Leaders within the state court system asked for patience on Wednesday as they pledged to address deficiencies in South Dakota’s system for delivering legal representation to people who can’t afford lawyers.
State Supreme Court Chief Justice Steven Jensen and other officials conducted a virtual press conference two days after the release of a report that outlined challenges facing the state’s public defense framework.
Despite the sweeping nature of some of the report’s recommendations, Jensen said the state Unified Judicial System is committed to following through.
“Honestly, it’s going to be difficult, it’s going to be a lot of work, and it’s going to require some discussions about who will fund that system going forward,” Jensen said. “But given our history in South Dakota, the widespread support and recognition of the need for change, I’m optimistic we can get it done.”
States are required by the U.S. Constitution’s Sixth and 14th Amendments to guarantee the right to an attorney for those who can’t pay.
Researcher highlights issues
The state-sanctioned report from the nonprofit Sixth Amendment Center, however, says South Dakota’s practice of delegating public defense funding and management to counties creates what the center’s Aditi Goel described Wednesday as “justice by geography.”
“It results in a decentralized patchwork of county funded public defense systems,” Goel said. “The problem is that some counties cannot afford to fund public defense services at the levels that are constitutionally required.”
The state also lacks oversight mechanisms and has no standards for qualifications, training, supervision, compensation or caseloads specific to attorneys who act as public defenders.
Goel pointed out that public defenders and court-appointed attorneys in South Dakota have heavy caseloads. One private attorney contracted as a public defender had 73 open cases in 20 counties across six judicial circuits at the time the attorney was interviewed by the Sixth Amendment Center’s research team.
“Our analysis found that attorneys across the state have cases that exceed the most conservative national standards,” Goel said.
The center’s report recommends the creation of standards in each area, and for the state to fund the recently formed Commission on Indigent Legal Services at a level high enough to perform oversight.
How to ‘eat this elephant’
Neil Fulton, dean of the University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law, chairs the commission. Fulton also formerly served as the chief public defender for federal cases in the District of South Dakota.
Fulton likened the state’s approach for tackling the issues laid out in the report to eating an elephant. According to a truism sometimes attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, the way to complete such a task is “one bite at a time.”
“One of the things for us as commission, now that we’ve all decided we’re going to eat this elephant, is to start deciding where we slice off a little bit of elephant and get that done,” Fulton said, adding that the work will take “many years.”
You can read the full article at South Dakota Searchlight.