Chief Judge Highlights Some Of His Failures

State’s Chief Judge Pledges More Aid for Poor in Courts
The New York Times by Thomas Kaplan  -  May 2, 2011

ALBANY, NY — New York’s chief judge, Jonathan Lippman, on Monday called the state’s routine failure to provide lawyers for poor criminal defendants being arraigned in local courts a problem that “can no longer be tolerated,” and pledged to remedy the situation within a year. Judge Lippman, in a speech at the State Court of Appeals, said too many New Yorkers were needlessly spending nights in jail after appearing without legal counsel at criminal arraignments in small-town and village courthouses. He vowed that the state would spend $10 million in an effort to improve the availability of legal defense provided to the poor. “The arraignment and pretrial jailing of defendants who are not represented by counsel is a fundamental failure that can no longer be tolerated in a modern, principled society governed by the rule of law,” Judge Lippman said. The grant disbursement will be the first major initiative of the State Office of Indigent Legal Services, created last year by Gov. David A. Paterson and the State Legislature with the charge of improving the quality of legal representation provided to indigent defendants. The office will ask counties to propose low-cost ways to finance the legal defense work, like centralizing arraignments or allowing lawyers to consult with defendants by telephone or computer. State judicial officials said that they did not know the percentage of criminal defendants who lacked lawyers at their first appearances in court, but that they believed that such situations were widespread upstate. The director of the Office of Indigent Legal Services, William Leahy, said some public defenders in rural areas first learn whom they will represent by checking with local jails each morning to see who was locked up overnight. Judge Lippman said that within a year he hoped to make it rare for criminal defendants to lack counsel at their first court appearances. But he acknowledged that that timeline was ambitious, given that officials had called for overhauling the town and village court system for decades with limited success. Derek P. Champagne, the Franklin County district attorney and the president of the District Attorneys Association of the State of New York, said he was cautiously optimistic about the initiative. He noted that in many cases it was difficult even for prosecutors to attend arraignments in rural areas.  “I completely agree with the principle,” he said. “But in practicality, I think it’s something that needs an awful lot of research and an awful lot of money.”