An Overburdened Public Defender’s Office Orders The Missouri Governor To Serve A Poor Client

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In an open letter to Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, director of the Public Defender System Michael Barrett demanded that the governor take direct action to alleviate “an overburdened public defender system.” Barrett did so by ordering Nixon to take on a case himself.

After seven years of budget cuts and a veto on a 2009 Senate Bill designed to provide caseload relief to public defenders, Barrett wrote that he no longer could afford to fully staff his office. Therefore and pursuant to a state law that allows the director of the Public Defender System to assign cases to any member of the Missouri Bar Association, Barrett appointed Nixon as counsel in a case.

Barrett slammed the Governor for failing to meet his obligations and ultimately denying citizens their 6th and 14th Amendment rights to the assistance of counsel and due process, respectively. The public defender decried Nixon for “repeatedly [cutting] funding for an indigent defense system that continues to rank 49th in the U.S.” He kept on writing:

“This action comes even after the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice found that poor black children are being systematically deprived of their rights in Missouri due in large part to the lack of public defenders. Choosing in the wake of that report to further debilitate the very organization that ensures an equal system of justice only adds to the escalating sentiment that the poor and disenfranchised do not receive a fair shake in Missouri’s criminal justice system.”

The director went on to remind Nixon that because he can only hire attorneys when his department has the budget to do so, the Public Defender’s office has been forced to maintain vacant positions. “To avoid having to close one or more offices, the remaining option is to consider the use of Section 600.042.5, which gives the Director of the Public Defender System the right to ‘delegate the legal representation of any person to any member of the state bar of Missouri,'” he wrote.

Until this point, Barrett had not invoked Section 600.042.5 — “because it is my sincere belief that it is wrong to reassign an obligation placed on the state … to private attorneys who have in no way contributed to the current crisis” — but the Director wrote that because of the “extraordinary circumstances,” he would be assigning a case to “the one attorney in the state who not only created this problem, but is in a unique position to address it.” Barrett ended his letter: “I hereby appoint you, Jeremiah W. (Jay) Nixon, Bar No. 29603, to enter your appearance as counsel of record in the attached case.”

(Via Missouri State Public Defender)

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