Idaho Report

Evaluation of Trial-Level Indigent Defense Systems in Idaho
NLADA Releases its report, "The Guarantee of Counsel"

With the release of The Guarantee of Counsel: Advocacy & Due Process in Idaho’s Trial Courts (January 2010), the National Legal Aid & Defender Association (NLADA) finds that the state of Idaho fails to provide the level of representation required by our Constitution for those who cannot afford counsel in its criminal and juvenile courts. By delegating to each county the responsibility to provide counsel at the trial level without any state funding or oversight, Idaho has sewn a patchwork quilt of underfunded, inconsistent systems that vary greatly in defining who qualifies for services and in the level of competency of the services rendered. While there are admirable qualities of some of the county indigent defense services, NLADA finds that none of the public defender systems in the sample counties are constitutionally adequate.

• None of the studied counties have any workload controls in place, and the workloads in most counties greatly exceed those allowed under national standards.
• People of insufficient means are routinely processed through Idaho’s magistrate’s courts without ever having spoken to an attorney. Local jurisdictions get around their constitutional obligation to provide lawyers in misdemeanor cases in a myriad of ways, including accepting uninformed waivers of counsel, pressuring defendants to “work out a deal” with the prosecutor prior to being given publicly-financed defense counsel, and threatening unfair cost recovery measures.
• All seven of the counties studied lack time and places to meet privately with clients, so that most attorneys are meeting with their clients primarily, if not only, at the courthouse on the day of a court proceeding, resulting in proceedings having to be continued, lawyers lacking sufficient information to advocate on behalf of their clients, and clients lacking understanding of what is occurring in their case.
• Public defense attorneys throughout our study lamented the lack of training available to them, variously describing what they received as “sink or swim,” “on-the-job training,” “virtually non-existent,” “you got to do it to learn it,” and “dive in and do it.”
• Juveniles facing delinquency proceedings are an afterthought to the troubled adult system. Idaho’s juvenile defenders lack the time, tools and training to provide effective advocacy for the clients of the juvenile courts.

The failure to meet basic national standards in these counties underscores the failings of state government under Gideon. While a state may delegate obligations imposed by the Constitution “it must do so in a manner that does not abdicate the constitutional duty it owes to the people.” (Claremont School Dist. v. Governor, 147 N.H. 499, 513 (N.H. 2002))  In other words, the state has an obligation to ensure that the counties are capable of meeting the obligations and that counties actually do so.  If the counties cannot meet the delegated responsibilities, the state — as the original obligor — must step in to fulfill this obligation. At minimum, the state should therefore have a structure to assess whether counties are meeting Gideon.  The NLADA assessment shows that the counties are not.
 
In June 2007, NLADA released a comprehensive management audit of the Idaho State Appellate Public Defender. The report noted that many of the workload issues facing the appellate defender office could be remedied with improvements to the various county-based, trial-level indigent defense systems across the state.
 
To ensure that a representative sample of counties was studied — and to prevent against cherry-picking only the best or worst systems — NLADA requested the Idaho Criminal Justice Commission (CJC) to identify the Idaho counties to be evaluated. A sub-committee of CJC selected seven counties representing diversity with respect to geography, population and services delivery model: Ada, Blaine, Bonneville, Canyon, Kootenai, Nez Perce, and Power.

Attachment	Size
idaho_report.pdf	5.21 MB
idaho_report_executive_summary.pdf	352.63 KB