Carson would like to hire more lawyers, but he hardly has the money for those already on the payroll. When trying to solicit the help of local attorney Anna Ferguson, he initially offered her $1,000 for every 100 cases she accepted, or $10 per case. In January 2015, he cut wages by 10 percent and eliminated travel funds. All of the attorneys in his office hold second, even third, jobs. Carson, too, maintains a private practice, where he spends about 20 percent of his time. “You can’t survive on this salary alone,” said one of the support attorneys. “I do it for the love of Derrick,” said another.
In La Salle, another parish under Carson’s jurisdiction, the swell of cases grew so overwhelming that he enacted a “restriction of services” plan and, mid-summer last year, stopped representing some defendants accused of misdemeanors. While Carson is more desperate than most, “every jurisdiction is headed this way,” he said. “It’s just a matter of time.” More than three-quarters of the state’s 42 public defenders’ offices are struggling to avoid insolvency. The Louisiana Public Defender Board, which oversees every district office, has predicted “systemic failure in the public-defense system” by this summer.
Statewide, public defenders represent more than 85 percent of those who pass through the criminal courts, many of them black and uneducated. Without public defenders available, pretrial detainees awaiting representation will clog the jails, judges will be unable to clear dockets, detention costs will rise, and the state will sink, eventually, into a constitutional crisis for failure to provide adequate counsel.
But as public defenders’ workloads climb, their ability to safeguard client rights suffers. A census of 22 states carried out by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that, between 1999 and 2007, the number of public defenders increased by 4 percent while their caseload increased by 20 percent. Until recently in New Orleans, public defenders assigned to misdemeanor courts each had upward of 19,000 cases per year, affording them an average of seven minutes for every client. Unsurprisingly, some detainees end up staying in jail waiting for attorneys for longer than the potential sentences for the crimes they were accused of. “You can’t dig into the details. There isn’t time to uncover the facts, to marinate in them, to do the research necessary,” Carson said about managing his caseload. “It becomes like herding cattle.”
