In Pleas for Funding, Public Defenders Go to Creative Extremes

Public defenders should be spending at least 47 hours per case in their duties representing defendants who are too poor to afford private lawyers—a standard set by the American Bar Association. But in Missouri, it’s been more like nine hours per case. Missouri’s public defenders have had to take on as many as 200 cases at a time—that’s per lawyer—and this has been a problem since at least 2005. In 2009, Missouri’s state supreme court declared that “every Missouri public defender office was over its calculated capacity, … which calls into question whether any public defender fully is meeting his or her ethical duties of competent and diligent representation in all cases assigned.”

Publicly funded attorneys in Missouri have not been able to provide quality representation for indigent defendants, the people most vulnerable to falling prey to a too-often unforgiving criminal justice system. This has been especially true under the watch of Jay Nixon, who served as the state’s attorney general from 1993 to 2009, and has been governor ever since. Which is why the director of Missouri’s public defender’s office, Michael Barrett, took the extreme move this week of appointing the governor to represent a client that Barrett’s overburdened staff does not have the resources to serve.