Anybody who watched crime shows on TV is familiar with the famous phrase 'if you cannot afford a lawyer one will be provided for you,' but an activist group says Bexar County is doing a lousy job of doing that, News Radio 1200 WOAI reports.
The Texas Organizing Project presented Commissions Court with petitions calling for a review of the county's Public Defender Program, saying not only do low income defendants get inadequate representation from court-appointed lawyers, but its taxpayers who have to pay the price.
"My son spent 63 days and six months in jail over a $1.89 bottle of water," Lacy Wallace told Commissioners.
She said her son bought the water with a friend's credit card that he didn't know was stolen, but it was only when he entered the criminal justice system that he discovered dysfunction of a Kafka-esque level, with court appointed attorneys not returning his phone calls, delaying court hearings without his knowledge, and pressuring him to plead guilty to theft charges.
Raven Pena of the Organizing Project says while people like Wallace's son pay the price in lost freedom, taxpayers are paying the price in wasted tax money. She said keeping a person in jail for more than two months awaiting trial on a minor charge costs taxpayers a fortune.
She says it would actually be cheaper to fully fund public defenders.
"The system does not offer an incentive, read that a financial incentive, to provide quality representation," Pena said, citing a recent study of public defender programs in urban Texas counties. "And it also encourages guilty pleas."
She says underfunding public defenders is not a wise way to save taxpayer dollars. "They identified sub-par defense from court appointed attorneys, resulting in higher costs to the county."
The Organizing Project also encouraged Bexar County to take a second look at how bail is set by magistrate judges. They say it is not fair for people who cannot afford cash bail to have to sit in jail awaiting trial, when they haven't been convicted of any crime, while wealthier defendants can make bail and be released, frequently without having to set foot inside the jail at all.
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