In a ruling handed down last week, the Missouri Supreme Court issued a decision that will affect the caseloads of public defender offices in two out-state Missouri counties. Those specific judgments, based on nuances of state laws and rules that govern public defenders, have little bearing on the black community in St. Louis. However, the Court’s opinion, written by Judge Michael A. Wolff, points to a crisis in the state’s criminal courts that impacts any poor person who is charged with a crime in Missouri that could lead to incarceration.
Further, Wolff’s vivid account of Missouri’s public defender crisis highlights an issue of grave importance that any state legislator with an urban constituency could seize and make his or her own. Leadership is badly needed on this issue – and there is a vacuum waiting to be filled by a legislator willing to advocate for the poor.
The data and legislation Wolff cites make it clear that Missouri’s public defender offices are being crushed by an unfunded mandate. They are charged by law to represent all poor citizens charged with crimes that could result in incarceration, but not funded adequately to take on all of these cases and, literally, do them justice.
“During the last two decades, the number of persons sentenced for felonies in Missouri has nearly tripled. The public defender represents about 80 percent of those charged with crimes that carry the potential for incarceration,” Wolff writes. As a result, as of July 2009, every Missouri public defender office was over its capacity, as calculated by the Public Defender Commission.
In Wolff’s detailed summary, the burgeoning public defender crisis is yet another casualty of the so-called “War on Drugs.”
“During the decade of the 1990s, the population of Missouri grew by 9.3 percent, while the prison population grew by 184 percent,” Wolff writes. This ballooning rate of criminality – and rapidly worsening burden on public defenders – is disproportionately due to the prosecution of drug offenses. “Since 1985, the number of offenders convicted of drug offenses (possession, distribution and trafficking) has increased by nearly 650 percent,” Wolff writes – and that is nearly three times the rate of increase for other crimes.
Clearly, more public defenders are needed in Missouri – both out of fairness to the attorneys who commit to this public service and to those poor citizens who have no other means of representation. The Public Defender Commission estimates that 176 additional trial division lawyers and 22 additional appellate division lawyers are needed to meet its standards for the current case load. Basic respect for justice and the law dictates that funding for these positions be made a state budgetary priority.
However, Missouri also should realize that more needs to be done than simply to throw money – and lawyers – at the problem. No one could reasonably conclude that the “War on Drugs,” as it has been waged during the last three decades, is actually working. Leadership is needed at every level – city, state, federal – to address the failures in our drug policy and enforcement and to establish new standards that actually address the problem, rather than worsening it and creating new ones.