the cases.

The conflict counsel office represents defendants in cases where the Public Defender's Office would have a conflict of interest, such as when two or more people are charged in a case and the public defender represents one of them.

The state Attorney General immediately appealed Thursday's ruling, and the appeal creates an automatic stay. That means the conflict counsels and their lawyers can continue to represent clients, said Sandi Copes, press secretary for the attorney general.

There are five regional conflict counsels who are appointed by the governor for a term of four years and who oversee a staff of lawyers in a district that is the same area as the five district courts of appeal.

My prediction: the legislature will dig in its heels and bolster the law it only "reluctantly" passed, and within a year the system will cost at least twice as much as the worst projections under the old system, which actually had the feature of people getting quality representation on the cheap.

Bureaucracies never die, do they?