It's bound to happen

I keep being told that our local Regional Counsel tells his employees that he expects the legislature to further cut the flat rates paid to court appointed attorneys. I don't know if that's true, but this article out of Sarasota provides further evidence that the system is already past the breaking point (excerpt follows):

"Criminal defense attorney Joe Campoli is stuck with a case that will pay him around $5 an hour for three months.

The state of Florida never paid handsomely for lawyers who defend poor people accused of crimes, but Campoli says the state's low fee and his office overhead mean he will lose money.

Campoli is the first to challenge Florida's new system for compensating private attorneys who do defense work for the state of Florida, saying it would ruin his law practice.

"I'm not sure I could recover," Campoli testified Thursday.

Ultimately, 12th Circuit Chief Judge Lee Haworth will have to make a ruling that weighs the rights of a 16-year-old defendant to have a competent attorney against those of Campoli, who has practiced law for 12 years.

The new system offers a flat fee to private attorneys for representing criminal cases where the public defender cannot because of a conflict.

Johnny Vazquez's case in Manatee County is a rare situation. There are 14 co-defendants, and the gang case has complicated racketeering charges, with more than 300 witnesses and piles of documents."

With 14 co-defendants, assuming that there is a conflict between each, that leaves 12 defendants left after the PD and the RC get theirs. Are we to gather from this that there are not 12 attorneys willingly on the rotation list to handle these cases?

Bottom line: Even when and if the RCs get fully operational, private attorneys available for appointment at a reasonable rate will be needed, period. There is not a way around that, and the sooner we different tribes in the defense field accept that and treat delivery of legal services to the indigent as a system, rather than a collection of systems, the better. If that seems vague, I mean only that private counsel, albeit less of them perhaps than there were before, are part of the solution, and not part of an "us vs. them" kind of problem, and solutions ought to be appreciated and funded.