Judge and Defenders Patch Things Up in Vista--Mostly

A bitter feud between the presiding Municipal Court judge and the North County branch of the Office of the Public Defender, which erupted three months ago with allegations that the defense attorneys were performing poorly in representing indigent patients, now appears to be mostly resolved.

Victor Ramirez, the presiding judge of the North County Municipal Judicial District, said this week that the lawyers who staff the defender’s office have made “great progress” and that he is now willing to give them “high marks.”

The most significant improvement, Ramirez said, was assigning a public defender virtually full time to oversee each of the four busiest courtrooms in Vista to prevent cases from grinding to a halt for want of a public defender.

Ramirez’s compliments contrast with the harsh criticism he leveled against the defense attorneys in July, when he at first ordered a 20% reduction in the caseload assigned to the office because he was concerned that it was understaffed and unable to carry its load of court-assigned defense work.

Ramirez complained at the time that public defenders were not always available to represent defendants for hearings or trials.

After meeting with public defenders a week later, he withdrew the order, saying he was willing to give the office a second chance to prove it could handle the caseload. The temporary truce blew up in September, however, when Ramirez wrote a scathing letter to the office, accusing its attorneys of being chronically tardy for court appearances and of being ill-prepared in representing their clients.

Ramirez said the performance by the public defenders was “absolutely abysmal” and concluded that the problems were caused either by understaffing or poor management. If corrections weren’t made, Ramirez said, he would reassign as many as one-third of the cases to private attorneys.

Ramirez said the attorneys had allowed themselves to be assigned to various courtrooms at the same time, had inadequately prepared themselves on misdemeanor cases because they were busy with felony cases, had consistently failed to get case information from police or the district attorney’s office before preliminary hearings and had failed to adequately interview their clients before hearing dates.

Ramirez now says that, with one general exception, his concerns have been resolved.

He said the addition of six attorneys in recent weeks “really boosted the performance of the public defenders dramatically, in terms of their being on time and coverage of cases.”

“There are still some complaints about public defenders not being accessible to their clients,” Ramirez said. “That’s an area that still concerns me, but overall I give them high marks.”

Larry S. Beyersdorf, who heads the Vista branch of the countywide public defender’s office, agrees with Ramirez that “things seem to be in control. All’s quiet on the Western front.”

Beyersdorf agreed that accessibility to clients is a continuing concern.

“I’ll never be satisfied until we answer every phone call the day we get it,” he said. “But sometimes it’s not possible, given the number of cases we get, and sometimes our clients are a little demanding. But we get as many compliments as we do complaints.”

Critical to the improvements in court, Beyersdorf said, was the assigning of supervising attorneys to four courtrooms: the felony readiness court where cases are settled on the eve of Superior Court trial; to Ramirez’s presiding courtroom, where municipal trial calendars are set, and to the two courtrooms that handle felony preliminary hearings.

The four public defenders essentially use the courtrooms as their offices, serving as “trouble-shooters for their clients, for the judges and for the other lawyers in our office,” Beyersdorf said.

“They’re keeping track of where our lawyers are, they know the status of the cases, and they can stand in for another public defender when he’s in trial in another courtroom.”

The Office of the Public Defender was established by the county Board of Supervisors last year, to replace the Office of Defender Services, which assigned indigent defendants to private lawyers, who were then reimbursed by the county on a contract basis.

In North County, four private law firms contracted with the county to provide defense counsel to clients who could not afford to hire their own attorneys.