This is truly extraordinary. Something has to be done:
The Orleans Parish public defender situation is beyond crisis. And it is far past time that the Louisiana Supreme Court intervened.
This summer, changes at the public defender's office resulted in the resignation of a number of attorneys, including two of the three remaining attorneys who handled death penalty cases. Five lawyers had been handling 27 capital cases pre-Katrina, far more than allowed under any nationally approved scheme; that insufferable caseload then devolved upon the remaining three.
Of the three remaining attorneys, one resigned because, like all the attorneys, he had been asked to devote himself to the job full-time, and he felt that he wouldn't be able to get along without the income from his private practice. Another was reassigned to non-death-penalty cases.
That left me.
I resigned as well, but money was not my reason. Though offered a salary greater than I ordinarily derive from both my public defender work and my private practice combined, I chose to quit effective Sept. 15 rather than continue to work under impossible conditions. The public defender's office was given almost two months' notice that I would not be able to try any more capital cases.
If I thought I was going to be able to walk away from those cases, I was wrong. Because the public defender's office took no steps to replace the departing attorneys, all but one of the judges ordered me to remain on the public defender's cases last week. The other attorney who quit may soon find himself in the same situation.
At the end of last week, I was the attorney on approximately 20 capital cases. It is unclear whether I will be paid at all, even though by Supreme Court standards this could be full-time employment for the next five years.
By Dwight Doskey on the editorial page of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Details here from LexisOne.com.