NLADA training and technical assistance (TTA) providers conducted the second of two routine site visits to Alameda County, California in early August 2017, and found a recent change in court processing threatening to derail gains made the Public Defender Office's (PDO) Innovative Solutions in Public Defense project.  

 

At the direction of the Alameda County Presiding Judge, in July 2017 all arraignments were centralized and held in the newly opened East County Hall of Justice, located in Dublin, a suburban town 23 miles from Oakland.  Previously arraignments were held at one of several county courthouses; whichever was closest to the inciting arrest.  By far most arraignments of PDO clients occurred in Oakland at the Wiley W. Manuel Courthouse.  The new East County court was first designed by the California Judicial Council in the 1990s, but the lengthy approvals and building process was only completed in 2017.  As soon as centralized arraignments began, it became apparent the court lacked proper specifications to effectively handle the large volume of cases. 

 

Difficulties from the Public Defender Office's perspective included a lack of adequate private meeting space for attorneys to interview clients before arraignment, delay getting initial discovery from the District Attorney's office across town, and difficulty even producing clients at the court by the Sheriff.  These system challenges affected the ability of the PDO to represent clients at their first appearance, and a number of defendants had to proceed without benefit of counsel.  After having the dubious distinction of being the only one of California's largest counties that did not provide counsel at arraignment, the sole focus of the Alameda County PDO's Innovative Solutions project is to provide public defender representation to clients at arraignment, and to document the effect of that representation.  The court reorganization directly threatened that initiative.

 

Public Defender Brendon Woods spearheaded a community campaign to call attention to the issues and to urge the Presiding Judge to return Oakland arraignments to the Oakland courthouse.  A key point in rallying the community was the inaccessibility of the Dublin court to family members, friends and loved ones of public defender clients, most of whom are from the Oakland area.  Eventually, the campaign paid off.  As of September 25, felony arraignments were returned to Oakland, greatly easing the difficulties plaguing the East County court.  While misdemeanor arraignments still remain there, far fewer misdemeanor than felony clients are detained, and clients can visit the PDO at its Oakland office. 

 

If you'd like to learn more about the relocation and return of the hearings, additional information can be found  here.

 

NLADA's site visit allowed the TTA team to see first-hand how changes in arraignment location contributed to disorganization and miscommunication among criminal justice stakeholders in the area. T he project team attributes these challenges to a lack of collaboration and discussion among state and county court officials, and other justice system stakeholders, during the change's planning process.  Notably, Alameda County does not have a criminal justice coordinating committee.

 

A year-long, pilot mentoring program for private assigned counsel, developed with technical assistance from NLADA, is now underway in Westchester County, New York.  Modeled on a program developed by NLADA for the Texas Indigent Defense Commission in 2015, the program includes group trainings and structured, one-on-one mentoring.  Housed at the Legal Aid Society of Westchester County (LASW) Assigned Counsel Resource Center, the program was designed in collaboration with the New York State Office of Indigent Legal Services (ILS) and the Westchester County Bar Association.  Starting small with a pilot group, the goal is to eventually foster a community of private attorneys who provide high quality, client-centered representation to their court-appointed clients in Westchester County.  Ideally, the model will be replicable in other New York counties by the ILS.

For this initial cohort, the supervisor of the Assigned Counsel Plan (ACP) at LASW developed a competitive  online application process and selected five mentors and ten mentees.  The practice focus is misdemeanors, as in Westchester County, Legal Aid Society staff attorneys handle felony cases, while assigned counsel handle misdemeanors and felony conflict cases.  The mentors are seasoned attorneys who attended two days of intensive "train the trainers" sessions where they received instruction in adult learning principles and techniques to help them impart their knowledge to mentees in a respectful, relevant fashion.  The mentors also created sessions to deliver at an initial week-long training session for the mentees.  Among other things, the initial week of training included sessions on client-centered representation, story-telling, effective client interviewing, bail applications, and mental health courts, and featured visits to the local jail and forensics lab.

Mentors will work one-on-one with mentees using a curriculum drawn from a core, twelve-module program that is individualized for each mentee's particular needs (see an example from Texas here). In addition to one-on-one mentoring, the mentors will hold bi-monthly group trainings for the full group on topics relating to local practice.  First up, for example, will be a session on assessing sufficiency of accusatory instruments, discovery, and motions practice.  CLE credit will be awarded for the trainings, which will be held at a local restaurant.  The informal setting is intentional, as developing community and connection is as much a goal of the project as is developing professional skills of mentees, who are solo practitioners.  

The Contra Costa County, California Public Defender Office's (CCPDO) Innovative Solutions in Public Defense project, the Misdemeanor Early Release Program (MERP), continues to make strong progress in reducing the number of Failure to Appear (FTA) warrants issued on cite-and-release cases.  Before the start of the program, which partners the CCPDO and the Richmond Police Department in west Contra Costa County, FTAs were issued in 52% of Richmond cite-and-release misdemeanor cases after the cited individuals missed their initial court appearance.  MERP has reduced the FTA rate by two-thirds to 17%.  A second city, Antioch, whose police department began teaming with CCPDO even before the BJA Innovative Solutions MERP grant was awarded in 2016, has seen a decline in FTA rate from  57 % to 27%.

 

Data show that in Richmond, of those people who did appear at their initial court appearance, almost half (47%) appeared as a direct result of the CCPDO's affirmative outreach program.  Under MERP, at the point of issuing citations, Richmond police also hand individuals a bright yellow card with information on how to contact the PDO before their initial court date.  In addition, police share information with the PDO on all cited cases that are filed for prosecution, which the PDO then uses to reach out to people, through letter and text message, prior to their initial court date.  Since the project launch in February 2017, CCPDO has served 449 people.  This represents a win all around: for the individuals who did not fail to show and were therefore not arrested on an FTA warrant; for the Richmond police department, whose officers did not have to serve warrants and process those arrested; and for the court and district attorney in not having to expend time and resources on FTA warrant arrest cases.

 

The program has been so successful that two other police departments are interested in joining in the MERP effort: the San Pablo Police Department in the west county area and the Concord Police Department in the central part of the county.  CCPDO has applied for grant funding under California's AB109 prison population reduction initiative to expand MERP into the central county area.  CCPDO, in partnership with the Concord Police Department, will be appearing before the county in the coming weeks to formally present its proposal.

• In September, both the Wisconsin Reporting Analysis and Monitoring Project (RAMP) and the Texas A.C.T. Smart web portal project were featured at NLADA's Defender Research Consortium gathering in Las Vegas, Nevada.  Funded by the Open Society Foundations, this event brings together researchers, defenders, analysts, technologists, and others to discuss ways to increase and improve research about indigent defense systems.  A major focus was on how to assess "quality indigent defense."  In both Wisconsin and Texas, the Innovative Solutions projects entail putting "quality indicators" into place to assess indigent defense system performance. 

• On November 2, the Contra Costa County Misdemeanor Early Representation Project (MERP) will be featured at BJA's Right to Counsel Campaign convening at the Office of Justice Programs in Washington, DC.  

• Both MERP and the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy's Innovative Solutions project will be featured on November 15 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology (ASC) in Philadelphia.  This will be the fourth consecutive year in which research and data in legal services for the indigent have been featured in a "conference within a conference," organized by the Indigent Defense Research Association, at ASC's annual meeting.

• Finally, both RAMP and the Alameda County Public Defender Office's Innovative Solutions project will be featured December 7 at a panel during the NLADA Annual Conference in Washington, DC.