PHILADELPHIA – In case you missed it, The Legal Intelligencer published a story about Philadelphia’s efforts to update their long outdated fee agreement and pay system for court-appointed indigent defense attorneys as part of the MacArthur Challenge. The full text of the article can be viewed below.
Committee Convened to Eye Conflict Counsel Fee Agreement
The Legal Intelligencer // Max Mitchell
The First Judicial District has named a committee to review and possibly revamp portions of the fee agreement and pay system for court-appointed indigent defense attorneys that have not been updated for about two decades.
The committee, composed of several judicial leaders, defense attorneys and representatives from the Philadelphia city government, met for the first time last month to begin the process of potentially revising the Modified Guarantee Fee System, which sets the amounts that conflict counsel attorneys will be paid for representing indigent defendants.
“We recognize that this fee structure has not been looked at for many years, and we need to make sure that lawyers who are representing indigent clients are adequately compensated,” Common Pleas Trial Division President Judge Sheila Woods-Skipper said. “This is not an exercise in futility.”
Woods-Skipper, who is chairwoman of the committee, said she hopes the committee will be able to have a proposal that can be presented to Mayor Jim Kenney by either the end of the year or early 2017.
Payment for the court-appointed defense bar has been problematic and a source of tension within the city’s judicial system for several years, with some lawyers claiming the payments are often subject to long delays and others saying that portions of the fees were being slashed.
Although some attorneys said they continue to have concerns about the issues, which have lingered almost as long as the current fee system has been in place, everyone agreed that convening the committee should be a significant step toward resolving the problems.
“It’s pretty much the general consensus that it needs to be overhauled, that the fees need to be increased,” said James F. Berardinelli, a criminal defense attorney who is serving on the committee. “The question is what the numbers will look like.”
Although the fee system, which is called the Modified Guaranteed Fee System, was updated in 1997 and fees for capital cases were increased in the past five years, many of the fees have not been increased since the 1990s.
“One of the things that was really a shock is how big of an effect inflation has had,” Berardinelli said, noting that the committee is expecting to reach out to defense attorneys who work in the arena to get their input about how to best tackle the payment issues. “The more voices that are heard from, the better.”
Woods-Skipper is joined on the committee by several members of the bench, including Municipal Court Judge Marsha H. Neifield and Court of Common Pleas Trial Division Administrative Judge Jacqueline Allen.
Former Common Pleas Judge Benjamin Lerner, who has worked as deputy managing director for criminal justice within the city of Philadelphia’s Public Safety Department since the spring, will represent the city’s interest on the committee. The Public Safety Department oversees the Counsel Fee Unit, which is responsible for processing payments for court-appointed attorneys.
Ronald L. Greenblatt of Greenblatt, Pierce, Engle, Funt & Flores, who serves on the executive committee of the Philadelphia chapter of the Pennsylvania Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said he was pleased to hear that Lerner, who was the city’s chief public defender from 1975 until 1990, will be on the committee. Convening the committee, Greenblatt said, is a step in the right direction.
“I think that it’s a very good start. They have some very good people on this committee, and we hope that they will come up with a solution quickly to solve what has been a real crisis for indigent defendants,” Greenblatt said.
Greenblatt noted that over the past few years attorneys have been leaving the court-appointed ranks because of low pay, delays in payment and other issues. The issue has been especially acute when it comes to court-appointed attorneys doing criminal appeals under the Post-Conviction Relief Act. In the spring it was revealed that there was a backlog of at least 600 PCRA cases pending, and fewer than 10 attorneys on the court-appointed list equipped to handle those cases.
“The PCRA crisis cannot be solved with just money,” Greenblatt said. “There needs to be systemic changes in the way that they’re handled.”
News of the PCRA backlog came after complaints about payment problems with the court-appointed system in general appeared to be on the rise.
Lerner, who, in 2012, reviewed the payment system for capital cases and recommended the fee increase, has been involved with the issue since his move into the Public Safety Department. He said he is continuing to handle individual complaints as they arise while the committee works to resolve the payment issues going forward.
“While we’re working on revising the fee system, my office is attempting to review and resolve any individual disputes about reimbursements,” Lerner said. “My sense is that we’re making progress here because I am receiving significantly fewer individual complaints than I was hearing about, or reading about last year and early this year.”
Max Mitchell can be contacted at 215-557-2354 or mmitchell@alm.com. Follow him on Twitter @MMitchellTLI.