The only problem, according to criminal justice
advocates? It’s not nearly enough money.
In June, tucked into a piece of budget
legislation known as the fiscal code, lawmakers approved a $500,000
allocation to reimburse counties for costs of indigent criminal defense in
capital cases.
The money will be distributed through a grant
program administered by the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency.
Drew Crompton, a top lawyer for Senate Republicans,
said this year’s allocation is “in the spirit” of a 2018 recommendation from
the Joint State Government Commission, which found in a study of
Pennsylvania’s death penalty that the state didn’t provide sufficient resources
for poor, or indigent, defendants.
While the $500,000 grant program might not cover all
costs related to indigent defense in capital cases, Crompton said, it could
lead to larger investments in the future.
“I don’t think we were looking to offset every
dollar of capital cases,” Crompton told the Capital-Star on Monday. “We’re just
going to have to see how the program works.”
Under the sixth amendment of the U.S. Constitution,
anyone charged with a crime is entitled to a lawyer. If a defendant is too poor
to hire one, a court will assign a public defender to their case.
Pennsylvania is the only state in the country that
doesn’t allocate general funds for indigent defense, according to a 2011
study by the Joint State Government Commission. Those costs are borne
entirely by the state’s 67 counties, which each maintain their own public
defender’s office.
The system “is particularly burdensome to the poorer
counties, which must contend with the dual handicap of scant resources and high
crime rates,” the report reads.
Last year, an investigation by Keystone
Crossroads found that those problems had hardly improved. In
addition to wide spending disparities among counties, reporters found that the
caseload for public defenders had risen, even as crime has fallen across the
state.
Phyllis Subin, a former public defender who now
heads the Pennsylvania
Coalition for Justice in Philadelphia, has long called on Pennsylvania
to direct state funds to indigent defense. A $500,000 earmark for capital
murder cases, she says, isn’t nearly enough to ensure fair representation for
the state’s poor defendants.
“It’s a small and … an unrealistic appropriation,”
Subin said. “This is pretty much a drop in the bucket of what’s really needed
in terms of appropriate and systemic change.”
Marc Bookman, a lawyer and director of the Atlantic
Center for Capital Representation, an anti-death penalty legal aid group based
in Philadelphia, put it another way.
“Imagine there’s a terrible drought across
Pennsylvania and the Legislature decides to address the problem by opening up a
lemonade stand in Harrisburg,” Bookman said. “That’s what they’ve done here to
address the state-wide problem with capital punishment.”
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