Law Firm Assailed, Loses Traffic Court Contract for Defense

A group of attorneys that represented thousands of accused people in San Diego County Traffic Court during the last 28 months has lost its county contract to provide defense services, after a finding by a committee of lawyers and judges that the group’s performance was inadequate.

The cancellation of the Traffic Defense Group’s $430,000, three-year contract midway into its final year marked the first time the county’s Office of Defender Services has fired a group of lawyers in the seven years that San Diego County has contracted for defense services, according to Melvin Nitz, defender services director.

Lawyers say the group’s ouster may prompt attempts in court to reverse guilty pleas entered by some of its clients, many of whom were indigents unable to afford private attorneys.

Moreover, they contend, the group’s sometimes lackadaisical defense in the bulk of traffic court cases may have resulted in a general stiffening of penalties for other defendants as well.

Judges, prosecutors and private defense lawyers had complained repeatedly that the group--headed by attorneys Robert Bennett and Martha Logan--failed to appear in court on schedule, conducted little or no investigation of defendants’ cases, urged unnecessary guilty pleas and sometimes provided defense that fell short of minimum standards of competence.

Bennett said last week that the Traffic Defense Group had done an excellent job under the constraints imposed by the county’s tight-fisted spending on defense services.

He said he was denied a chance to fully respond to the allegations against the group and that several members of the committee that recommended the firing “had an ax to grind” against him.

Bennett, who is black, stopped short of alleging that racism may have been a factor in the loss of the contract. But he raised the question in a letter challenging the group’s ouster.

Under its county contract, the group’s lawyers gave initial legal counseling to nearly all of the hundreds of defendants ordered to appear in traffic court each week on charges ranging from speeding to drunken driving. In addition, the group was appointed to represent indigent defendants who chose to plead not guilty and take their cases to trial in Municipal Court.

The criticism of the group peaked with a hearing in mid-September by the screening committee of the Office of Defender Services.

That panel, chaired by Municipal Judge E. Mac Amos Jr., recommended the traffic group’s removal. After negotiations with Bennett, the group was replaced in late October by a panel of seven lawyers administered by Nitz’s office.

Though the screening committee had recommended a three-month probation for the group in June, 1984, Bennett insisted last week that in the months before its ouster, the group had received no criticisms from the panel or Municipal Court judges.

“It appeared they were somewhat satisfied with the changes that had been made,” he said.

But attorneys active in traffic court said the performance of the group had consistently been inept.

“As far as the defendants themselves were concerned, they were being cheated out of fair representation,” said Alan Geraci, chief trial attorney for the San Diego city attorney’s office, which as the prosecutor of traffic cases was the group’s primary opposition in court.

The work fell “below the minimum standards of competence that should be expected, even of an overworked public defender,” added Tom Warwick, a private defense attorney who practices in traffic court.

Warwick said the lack of strong advocacy by the group, which handled the disposition of the vast majority of traffic court cases, may have resulted in tougher plea bargain offers from city prosecutors to all defendants. In general, he added, defendants have been pleading guilty to drunken driving charges with lower blood alcohol levels because the group advised against fighting the charges.

The Bennett group’s replacement comes just as San Diego’s legal community is gearing up for a comprehensive review of the county’s system of contracting with lawyers for defense services.

The county Board of Supervisors recently agreed to finance a study by a blue-ribbon commission of local lawyers into questions about the effectiveness of the county’s $9.5-million-per-year spending on defense services.

The contracting system--in which lawyer groups are hired to handle large blocs of traffic, misdemeanor and lesser felony cases--has come in for special criticism.

Reports by the American Bar Assn., the California State Bar and the National Legal Aid and Defender Assn. have outlined failings of the San Diego system, considered the largest contract plan in the nation.

Further, the Defenders Program of San Diego, a nonprofit defense group, is challenging aspects of the system in Superior Court, alleging that it creates economic disincentives to providing adequate defense to indigents.

Bennett said the built-in pressures of the system, designed to keep defense costs to a minimum by assigning contracts to the lowest qualified bidder, made it impossible for the Traffic Defense Group to please the courts.

“We were squeezed between ODS trying to save money, to show it was successful economically, and the demands of the court to do more and more work,” he said.

