County’s defense of child suspects blasted; ACLU threatens lawsuit

Molly Ball

Friday, July 9, 2004 | 10:57 a.m.

The American Civil Liberties Union is threatening to sue Clark County, saying the county fails to provide adequate defense to children accused of crimes.

Robin Dahlberg, a senior staff attorney for the civil liberties group headquartered in New York, sent a letter to Assistant County Manager Catherine Cortez Masto on July 1.

"Despite your assurances to the contrary, Clark County has failed to remedy the egregious under-staffing of the Juvenile Division of its Public Defender Office," the letter states.

"The current situation is intolerable and demands immediate attention," Dahlberg writes.

"We hope the County will do what it must to ensure that the constitutional rights of juveniles are properly protected," she adds. "Otherwise, we will be forced to move forward with litigation."

The threat comes on the heels of a $5 million settlement the county recently agreed to pay Roberto Miranda, who was wrongly convicted of murder and spent 14 years on death row before having his conviction overturned.

His lawsuit alleged that inadequate representation by the public defender's office, which supplies lawyers to those who cannot afford them, led to his conviction. Because a settlement was reached, a judge never ruled on Miranda's claim.

The ACLU letter cited the settlement's cost as reason to make sure the Public Defender's office Juvenile Division gets more lawyers.

"The Division's ongoing lack of resources should be cause for the same kind of concern among taxpayers who could be stuck with a similar bill the next time someone falls through the cracks of an inadequate indigent defense system," the letter warned.

Nevada ACLU Executive Director Gary Peck also warned that multimillion-dollar lawsuits could be ahead if the juvenile defense problems are not addressed.

"Not only is it important to bring staff levels up where they should be because people's constitutional rights are at risk, but also because taxpayer dollars are at stake," Peck said.

While a private insurer will pay out all of the $5 million Miranda settlement, the county is now self-insured up to $2 million, said Bob Mulroy, the county's director of risk management and safety.

"The quicker the county is able to come up with the funds (for additional juvenile defenders), the better off our kids will be, and the less vulnerable we'll be to lawsuits," Clark County Public Defender Phil Kohn said on Thursday.

Kohn said the county should be willing to "pay for this because it's the right thing to do -- because not only rich people deserve justice; poor kids do too."

If the county isn't willing to invest in more public defenders for juveniles "it'll also cost us money in the long run, in lawsuits," Kohn said.

Kohn was hired in March to take over the troubled public defender's office.

Cortez Masto said the county was working as fast as possible to fix the situation but would not take any special measures to respond to the letter, other than drafting a reply together with Kohn.

"We are committed to putting resources into the public defender's office, including the juvenile unit," she said.

Cortez Masto pointed out that the juvenile division has come a long way since a damning report last year. The report, commissioned by the county and conducted by the National Legal Aid and Defender Association, found: "Juvenile representation is beyond the crisis point and requires immediate attention to avert constitutional challenges of ineffective assistance of counsel."

The report found that the average juvenile accused of a crime spent less than two hours with his public defender.

At the time of the report, the juvenile division had just two attorneys, whose caseloads were more than seven times the nationally recommended standard amount, and four support staffers. Now, the division has 10 attorneys and 13 support staff members, Cortez Masto said.

Dahlberg's letter claims that the county promised to bring the number of attorneys up to 16. "Clark County's failure to carry through on its prior promises...is deeply disappointing and causes us considerable concern," it states.

Cortez Masto denied that promise was made and said 16 was a recommendation for 2004 made by the National Legal Aid and Defender Association in September.

"There are national standards, but those are goalposts or mile markers," Cortez Masto said. "They're not necessarily reality, because the way we do business is not necessarily the same as all the other public defenders."

Adding too many new attorneys at once could lead to chaos and put pressures on office space, Cortez Masto said.

Peck said the county needed to move faster. "While there has been some progress made and I applaud that progress, it has not been nearly enough and it has not been nearly quick enough," he said.

"I understand there are real fiscal limits and constraints the county has to work with," he added. "But you cannot put a price tag on people's constitutional rights."

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that, based on the Sixth and 14th Amendments, states are constitutionally obligated to provide lawyers for defendants who cannot afford them.

Even the allegedly promised 16 attorneys is no longer enough, Peck said, because of an increasing number of cases coming to the office.

The ACLU letter estimates that each juvenile division attorney's caseload is still around 600, three times the national standard of 200.

But the situation used to be much worse, said Assembly Majority Leader Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas, a lawyer for the nonprofit Clark County Legal Services who served on a county task force on indigent defense.

"The county has done more in the last year than in all the other years I've seen," Buckley said.

Previous public defenders often shunted resources away from the juvenile division, but it ought to be the office's top priority, she said.

"These are troubled kids where maybe, if they get the right intervention, you might be able to save a child and prevent them from going down the wrong path," she said.