From the LV Sun, by Tom Gorman, photo by Leila Navidi:
Long arm of the law wouldn’t fit in his office - Public defender thrives on job that’s part tough love
The small, windowless office where public defender Ben Saxe works isn’t much bigger than a jail cell...
From the Nevada Appeal:
From medicine to law, new State Public Defender is just trying to help
For 17 years, Diane Crow has worked for the State Public Defender's Office in Carson City handling everything from trespassing to capital murder cases. On Thursday, Gov. Jim Gibbons appointed Crow to a four year term as head of the office...
"I've always seen this as a service oriented profession," she said. "It's just like medicine. You help people that need help."
From KVBC in Las Vegas:
Two public defenders arrested
News 3 has learned two public defenders were arrested over the weekend...
Damn shame, but not bad-looking mugshots, considering. I hope they'll be able to keep their careers on track; the female p.d. was admitted in Nevada in 2004, the male p.d. in 2005. At a public hearing in December, he told the state Supreme Court:
"After those cases start piling up, you can't do anything near what you need to do," he said. "I can't convey to you what it means to put blood, sweat, and tears into a job and come home every night knowing you're a failure."
It's enough to drive a p.d. to drink.
This post reminded me...
(A) bunch of public defenders in Las Vegas? I'm guessing (a) the parties will be good; and (b) there may be booty to be had.
It's getting to be time to sign up for the 8th Annual Public Defender Retreat:
A yearly gathering of public and private criminal defense attorneys, investigators, staff, law students, spouses, or anyone with a Public Defender Attitude.
"Public Defender Attitude" If you have to ask what that is... you probably don't have one!
And for cheap! One year I sent some lawyers and staff from the Twin Falls office; no arrests were made.
The Nevada caucuses are on Saturday. If you're a Nevadan, Vito De La Cruz - Community Leader would like you to vote for Barack Obama.
I noticed that the first version of the endorsement read, "Vito De La Cruz- Public Defender, Community Leader." The current version from the Obama campaign has scrubbed the "Public Defender" part of the caption. You know me, always looking for the slightest slight to the p.d. profession. Oh well, if it helps Barack pick up an extra delegate over Hillary in Elko County, well then, go right and slight us I suppose.
Nonetheless, cool guy, Vito De La Cruz. He's an assistant federal public defender in Reno, instructor at NCDC, and lecturer on the NACDL tape, "Cross-Cultural Communications: I Know You Don't Like Me, Just Give Me What I'm Entitled To." He also has a CD out.
When we lived in Yakima and De La Cruz practiced there, I was impressed when I saw him in action a few times. My wife only saw him once, but once enough to count: it was just before she ran him over at the intersection of N. 3rd St. and Chestnut (in her defense, my wife would like you to know that he may not have been in the crosswalk at the time).
Elko County, Nevada, is looking for a deputy public defender.
If memory serves, seems that they were looking for one about this time last year.
Elko is lovely this time of year. 
Private indigent defense contractors going for the gravy, from the Las Vegas Review-Journal:
Nye experience highlights system flaws
If not for Henderson defense attorney David Neely, some court proceedings in Nye County might come to a standstill. The county so relies on Neely to take indigent cases that he earned $150,000 in fees during a recent one-year period. That was without ever going to trial...
Though the state created a public defender office for rural counties in 1971, it pays for only about 20 percent of the indigent cases in those counties. In fact only four counties and Carson City even use the office... David Carroll, research director for the National Legal Aid and Defender Association in Washington, D.C., puts it simply: "The state system (in Nevada) is failing..."
Citing concerns over cost, quality, and turnover rate, Nye County left the state public defender system in 1993. At the time, one lawyer covered the entire county, which is the third largest geographically in the continental United States. Currently, Nye employs a four-lawyer firm based in Pahrump on a flat-fee $490,000-a-year contract for an unlimited number of indigent cases.
The contract violates several American Bar Association guidelines for indigent defense delivery. It doesn't provide allowances for travel or hiring of investigators, nor does it limit the amount of privately retained work the firm may do. No extra compensation is paid for work on serious felony cases such as murder and sexual assault. "The contract's enough to pay the rent and bills, and then we can go for the gravy, which is the private work," said Jason Earnest, the firm's head lawyer...
Link via Harmful Error, "Rural counties struggle to provide defense for indigents"
From the bad old days of the Clark County (Las Vegas) public defenders office...
to today: Nevada crim law blog Harmful Error links to the local paper's recent series on LV's contract attorney system for conflicts. It ain't pretty.
Here's another post of note from Harmless Error on a Nevada habeas win for a factually innocent client.
Elko County, Nevada has an opening for a deputy public defender:
Nevada bar license is preferred, but is NOT required, as long as the applicant is a licensed member of the bar, in good standing, from another state. Nevada Supreme Court Rule 49.9 allows for a Deputy Public Defender in a rural Nevada county to be waived in to practice for up to 2 years pending passage of the Nevada bar exam. The starting salary is $50,000 to $60,000 per year...
Doesn't suck. The Ruby Mountains are beautiful, particularly around Lamoille. I'm partial to Jarbidge and its surroundings. There's the famous cowboy poetry slam. And Basque food... mmm, Basque food. Plus, it's 2 hours or less to that true meeting point of Northeastern Nevadans, the Costco in Twin Falls, Idaho.
The Nye County commissioners are looking for "competitive proposals." From the Pahrump Valley Times:
Lawyers compete for public defender deal
Pahrump attorney Carl Joerger made a pitch for the Nye County public defender contact currently held by attorney Jason Earnest...
Commissioners will have to advertise for qualified applicants quickly as Earnest's contract expires June 30. The current three-year contract for Earnest and three attorneys is $420,000 per year. Earnest is seeking to sign a three- to five-year public defender contract through June 30, 2009...
Earnest told commissioners... (h)is team includes Harry Kuehn... and Tom Gibson... Both Kuehn and Gibson are certified to handle capital murder cases, Earnest said, which could be handy as he expects more violent offenders with a growth in murders and methamphetamine use. Earnest said the caseload for the Pahrump Justice Court increased from 532 cases in all of 2003 to 810 cases in just the first four months of 2006...
Joerger submitted an offer for $240,000 for three attorneys.
Such a deal!
Some background: Nye County's population has ranged from approximately 38,000 to 47,000 in the first years of this decade. The current private attorney contractor there has charged Nye County $420,000 per year for himself and three other attorneys. In that same period, I managed a public defender office as a department of county government in a county of 66,000 people. My budget averaged approximately $465,000 per year for me and five, later six, attorneys. Just saying.
Las Vegas newspapers report on new Clark County Public Defender Phil Kohn's recent move to put the brakes on the prosecution's former practice of offering take-it-or-leave-it offers at initial appearances to defendants with charges as serious as felonies, and the resulting pressure on p.d's to plead mere minutes after meeting the client. At least one judge has come up with an improved system he calls the early offer calendar, which still looks like a cattle call from the outside, but sounds like a step in the right direction:
More to the point, Phil Kohn sounds like he's moving Vegas indigent defense in the right direction all around. It's a huge turnaround since the bad old days when management ran Nevada's biggest criminal defense firm as Nevada's biggest dumptruck lot. You'll recall the debacle surrounding the old chief's dereliction, reported to have included fighting harder for Anglo than Latino clients as a virtual office policy, and using in-house polygraphs to decide which murder clients deserved a vigorous defense and which didn't. This summer Clark County paid out $5 million to a poor murder defendant, now exonerated, who was up on the row for 14 years thanks to prior management. Here's wishing new management and all the colleagues in LV best wishes for the battles ahead.
