Posted by Dave on 12/22/06 at 09:25:49 am
Categories: Crime and Justice, Chicago/Illinois

Lovely. Cook County (i.e. Chicago and its surrounding towns) is in a major budget crisis. County Board President Todd Stroger wants every department to cut their budgets by 17%. 17% is a huge amount, and one that will have a significant on the services that the county offers.

This will obviously have a devastating affect on the county's public defender's office:

The 10 percent budget cut initially requested by county officials would force layoffs of 150 lawyers, Public Defender Ed Burnette said. If County Board President Todd Stroger gets the 17 percent cut he is now asking for, at least 210 assistant public defenders would have to be cut, another source said.

"It's going to be devastating," Burnette said.

There is no doubt that this will also have an impact on other departments in the county, including the Prosecutor's office. But lets be honest.

The Public Defenders office is underfunded - it is underfunded everywhere. And cutting lawyers from the office will make an already understaffed department even more stretched. This will also make it much more difficult for the remaining PDs to have the ability to properly defend their clients.

But here is the really ironic thing. If the Public Defender's Office cannot cover all of the necessary cased, the government will be forced to pay private lawyers, at $75 an hour, to take the cases:

Lawyers in the public defender's office work 2,080 hours a year, Sessoms said. A private lawyer retained for that many hours would cost the county $156,000 a year--more than three times a starting assistant public defender's salary.

The public defender's office handles 400,000 cases a year and has 550 lawyers. Its 2006 budget was $52 million. But the proposed cuts would end up costing the county $15 million to $30 million more, Sessoms said.

Ah...the lovely stench of government bureaucracy and Cook County politics. Lawyers will get laid off in order for the county to spend more money in order to fulfill a court order to provide legal services to those who cannot afford their own defense.

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