Public defenders in Kansas face borderline unethical caseloads, lower pay rates than peers and now the possibility of even less funding to address attorney shortages, reported News from the States.
Heather Cessna, executive director of the Kansas Board of
Indigents’ Defense Services, or BIDS, painted a picture for the Senate
Judiciary Committee at its first meeting Tuesday of a state struggling to keep
up with high case volumes, an aging workforce and economic pressures.
BIDS requested an additional $10 million from the Legislature
this year to adequately compensate public defenders to avoid turnover and hire
more lawyers to allow for ethical caseloads.
Instead, the special legislative budget committee wants to
cut $7 million from the BIDS budget, according to House Bill 2007, which
was introduced Monday and sponsored by committee chairman Rep. Troy
Waymaster, R-Bunker Hill.
Ultimately, Kansas does not have enough “experienced,
qualified and available” attorneys willing to take on BIDS cases, Cessna told
lawmakers. About 84% of adult criminal cases in Kansas are BIDS cases.
Clients and lawyers alike are frustrated, Cessna said, “and
I field those phone calls daily.”
In Sedgwick County, home to Wichita, attorneys from outside
the county are called to travel in to represent indigent defendants. In Shawnee
County, where BIDS has two offices, attorneys spent 2024 refusing to take on
more cases to maintain professional and ethical caseload levels. In Johnson
County, public defenders are inundated with cases, even with a fully staffed
public defender’s office and a back-up cache of private attorneys, Cessna said.
“In counties with fewer attorneys, that only gets worse,”
she said.
A judge appoints a public defender to a criminal case when a
defendant cannot afford representation. It’s a right embedded in the U.S.
Constitution, and when that right is in jeopardy due to attorney shortages,
like those in Kansas and jurisdictions across the country, the consequences are
serious, Cessna said.
Without an attorney, cases are delayed. Evidence can be
lost.
“If you have a constitutional requirement to have an
attorney representing these people, and you don’t have an attorney standing in
that courtroom next to that person, then that case has to get dismissed,”
Cessna said.
More than half of Kansas counties have 10 or fewer lawyers
and even fewer who specialize in criminal defense. One-third of lawyers in
Kansas are over the older than 60, signaling a swath of soon-to-be
retirees.
Freshman Republican Sen. TJ Rose, an insurance agent from
Olathe, wondered if compensating private attorneys who take on public defense
cases at a rate of $250 an hour instead of $120 an hour would alleviate the
shortage.
Steve Leben, a retired Kansas Court of Appeals judge and a
University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law professor, wrote Monday on social media platform
X that higher compensation rates for private attorneys could “lessen or
eliminate” the shortage.
“But the most effective solution economically and for
professional representation is properly funding public defenders,” he said.
Cessna said private attorneys are also subject to the same
ethical caseload standards as public defenders, and there isn’t the same
oversight and quality control capabilities as with direct employees.
Kansas remains in a better position than some other states,
which have seen courts forced to dismiss criminal cases due to a lack of
attorneys and, therefore, an inability to fulfill constitutional
obligations.
Still, challenges persist.
“There is no question” cutting BIDS’ funding will escalate a
situation that has already reached a crisis point, Cessna told Kansas
Reflector.
“I think we’re going to have difficulty paying bills,” she
said.
Kansas Supreme Court Chief Justice Luckert told reporters
Wednesday that the proposed $7 million budget cut would be “amazingly
significant.”
“The result of that is that it slows processing cases,”
Luckert said. “Basically, what we have to do is wait. There are caps on the
number of cases that an attorney can take to be able to be effective in those
cases. If they’ve reached those caps, the court just has to wait until the
attorneys are able to help with that.
“And that means, oftentimes, people sitting in jail for
undue amounts of time.”
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