BATON ROUGE – The state legislature, and not the Louisiana Supreme Court, must decide whether the state should spend more money and resources on reducing the caseloads of public defenders, the high court decided this month.
In litigation involving consolidated cases, Louisiana Chief Public Defender Michael Mitchell argued that public defenders should be able to reduce their own caseloads to reasonable levels based on a 2017 study of workload standards. But justices rejected that argument, citing previous case law that requires evaluations of how indigent defendants are represented be made on a case-by-case basis.
The 2017 report, titled “The Louisiana Project, a Study of the Louisiana Public Defender System and Attorney Workload Standards,” found that the state’s public defender system would need an additional 1,400 attorneys to adequately manage the current caseload.
The justices acknowledged that Louisiana’s justice system was still burdened by draconian laws and must respond to problems that may be better addressed through substance-abuse and mental health programs.
“Unless and until the legislature sees fit to change such laws, the courts of this state will continue – as we must – to enforce them,” the Dec. 11 opinion states.
The public defenders’ arguments implied that they should be allowed to take a triage approach to deal with excessive caseloads, which would mean a situation where lower-level crimes and misdemeanors are not prosecuted. That idea, however, would go against the traditionally high level of public support for the “broken-windows” policing policy, which research groups such as the Manhattan Institute say protects minority neighborhoods and promotes community pride and respect for the law in general.
The Louisiana ACLU has taken a different tack in its criminal justice system lawsuits. Excessive public defender dockets lead to an inability of the justice system to abide by the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling Gideon v. Wainright, which established the right of indigent defendants accused of serious crimes to court-appointed attorneys, according to Louisiana ACLU Legal Director Nora Ahmed.
“We have too many interactions between police and people of color,” Ahmed told the Louisiana Record in an email. “Those interactions related to less serious offenses need not happen to begin with because we are not rigorously policing white neighborhoods or people in the same way as we do communities and people of color.”
Shifting funds from policing to social-service agencies and public defense would serve to reduce police harassment of residents in low-income communities, she said.
“What we should demand is limitations on policing and a diversion of resources from police to those social-services organizations that actually serve to improve people’s lives and provide them with access to basic needs and fundamental dignity,” Ahmed said. “That Louisiana has more police officers to residents than any other state in the country and also the highest incarceration rate in the country suggests that we have a system that ineffectively uses taxpayer funds to meet taxpayer needs.”