The quality of legal services for New York City's poor defendants continues to decline. The city has steadily reduced its contributions to the Legal Aid Society, the main nonprofit agency providing representation for indigent defendants, even as caseloads have grown. A recent report from a court-appointed committee shows how desperate the situation has become.
Legal Aid's troubles go back to a disastrous four-day strike in 1994 that prompted Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to retaliate by farming out some of the public-defender work to other nonprofit groups. Since then City Hall has steadily cut Legal Aid's funding from $79 million in 1994 to roughly $52 million this year, based on the assumption that the agency's workload would drop accordingly. But the decline did not materialize. Instead, the agency has been representing nearly the same number of clients for far fewer dollars.
Legal Aid's arrangement with the city requires it to represent poor criminal defendants for a fixed contract price. But Mr. Giuliani's vigorous pursuit of quality-of-life crimes has produced many more cases than expected. The average lawyer in the agency's Manhattan office is assigned some 650 criminal cases a year, a breathtakingly high number that makes proper representation extremely difficult if not impossible. The other defender agencies have city contracts for a fixed number of cases.
The court-appointed panel calls it ''imperative'' that the city change its contract with Legal Aid to limit the caseload or provide more funding. The City Council allocated an extra $10 million to the Legal Aid Society in the fiscal 1999 budget, but Mr. Giuliani has refused to release the money. The new report shows that the agency needs more resources to meet the city's constitutional obligation to provide legal services for the accused.