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Court Rules State Not Liable

To Pay For Legal Help For

Poor

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The Mississippi Supreme Court has ruled that the state is not obligated to help counties pay for hiring lawyers for poor criminal defendants.

The court, in a 6-2 decision Thursday, sided with Circuit Judge Ann Lamar in a 2003 case out of Quitman County.

In her November 2003 decision, Lamar said she would not declare unconstitutional a state law requiring local governments to pay for indigent defense.

Quitman County sued the state in 1999 after it was forced to borrow several hundred thousand dollars in the early 1990s to defend two men convicted of killing members of a local family.

Attorneys argued that having the counties pay for their own indigent defense systems was a violation of the state's constitutional duty.

Lamar said Quitman County never proved their main points: that the county's two part-time public defenders were overburdened and gave their clients poor representation because of a bad system.

Quitman County argued the Legislature's failure to fund a statewide public defender program violated the U.S. Constitution by not providing defendants representation.

In 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Clarence Earl Gideon that the right to counsel in criminal cases was necessary to achieve a fair system of justice.

In his initial trial, Gideon represented himself because he could not afford an attorney. After his conviction was overturned, he was retried and his appointed attorney discovered new witnesses and won an acquittal.

In 2004, 22 states directly funded indigent defense services, according to The National Law Journal. However, the Mississippi attorney general's office argued that Quitman County was not seeking relief for poor defendants but relief for its taxpayers.

The Supreme Court on Thursday said part of the expense to the counties was alleviated when the Office of Post-Conviction Counsel and the Office of Capital Defense Counsel were created in 2000.

A 2005 law created the Office of Indigent Appeals, which now handles appeals for indigent defendants convicted of non-capital crimes.

Chief Justice Jim Smith, writing Thursday for the court, said if Quitman County officials had been concerned about indigent defense they would have budgeted more for it.

He said the county officials also failed to prove that county-based indigent defense systems have resulted in widespread ineffective assistance of counsel.

"The county urges this court to implement a remedy that falls within the purview of the Legislature instead of the judiciary,'' Smith wrote.

Smith said court records showed Quitman County spends less than 1 percent of the county budget on indigent defense, $38,352 per year.

"This expenditure has remained the same since 2000,'' Smith wrote. "Testimony revealed that the county's deficit was mainly a result of spending in the area of solid waste, other unfunded mandates, natural disasters, and economic development bonds that were not being repaid.

"While the county established that it is struggling to meet its financial obligations and has had to cut funding in some areas, there was no testimony that resources to fund schools, hospitals and local law enforcement were reduced because of indigent defense costs as was alleged in the complaint. The court is convinced that indigent defense is neither the cause nor the solution to the county's financial difficulties,'' Smith said.

Justice James E. Graves, in a dissent joined by Justice Jess H. Dickinson, said Quitman County showed deficiencies in the indigent defense system that justified some remedy from the state.

"Because the (U.S.) Supreme Court has deemed the right to counsel for indigents in state prosecutions to be fundamental, the State of Mississippi bears the ultimate responsibility to ensure that this right is preserved,'' Graves wrote.

Graves said the flaws in Quitman County's system are "the result of the fundamental problem in a part-time, county-based system that lacks state funding and uniformity.''

"In essence, the State of Mississippi has failed to establish or fund a system of indigent defense that is equipped to provide all defendants with the tools of an adequate defense, and has therefore fallen short of its constitutional obligation,'' Graves said.