Court Budget Cutting Defenses

Tools

Story Published: Nov 18, 2009 at 7:17 PM PDT

By Peter Bukowski

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YAKIMA -- Court Administrator Harold Delia's message was clear,"Will we be doing more with less? No. We will be doing less with less and that's gonna be a problem for everybody."

If you think the county's budget problems don't effect you, what happens when you need help and neither you nor the county can pay for it? Or worse yet a dangerous criminals released on appeal, all because there's not money to provide sufficient defense?

"A lawyer is only as good as the tools that he or she has," says Department of Assigned Counsel Director Dan Fessler. "Not providing adequate attorneys, adequate tools, we could see convictions even in very serious cases, perhaps especially in serious cases be coming back to do ours over again. And nobody in this system can afford do-overs."

That may be an understatement, given the courts are struggling to get through their current case load. Now, budget cuts will take away at least six attorneys from the public defender's office, increasing workloads for everyone else.

"With 3/10ths, quite frankly we set a pretty high standard and we met it. I'm hoping we don't have to back away from that. But the general public may see some backing away from that," Delia says.

If people don't have faith in the system, the courts could lose some of their force, especially if innocent people are going to jail or criminals are going free.

"One of the problems we see in the system, because the people who are working in it are good people, is that it tends to work until it fails and when it fails it tends to go like a bridge:boom," Fessler explains.

And the crash of a system designed to keep criminals behind bars is exactly what the county is hoping to avoid.

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