Los Angeles County has moved a program providing attorneys to poor criminal defendants from the L.A. County Bar Assn. to the overworked office of the public defender.
A program that provides some of the poorest criminal defendants with private legal representation will undergo major changes this year for the first time in a quarter century, after Los Angeles County chose not to renew a long-standing Bar Assn. contract to administer it with taxpayer dollars.
The county is required by law to provide poor criminal defendants with defense attorneys if they cannot afford one and usually does so through García’s office. In cases where it would be a conflict of interest for his office to represent a defendant, the case is handled by an attorney in the county’s alternate public defender’s office. Both offices are staffed with attorneys employed by the county but operate separately.
He said the move would have “zero impact” on existing employees in the public defender’s office unless they move to the new program’s team, which he has assigned Assistant Public Defender Marco Saenz to lead. Those who do move will be replaced, and there will be “no economic or direct resource impact” on the public defender’s office, he said.Brooke Longuevan, president of the L.A.
Given the caseload issues within the public defender’s office, moving another program under García “just seems like a strange switch,” Kennedy said. Davenport’s office said the decision was based on a months-long analysis of “ways to leverage existing economies of scale and enhance service delivery,” which included conversations with the county bar, García’s office and the San Diego public defender’s office and “internal discussions” about the budget proposals put forward by the bar and García’s office.
Officials from the Independent Juvenile Defender Program, which represents youth who have had cases remanded to juvenile court, were reporting “serious shortcomings” by panel attorneys prior to their cases being remanded, according to a February letter from the L.A. County Bar Assn. to county officials.
The result was that dozens of attorneys were rejected, including 27 who had been in the program in 2021. The accusations of mismanagement quickly followed.
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