The group was given added responsibilities after its contract began in July, 1983, court officials and Nitz concede, covering arraignments and providing additional counseling at the downtown courthouse.

Also, under an order from Municipal Judge Ronald Mayo, who recently retired, Bennett was required to double his staff at traffic court. Mayo said in a letter to Nitz in January that the group was not providing “anywhere close to adequate and competent representation.”

It was not until March, nearly a year after Bennett first requested additional money, that the county raised the group’s monthly fee by $1,700 to $12,500, according to Office of Defender Services records.

Ironically, the increase meant the group was being paid at almost exactly the level of its predecessor, the Boesen & Sauer law firm, which lost the contract when it was underbid by the Traffic Defense Group in 1983. Court officials had strongly endorsed the Boesen & Sauer group’s performance.

Though Nitz said he was confident the Traffic Defense Group had provided adequate representation to traffic court defendants, lawyers who testified before the defender screening committee painted a different picture.

Geraci said Bennett’s group lost cases to city prosecutors that it could have won if its lawyers had been better prepared.

“They were just processing, more than advocating,” Geraci said. “They were just trying to process these defendants through the system as expeditiously as they could, without giving any regard as to what was the proper way to go forward.”

Had some defendants appealed their convictions, he said, “I couldn’t see how the Superior Court could hesitate to grant them a new trial or a reversal just based on ineffective assistance” of counsel.

Donna Woodley, an attorney who worked for the Bennett group from November, 1983, until September, said the group’s lawyers regularly were unprepared to handle cases at trial time. They were unavailable to meet clients outside of court, did little investigation of the clients’ cases and rarely filed motions to challenge evidence submitted by prosecutors, she said.

They “just ran the clients through like cattle,” said Woodley, who was named to the panel of lawyers that has replaced the group. She sued Bennett and Logan last month, seeking back pay she claims was owed when she severed ties with the group.

Woodley and other lawyers said the group’s ouster would prompt them to review the records of clients who return to court on new charges to see if convictions entered while they were represented by the Traffic Defense Group can be overturned.

According to Bennett, both Geraci and Woodley have ties to Presiding Municipal Judge Frederick Link that make the county’s action against him suspect.

In a letter challenging the screening committee’s hearing, Bennett said much of the criticism of the group had come from Link and his court. Bennett wrote that the committee hearing appeared to be prompted by a dispute he had with Woodley in early September.

In an interview, he noted that Woodley’s husband, Michael Baker, is Link’s clerk. Geraci works closely with Link’s court, Bennett said, and may have criticized him to remain in Link’s good graces.

Several members of the screening committee “had an ax to grind, as far as I could see,” Bennett added. “The witnesses they brought in were jaded to see only one side of the issue.”

Nitz agreed that personalities may have played a role in the Traffic Defense Group’s demise. “What Bob’s mistake was was that he had an attorney who was married to Judge Link’s clerk, and whenever she had a problem she went running to Judge Link,” Nitz said.

Link said merely that the group’s ouster was “a long time coming” and that Bennett’s comments “do not deserve a response from me.”

Prompted by the group’s firing, the county’s Indigent Defense Advisory Board said last week that it may review whether a set of objective standards can be developed for gauging contract lawyers’ performance.

Bennett “was subjected to vague and ambiguous criteria,” said board member Clifton Blevins, an attorney. “It all seemed to beg for some kind of overall standard to be applied on these contracts.”

Asked last week if he thought race played a role in the decision, Bennett said, “I think the people involved are too sophisticated to come out and say, ‘We don’t want you because you’re black.’ But I don’t think there are too many blacks involved in the contract system at this point.”

In his letter, moreover, Bennett said one member of the screening committee, former Office of Defender Services director Louis Katz, “had made his negative opinion of black attorneys well known”--a reference to a dispute that arose in the late 1970s when Katz said he would not relax standards for black attorneys and denied county contracts to black lawyers he considered unqualified.

Katz, who has won awards from civil rights organizations, said race played no part in the decision to recommend the Bennett group’s ouster. “Our committee bent over backwards for two years, after many complaints were made to (Bennett) and about him,” Katz said. “There was a problem from the first month he started that contract.”

County and court officials also said race had nothing to do with the decision.

“That is not a valid issue as far as this case is concerned,” Link said. “And that’s going to stir up a lot of hot feelings.”