Six federal judges in South Carolina, including Chief U.S. Judge Timothy Cain, have written a letter highlighting a critical money shortage in the state’s federal criminal justice system.
The situation they shine a light on involves a lack of federal funds to pay South Carolina’s 127 private criminal defense attorneys — called “panel attorneys” — who are financed with public money to represent indigent defendants charged with federal crimes, wrote U.S. Judge Timothy Cain, a former state judge and former law partner of U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
Cain was joined by five of his fellow S.C. federal judges in writing the letter, dated Aug. 19.
“Judges and prosecutors cannot do their jobs without defense attorneys, and cases cannot get resolved in a timely fashion,” the judges wrote.
South Carolina’s taxpayer-supported criminal defense lawyers are supposed to be paid by Congressional funding. But this year’s federal funding for all the states has now dried up.
“Funds for payment of attorneys appointed to represent indigent defendants in federal court were exhausted in early July,” the judges wrote.
Those private taxpayer-supported attorneys don’t just represent run-of-the-mill accused drug dealers or gun traffickers.
They have represented high-profile defendants in cases of high public interest, such as white supremacist Dylann Roof, who killed nine parishioners at Charleston’s Mother Emanuel AME Church in 2015, and most of the 34 defendants from South Carolina charged and convicted of offenses in the storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Under the U.S. Constitution, all defendants charged in criminal cases must have a lawyer. That right to counsel was affirmed in a 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Gideon v. Wainwright. The system not only ensures fairness to defendants, but having a competent defense attorney as an opponent helps keep prosecutors’ errors to a minimum.
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