Public Defenders See Job Threat in New County Plan

San Diego County’s staff of public defenders--their office threatened with extinction by plans to establish a private, nonprofit defense organization--are sputtering with anger and exploring responses ranging from legal action to a job action.

Nearly half of the 21 lawyers in the Office of Defender Services gave up jobs elsewhere to relocate in San Diego during the last two years, expecting to join a public defenders office likely to expand from its initial duties of representing indigent defendants in 70% of serious felony cases.

But those expectations were dashed late in May when the county Board of Supervisors tentatively approved establishment of a nonprofit “community defender office” to replace the public defenders and a much-criticized system of contracting with private lawyers to handle less-serious cases.

County officials--who recommended enlarging the public defender staff rather than creating a nonprofit defense office to take over the contract lawyers’ work--now are working with members of a blue-ribbon commission to flesh out a budget and implementation plan for the community defender organization.

Meanwhile, the public defenders, feeling abandoned and adrift, are fuming.

“The people here left career jobs for what they perceived was another career job,” said Deputy Public Defender Elliot Lande, who quit a position as a prosecutor in Kalamazoo, Mich., to join the Office of Defender Services in January, 1985. “I’m not aware anyone was told or anyone realized that this was an experiment that could end at any minute.”

The defense lawyers want to take steps to preserve their jobs and a defender office they say has proven both its cost-saving worth and its capacity to provide competent representation to the poor. But they have reached no consensus on what they can--or are willing to--do.

“We have not foreclosed anything nor come to any firm decisions yet,” said Lande, whose co-workers have dubbed him their official spokesman.

Legal action challenging the elimination of their civil service jobs is a possibility, he said. So is some type of job action--presumably a protest, strike or slowdown of some sort--though Lande said this week that the public defenders will do nothing to harm their clients’ interests.

“None of us is prepared to jeopardize a defendant’s rights for a job action,” he said. “But we’re not labor lawyers, so we are exploring all the alternatives and attempting to find out what our rights are, if any.”

Some of those involved in the implementation of the community defender program say the public defenders are overreacting. Though the structure of the county’s indigent defense efforts will change, they say, the lawyers virtually are guaranteed jobs with the new organization at roughly the same pay.

“I think it’s assumed--and there’s nothing to indicate otherwise--that everybody in that office now would have a job with the new office if they wanted one,” said attorney Glenn Warren, executive director of the commission that recommended creation of the community defender organization.

Warren said this week that, under the plan being drafted for the new office, defense lawyers would receive the same pay as prosecutors with comparable experience and would have a benefit package worth 17% to 20% of their salaries, including a retirement plan. Overall, the plans actually may boost the lawyers’ income, he said.

Yet the community defender proposal remains so tentative and full of uncertainties that officials sympathetic to the public defenders’ plight say they have grounds for their frustration.

“They don’t even have a budget yet,” Public Defender Melvin Nitz, director of the Office of Defender Services, said Tuesday. “I can understand why everybody is so apprehensive about the future. It certainly doesn’t show it’s a well-planned organization yet.”

One step some of the lawyers already have taken is to launch a hunt for more secure employment.

“There’s a sense that a number of people are job hunting, which may cause some problems in handling cases until the transition comes about,” said Larry King, criminal justice project manager for the county.

Other lawyers in the Office of Defender Services are hoping--along with Nitz, their boss--to be able to persuade county supervisors to reverse course and drop the novel community defender plan in favor of expanding the existing program.

“People are deceiving themselves that some sort of private corporation is going to make anything different,” said Deputy Public Defender Milly Durovic, who left the Maryland state defender’s office for a job in San Diego in early 1985.

“Everything’s going to sound great on paper,” she said this week. “But there are not going to be any cost-of-living increases, the caseload is going to be too high and, eventually, you’re going to have shoddy representation.”

Echoing the arguments that prompted Chief Administrative Officer Norman Hickey to endorse expansion of the public defender’s office, Durovic contends that a competent, in-house staff of defense lawyers is the most effective legal counterweight to a competent district attorney’s office.

“A public defender, if they’re doing their job, is going to engender respect from the bench and the district attorney’s office,” she said.

Advocates of the community defender system say a defense office supervised by independent trustees would have all the advantages of a public defender office without creating a big bureaucracy.

Nitz, who did not get a chance to defend his office during the May meeting when supervisors voted to do away with it, said he hopes to make the case for an expanded public defender program when the board revisits the issue in early August.

“We can expand into a public defender system with no great increase in expenses--certainly nothing like this community organization would be,” he said. “It can be done much more quickly and more efficiently, and I want to get that across to the board sometime.”

Lande, 39, who moved his family from Michigan, hopes the supervisors give the decision at least a little more thought.

“If they decide to go with a community defender program, we’re certainly not going to try to upset the apple cart, because that would be detrimental to defendants who need to be defended,” he said.

“But I would hope they would listen to all sides and make a decision based on all the criteria they have, and not the politics of saying, ‘We’re shrinking government!’ or some other meaningless slogan.”