One of New York’s worst-kept secrets is the abject failure of its public defense system. Fifty years ago, in Gideon v. Wainwright, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states must provide a competent lawyer to poor people accused of crimes. New York State’s response was to abdicate its responsibility to county governments. As with so many unfunded state mandates, counties face enormous political and economic pressure to keep costs down, especially given that the immediate beneficiaries of the Gideon mandate are disenfranchised indigent criminal defendants.
A recent ruling from the New York Court of Appeals highlights how the pressure to contain costs results in violations of the constitutional right to counsel in one particular county. The administrators of Onondaga County’s Assigned Counsel Plan promulgated a series of rules governing the qualification, assignment, conduct and compensation of attorneys who agree to represent indigent criminal defendants. In Roulan v. County of Onondaga,1 the Court of Appeals considered a challenge to three of those rules brought by an attorney who claimed that they existed for the purpose of controlling costs at the expense of his own rights and the rights of his indigent clients.
