From the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:
The Allegheny County Public Defender’s Office is scrambling to reassign hundreds of cases after five attorneys quit in the past six weeks.
Chief Public Defender Michael Machen said the five departing trial lawyers are leaving more than 600 cases to be reassigned. Replacements have been hired but it will take time to train them, Machen said.
“We’ve been able to reassign a lot of cases internally,” Machen said. “I’m not going to send an unprepared attorney to court. I won’t do it.”
Most of the cases that are not reassigned internally will be given to private attorneys, leaving taxpayers to cover thousands of dollars in attorneys fees.
Total costs won’t be known until the private attorneys submit bills, but one factor that can influence the cost is whether a defendant enters a plea or opts for a trial. A lawyer can bill up to $750 for a guilty plea and more for trials, said Helen Lynch, administrator of the county Common Pleas criminal division.
The county is responsible for providing legal representation to indigent defendants.
“We don’t want what’s happening at the Public Defender’s Office to affect the administration of justice,” Lynch said. “If we didn’t (appoint private attorneys), the public defender would postpone the cases. That’s not fair to the people in jail, and the county would have to pay to house them there.”
Common Pleas Judge Donna Jo McDaniel, who leads the criminal division, agreed to allow some cases — 98 so far — to be reassigned through the county’s Office of Conflict Counsel, which includes four county attorneys who handle indigent cases when the public defender has a conflict.
That office will absorb roughly 30 of the cases and assign the rest to private attorneys, said Richard Narvin, head of conflict counsel.
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