Evidence of that seems to be somewhat lacking down here at the courtroom level. Still, we read:
Even with a pending legal challenge, Florida’s new Criminal Conflict and Civil Regional Counsels are pushing ahead to begin their operations and in some cases have begun taking conflict cases from public defenders.
“We’ve got our footing, we’ve got real direction and now that we’ve started taking cases. That’s started to level us out. I’m real pleased with how it’s going and so are the judges,” said Jeffrey Deen, the CCCRC for the circuits covered by the Fifth District Court of Appeal, of what has been a hectic late summer and fall....
As for "so are the judges", our local dependency judges still haven't met with the Regional counsel, and the dependency court coordinator still has no idea whether or not to assign rotation attorneys for January 2d.
Dependency defense still falls by the wayside. If you read the entire linked article, you get the impression that even if the FACDL lawsuit fails, it is just fine that criminal conflicts will continue to operate under the old system, while the new $50 million dollar system which is already paying salaries to attorneys who are not doing anything (at least from our experience locally) will take over dependency and guardianship cases at a bloated cost and with what seems to be no particular desire to meet the statutory mandate that parents be represented by counsel and able to present evidence at each stage of a dependency case, including the initial shelter hearing.
At least one of the Regional Counsels seems to be taking the position that, as the public servant tasked with providing defensive legal services to the indigent, we should take comfort that some counties are not in the practice of providing counsel as required by law
Just today, this very day, I had a shelter review hearing, after a weekend shelter hearing in which a judge placed three children in foster care without either the parents or their attorneys being heard. Today, after two solid hours of in-court litigation, two of the children were returned to the parents and the third was placed temporarily with a grandmother pending a more formal hearing. In the meantime the parents can have unsupervised contact.
That is a far cry, both in terms of the emotional damage done to the kids by being separated and placed in foster care, and in terms of the cost to Florida's taxpayers of having to pay foster parents and others, from what was the ultimate outcome. The difference was experienced and prepared dependency defense attorneys who were on the spot at the shelter review hearing.
I don't get the impression from the Florida Bar News article linked above that any of the Regional Counsels are making it a priority to provide that defensive firewall at shelter hearings, and I don't get the impression from the lack of responses to my inquiries and from what I hear from local court personnel that the Regional Counsels "get" that complying with that statutory duty actually saves taxpayer money over time as well as avoiding worlds of hurt to kids and parents from time to time.
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