A new commission made up of lawmakers, public defenders, academics and lawyers wants to push California — one of two states that does not pay for basic social security — to begin subsidizing and enforcing minimum standards for state social security programs.
The Independent California Public Defender Commission includes three members of the assembly and two senators – among them Jesse Arreguín and Nick Schultz, chairmen of the Senate and the Assembly’s Public Safety Committee – as well as senior public defenders from several states, retired judges, directors of criminal justice nonprofits, and heads of organizations representing thousands of defense attorneys in the state.
“We’ve talked about the problem with our social security system for years,” said Schultz, a Democrat from Burbank and a former prosecutor who sponsored legislation to improve social security.
The goal is “to carry forward the conversation and past learning, and come up with an actionable road map of what we need to do to build the strong public safety infrastructure that Californians are rightfully entitled to,” he said.
Commissioners plan to enact a five-year plan to improve federal funding, as well as enforce standards such as liability limits and access to defense investigators.
A CalMatters investigation last year found that criminal defendants across the country are being sentenced without trial, greatly increasing the likelihood of wrongful convictions. Many California counties do not employ a single criminal defense investigator who can interview witnesses, review police reports, visit crime scenes and retrieve surveillance video. CalMatters also found that attorneys in some rural districts handle responsibilities that far exceed even the permissive standards, making them less likely than other defense attorneys to challenge the prosecution’s evidence through legal action and take their cases to court.
But the state refused to intervene. After the rejection of a bill that would have created an official federal commission to deal with this issue, two advocacy organizations, the Wren Collective and UC Berkeley’s Criminal Law and Justice Center, decided to create an independent commission and began to bring together stakeholders who could promote and make changes. These types of commissions, which have facilitated significant improvements in other states’ civil defense, are usually established by the governor.
“It became clear that this was a low-priority issue in Sacramento, especially during the budget crisis,” said Chesa Boudin, the Berkeley Institute’s founding director and former San Francisco district attorney. It was also clear, Boudin said, that “there was a big gap between what the experts understood as the problem and the public’s perception of the government of California as the kind of progressive leader in the country.”
In the decades since the US Supreme Court established the right to an attorney in state criminal trials, California has burdened its states with the responsibility of providing attorneys to poor people accused of crimes. Many of those states have chosen the cheapest option: paying private attorneys and law firms a small fee to represent indigent defendants, regardless of how many cases they handle or how much time they spend on each case.
“You have offices that have incredibly high representation that they can offer, and you have other offices that do these low-cost contracts where the quality is documented to be very poor,” said Eve Brensike Primus, a law professor at the University of Michigan.
Primus is the only new commission member from outside of California. He was asked to join because of his extensive research and writing on the immune system of humans.
The Michigan Indigent Protection Commission, created by the legislature in 2013, has led to significant changes and a significant influx of state funding.
The California commission’s work, Primus said, could serve as “an incentive for political players to do the right thing and start supporting and improving the delivery of protections for the poor, or as fodder for lawsuits that would try to get law enforcement to pressure political players to do the right thing to effectively represent them.”
The commission is scheduled to hold its first in-person meeting, which will be open to the public, in Berkeley in October, with additional meetings planned for Los Angeles, the Central Valley and Northern California over the next 12 months. The commissioners said they will work in subcommittees between these quarterly sessions to create a strong state budget, draft legislative language, and establish minimum standards for how counties should organize their public defender offices, compensate their attorneys, provide access to experts, and report on their work.
Rubin is with us writes CalMatters.
