PrintAfter just a few months at law school at Saint Louis University, Matt Melton knew he wanted to be a public defender. As he neared graduation he sent his one and only job application to the Missouri State Public Defender's Office.
And despite a herky-jerky year for Missouri's indigent defense system - funding disappointments, legislative victories and vetoes, Supreme Court litigation and a new tool for caseload relief - Melton loves his job.
Melton, an assistant public defender in the St. Louis City office, said he knew all about defender burnout, the perpetual exhaustion and exasperation of a lawyer with more cases than he can handle.
"In the St. Louis City office, it's the most common reason to leave. You're burned out because you're swamped and can't keep your head above water," Melton said in December during a lunch-hour break in a murder trial he second-chaired. "I didn't want that to happen to me. "
The Public Defender Commission claimed attorney burnout was happening to too many defenders. The commissioners pushed the Legislature for more funds and attorneys in 2009, and in return received a barrage of legislative and legal ups and downs. But the year ended on a high note.
Up: In May, the Missouri Legislature passed a bill that would have set similar caseload limits for public defenders.
Down: Gov. Jay Nixon vetoed the bill in July.
Down: On Oct. 15, Nixon's budget office released a fraction of $2 million in federal recovery funds the Legislature allocated to the public defender system. The defender's office wanted to hire a pool of temporary attorneys to move cases in their busiest offices, but $500,000 wasn't enough. It scrapped those plans.
Up: Also in October, an independent study of Missouri's public defender system reaffirmed its overloaded status and declared Missouri's indigent defense options are "headed for disaster. " The Spangenberg Group, now a program at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., called for a 50 percent increase in the number of investigators and support staff for public defenders.
Down: The Spangenberg Group couldn't deliver on the system's No. 1 goal: create a Missouri-specific caseload standard. State prosecutors attacked the Spangenberg study for hyping a "constitutional crisis" they claimed doesn't exist. A new Missouri Bar governor, Marie Kenyon, the managing attorney of Catholic Legal Assistance Ministry in St. Louis, urged the defender system to get its money back for the study. She criticized the report as a useless collection of anecdotes that portrayed public defenders as whining attorneys who hate their jobs.
Doug Copeland, a St. Louis attorney and public defender commissioner, said Tuesday that Spangenberg researchers rebuffed a refund request, saying they spent enough hours on the study to merit the $70,000 bill. The Missouri Bar won't pursue a refund any further, Copeland said.
Up: In a trio of appeals from Boone and St. Francois counties, the Missouri State Public Defender got the chance in November to tell the Missouri Supreme Court about the dangers of lawyers who juggle too many cases to effectively represent all their clients. At November oral arguments before the high court, prosecutors argued the Public Defender Commission can't pass rules that conflict with the system's statutory mandate to represent all eligible defendants.
Down - and Up: On Dec. 8, the Missouri Supreme Court handed down its unanimous opinion, which tossed out the administrative rules that sought to allow public defenders to refuse certain types of cases. But opinion author Judge Michael A. Wolff shoved open the door to a new option: Public defender offices can't refuse some cases and take others, but particularly burdened offices can refuse to take any new cases.
System leaders aren't sure how this new option will play out, but they're prepared close several offices to new clients.
Melton, the assistant public defender in St. Louis City, said his office will likely not be among those closing its doors. The office tries more cases than the rest of the state put together, he noted, but to him, the office doesn't seem completely overloaded. If a defender works hard to manage his own caseload and communicates with judges and prosecutors, then the job can be done, he said. Melton said budget constraints have never hampered his representation of a client.
"We do what we have to do," Melton said. "In an ideal situation, we'd all want to have more resources and more money.
"But I've never told a client, 'We can't do this' or 'we can't talk to this person' or 'we can't pursue this theory' ... because of a lack of resources. "
