Juvenile Cases Short-Circuited Defender System : Justice: New Public Defender’s Office was saving county money in all areas except delinquency cases until a recent rule change brought court and agency together.

With the advent of the county-managed Public Defender’s Office, the number of cases farmed out to private lawyers has dropped dramatically, saving taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to county statistics.

With one exception--delinquency cases at Juvenile Court.

Just about midway through the current fiscal year, the number of delinquency cases that were referred to private lawyers is up nearly 200%, from 332 to 984, the statistics reveal.

As a result, the county has spent nearly $400,000 paying those defense attorneys in cases which involve charges of crimes against youths, officials said.

The number of private lawyers handling all other cases--in Superior and Municipal Courts, from violent felonies to minor misdemeanors--is down sharply, the statistics indicate. That’s because the Public Defender’s Office has taken over those cases, relieving the county from paying private lawyers fees of $25 to $75 an hour, officials said.

The statistics highlight the economic motivation behind the county’s controversial decision nearly three years ago to create a Public Defender’s Office for poor people unable to afford a lawyer and, for the first time, document the cut in the number of cases dealt the private lawyers.

The discrepancy at Juvenile Court, meanwhile, appears to be the result of a clash between good intentions and an inflexible law.

It also, however, seems to reflect a bureaucratic inertia that stalled the necessary changes--until they were finally altered on Feb. 4--in court business that the creation and recognition of a Public Defender’s Office demanded, particularly in the routing mechanisms that delivered nearly the $400,000 worth of cases to the private bar.

County supervisors voted to create a traditional, in-house Public Defender’s Office in May, 1988, hoping to bring stability to San Diego’s widely criticized indigent defense system, and to save money.

In its first fiscal year, when the patchwork of contract lawyers continued to bear the bulk of the load, the Public Defender’s Office spent $27 million.

Last fiscal year, relying on about 185 in-house lawyers, the agency expended $17.4 million, said Ernie Cardoza, the public defender’s administrative services manager.

This fiscal year, which began July 1, 1990, its budget is $21.2 million, including a county board-ordered $1.2 million expansion at Juvenile Court to cover dependency cases, those in which the county seeks custody of a child it contends has been abused or neglected. In contrast, delinquency cases involve allegations of crime.

On the delinquency side, meanwhile, the Juvenile Court has for years directed cases of repeat offenders back to the lawyer who handled the case the first time it came through the system, believing that continuity is good for the offender and the attorney.

If, for example, a youth is charged with a crime at 14, then another one at 17, the lawyer who advised the minor the first time around would be called to handle the second case.

“They develop a relationship, the attorney doesn’t have to start from scratch to figure out what the child’s problems are and we believe that is in the best interests of minors,” said Judge Judith McConnell, a former presiding judge at Juvenile Court and the presiding judge of the 71-judge San Diego Superior Court.

Under state law, however, counties with a public defender’s office must direct cases to that office, Public Defender Frank Bardsley said. It’s irrelevant under the law that there may have been a prior, different system in place to provide legal defense to poor people accused of a crime.

Each time a delinquency case is shipped out to a private lawyer, it costs county taxpayers hundreds of dollars, on average $400 a case, county officials said. At 984 cases, that’s $393,600--though it appears the county cash stopped flowing earlier this month.

On Feb. 4, with defender officials pointing to the state law and the private bar concerned about yet another cut in funding, Judge Napoleon A. Jones Jr., the current presiding judge at the Juvenile Court, called a halt to the old policy. But not all the way.

In the Feb. 4 directive, Jones ordered that the cases of repeat offenders charged with a new crime would be handled by the Public Defender’s Office.

The cases of repeat offenders charged only with the equivalent of probation revocation would be assigned back to the lawyer who handled the original case, since, technically, it was still the same case, he ruled.

Defender officials stressed that the episode that led to the Feb. 4 order involved no hard feelings between them and Jones. But they said Jones resisted the change and agreed to it only after agency officials discussed the state law with McConnell and she, in turn, talked to Jones.

Jones, who reports to McConnell, said that after he talked with her, the switch “just made sense at that point.”

McConnell, who has been the boss of the Superior Court for 14 months, declined to comment on her discussion with Jones. She said, “I don’t order my judges to do anything, but I do try to solve problems.”

“It was just a matter of the (Juvenile Court) adjusting its policies to keep up with the changing situation in the county structure,” she said.

“But if people don’t bring to our attention that what we are doing (at the courts) is having an adverse affect on other parts of government, we are not necessarily going to change our policies,” McConnell said.

Public defender officials said they understand it’s up to them to announce their presence on the scene. But they said they were in no position to lobby for change because, until recently, they had no idea that they weren’t getting their cases--because the court wasn’t telling them.

The Juvenile Court used to put out a monthly chart displaying a variety of case statistics, and the Public Defender relied on that chart to track its caseloads, said Bill Boyland, the public defender’s chief trial deputy at Juvenile Court.

After last September’s chart, the court suddenly stopped producing the monthly accounting, saying it was changing the way it handled statistics, and adding that the next chart would not be out until January, 1991.

There has been no new court chart since the September document, Boyland said.

Then, a few weeks ago, the Department of Alternate Defense Counsel, the office that coordinates the assignment of cases that the Public Defender’s Office cannot take, usually because of a conflict of interest, released to county managers a separate set of statistics.

Those numbers showed that the private bar had been referred 984 delinquency cases during the first five months of fiscal 1991, from July to November, 1990.

Those numbers are the most up-to-date figures available, said Elliot G. Lande, director of the Alternate Defense agency, better known as the “conflicts office.”

Those numbers also mark the first time the county had been able to prove what the Board of Supervisors suspected when it opted for the Public Defender’s Office: that its creation would short-circuit the fiscal unpredictability that went with farming out most cases to private attorneys by slashing the number of cases directed to the private bar.

According to the conflicts office, the number of private lawyers handling misdemeanors in Municipal Court from July to November, 1989, was 975. The number for July to November, 1990, was 223--a drop of 77%.

In Superior Court, the number of private attorneys handling relatively low-level felonies dropped from 803 to 374, a 53% decrease, the conflicts office reported. More serious non-murder felonies were cut 21%, from 106 to 84.

Even the number of murder cases assigned to private lawyers went down, from 22 to 12, or 45%, the conflicts office said.

Only delinquency cases were up, the conflicts office said--to 984 from the 332 during the same time frame the year before, or 196%.

The figures perplexed public defender officials, Boyland said. They simply did not know about the rush of cases being swept out to the private bar, he said.

What they did know, however, was that without their proper share of the cases, their cost per case would skyrocket. Last fiscal year, according to Cardoza, the defenders’ administrative manager, it cost the office $352 per delinquency case, about 12% less than the cost of a private lawyer.

After talks began with Jones, it turned out that the system, as it worked before Feb. 4, simply relied on old, familiar patterns in the clerk’s office at the court, ways of doing things before there was a Public Defender’s Office, Boyland said.

In the days before there was a Public Defender’s Office, the Juvenile Court “could give a case to whoever had a contract,” meaning a private attorney eligible to take delinquency cases, Boyland said.

So, he said, the court clerks were still routinely assigning non-custody cases to the private lawyers, because that was the way they had always done it. Until Feb. 4.

“Nobody at the court seems to have been aware that the legal situation changed when this county adopted the public defender plan,” Boyland said.