What’s often obvious to people on the inside of the onion gets subsumed in layers of obfuscation to the outsiders.  I wouldn’t have thought this true of indigent defense, but apparently I would be wrong. 

Newsday has an editorial today about indigent defense.  That’s not just a good thing, but a great thing.  Issues like this rarely make it onto the radar unless there’s some tragedy or scandal that commands attention.  This popped up organically, without any particular screams for change.

Unfortunately, the news is not all good.  Indigent defense in New York, aside from the past issues of exceptionally poor pay to the lawyers providing it, and the state having made it an unfunded mandate, suffers from lack of oversight, highly inconsistent quality, wasteful expense and occasional abuse.  It’s a barely a system at all, more like the longest running ad hoc show in town.

Recognizing that indigent defense failed to satisfy the true meaning of Gideon, Chief Judge Judy Kaye put together a commission to come up with a better system, a real system.  The outcome was announced by Judge Kaye in 2007. The state needed an independent Indigent Defense Commission to operate a statewide system that could provide education, oversight, support and control to the provision of services to the poor.  It would save money and drastically improve the quality of representation. 

Apparently, Albany has finally taken the idea and ran with it.  Sideways.  Albany has come up with the brainstorm that they need for form an “independent commission,” not to run and manage the system, but to study the system.

Legislation initiated in the Assembly would create an independent public defender commission to dissect the system’s inadequacies. It would report to the legislature what it would take to ensure an adequate, independent legal defense, what it would cost and how to get there from here. It’s a journey that officials need to take.

While I appreciate Newsday taking any interest in the subject at all, do they not have anyone around that newspaper who actually reads it?  Don’t they know that this was already completed, and the results are in? 

While the editorial writers of Newsday may have their hearts in the right place, their heads are somewhere else.  It’s been studied.  It has the support of the court system.  It has the support of the bar associations.  It’s a no-brainer.  We need the commission to run it.  What we don’t need is another commission to study it. 

The only thing this guarantees is that another few years will pass, and another thousands more indigent defendants will be prosecuted without adequate representation, and millions of dollars will be flushed down the toilet, and we will find ourselves right back at the starting line.  Wonderful.