Defenders Want Critical Judge Off Their Cases

One day after the presiding judge of Vista Municipal Court accused the public defender’s office of poor performance and demanded immediate reform, the defense attorneys responded with affidavits accusing him of bias and demanding his removal from their cases.

The judge, Victor Ramirez, standing by his contention that the defenders are incapable of handling their workload, in turn reassigned all the afternoon arraignments away from the public defenders, giving the cases to private attorneys.

Several of Ramirez’s fellow judges said the fight is likely to be just one small skirmish in a larger battle to come.

“This problem has greater depth than just what’s happening in Vista’s Municipal Court,” San Diego Superior Court Presiding Judge Michael Greer said. “That’s just a minor symptom of what’s going to become a bigger problem, and you certainly can’t blame the public defender’s office because they’re doing all they can.”

Greer said that Ramirez may have been justified in pointing out what appeared to be a grievous lack of attention to misdemeanor cases by the public defender’s office, but said that courthouses across the nation are overwhelmed by caseloads.

Arrests and prosecutions are skyrocketing as people pressure police to do something about increased crime, Greer noted. But just hiring more police and cracking down on crime won’t do much good when the courts find themselves flooded with cases and crowded jails lead to release of all but the most dangerous criminals, Greer said.

“This is going on everywhere,” said Greer, who last week attended an Institute of Court Management conference in Denver, which brought together judges from across the nation. “We’re trying nationally to deal with these problems. . . . Just screaming at each other, writing letters and calling names doesn’t cut it.

“I think we ought to all just cool it and start working with each other during these trying times.”

Greer said the consensus is that people will have to be made aware of the scope of the problem and admit that new taxes will be necessary to pay for more courtrooms, more jail cells, more judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and probation officers. Otherwise, people had better learn to live with potholes, he said. “They’re going to start seeing less and less of the public services they normally receive just so we can defend our communities against crime.

“So there’s either going to be more money pumped into the system, or we’re going to have to get along with less,” Greer said.

As far as the local problem goes, Greer said the shortage of personnel seems to have reached the critical point in North County first, despite the fact that Larry Beyersdorf, head of the Vista branch of the defender’s office, has said that his office is fully staffed and not overburdened.

Greer said he thinks the newly established public defender’s office has performed excellently overall, especially in downtown San Diego. “We are so lucky to have (Public Defender) Frank Bardsley in our county. We were in real trouble before he got here.”

Bardsley arrived in San Diego from the Los Angeles public defenders office last summer to head up the new Office of the Public Defender. The County Board of Supervisors established the new system to replace the former Office of Defender’s Services, which provided free legal representation to indigent clients mostly by sending cases to private lawyers on a contract basis.

The new system is widely considered to be more streamlined and cost-efficient, but has been saddled with a tremendous backlog of cases since the first day, Greer said.

Judge Runston Maino, who presides over the criminal cases in the Vista Superior Court, said he also believes that the public defender’s apparent deficiencies in North County are caused by having too many cases for too few attorneys. “The individual attorneys are very fine, very competent and good,” he said, “but there’s no way even the best attorney can be in two places at the same time.”

Judge E. Mac Amos Jr., head of the San Diego Municipal Courts, agreed that the new defender’s office is a superior system. “Generally, I feel that the public defender’s office is doing a good job,” he said.