A RAND study examined the challenges public defenders face and found a dramatic increase in defender workload.
“Today's public defender must possess the skills and time to review police and public camera video, social media and cell phone data, forensic evidence from DNA to chemical drug analysis” RAND reports.
In Colorado, digital and video information has become more prevalent in criminal cases, specialized treatment courts and bond hearing reform, said Colorado State Public Defender Megan Ring.
According to the study, the average time a defender needs to represent an individual in an adult criminal case varies from 286 to 13.5 hours. The time spent is dependent on the type of case. The more severe the case the more hours required, the study states.
High-severity cases require the most time. For a case that could result in a sentence of life without parole a defender can spend as much as 286 hours. Murder cases can demand 248 hours while sex crime cases may require around 167 hours.
The least amount of time can be spent on high- and low-severity misdemeanor cases which can average 22.3 and 13.8 hours respectively, according to the study. Probation and parole violation cases average 13.5 hours.
“We have seen an explosion in the amount of these materials in our cases. The competency crisis is taxing our defenders, but more disturbingly unfairly hurting our clients and violating their rights,“ said Jame Karbach, director of Legislative Policy and External Communications at the Colorado State Public Defender’s Office.
Another challenge public defenders face is working with the mental health and behavioral health issues of their clients. Clients who fall within the competency crisis in Colorado require more time from the public defender to effectively represent them.
“These clients require extra time to communicate with them, investigating their history and gathering records, pushing for systems to find solutions for individual clients, and litigating issues related to the competency waitlist and delays,” Karbach said.
“We have a behavioral and mental health crisis in our state,” Ring said, “which routes individuals suffering from disorders into jails and prisons. We have a criminal legal system that is ineffective in addressing the needs of these human beings. Our lawyers are working more than ever to try to address the diverse problems of this population forced into the criminal courts.”
Despite a 2012 federal lawsuit, Colorado taxpayers continue to pay millions of dollars per year in fines for court violations on how to treat people living with mental illness.
“There are many solutions to the massive growth of the criminal legal system that need to be examined by policy makers, including providing needed resources and removing people and cases from the criminal legal system. But at the end of the day, OSPD remains committed to ensuring that no one is standing alone in Colorado’s courts when facing the might of the government,” Ring said.
The workload standards for public defenders has not been updated since 1973 which failed to differentiate among the types of felonies. This assessment gave equal weight to burglaries, sexual assault and homicides, the study stated. The outdated standards have led to an increase in excessive workloads.
The RAND study suggests that new standards be implemented to reflect attorney’s experiences with current criminal defense practices by conducting locally-driven workload studies and combining the results with nationally-created workload standards.
“While we currently monitor, study, and evaluate workload for defenders, we plan to review closely any well-researched attempts to use reliable data to show the need for increased public defender funding,” Ring said.
Correction: The article previously stated that the National Association for Public Defense participated in conducting the survey. The survey was conducted by RAND.
