Reno Launches NLADA American Council of Chief Defenders

U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno helped inaugurate the nation's first leadership council of chief defenders at a conference in Washington DC on August 28-29. She met at the Justice Department with 60 representatives of the American Council of Chief Defenders (ACCD), a newly constituted section of NLADA, to discuss topics including parity of resources between prosecution and defense, student loan forgiveness and defender concerns about problem-solving courts.

Reno also presented the ACCD's newly created Robert F. Kennedy Award for extraordinary contributions to the field of indigent defense by a criminal justice system leader other than a defender. The award was presented to Nancy Gist, director of DOJ's state-and-local grant-making arm, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, who is a former director of the Massachusetts assigned counsel program and a former member of the NLADA board of directors.

The meeting came on the heels of a massive DOJ-funded national symposium on indigent defense, held in June and attended by defenders, prosecutors, judges and justices, legislators, county and court executives, and other key criminal justice system leaders from every state in the nation [see story below].

It was at the June symposium that Reno committed to helping launch the ACCD. The ACCD was formally established as a section by the NLADA Board of Directors on July 17, to provide the defender community with a platform equal to that of national groups of chief justices, chiefs of police and chief prosecutors in public education, legislative debates, and established channels of access at the highest levels of the justice system, including the Attorney General.

The ACCD's stated mission is to secure a fair justice system by advocating sound public policy and ensuring quality legal representation of indigent people facing a loss of liberty or accused of a crime. Goals include promoting defender independence, resource parity and a seat at the table with the other criminal justice agency leadership groups for every discussion of criminal justice policies or funding.

"The creation of the ACCD, and the commitment of NLADA and the attorney general, comes at a time of a crisis of public confidence in the accuracy, fairness and integrity of the criminal justice system," Cook County (Illinois) Public Defender and ACCD Co-Chair Rita Fry said in a press release. "It reflects a rising tide of public concern about convictions of the innocent and the competence and effectiveness of legal representation for the poor."

Fry told Reno that the 60 chief defenders present at the meeting represent some 9,000 employees, providing indigent defense services to some 2.5 million clients every year. The chief defenders told Reno of disparate treatment of clients in various types of "problem-solving courts," such as drug courts and domestic violence courts, and presented her with a draft of 10 principles they recommended to ensure that such courts afford equal participation to defenders and protect clients' rights. Dade County Public Defender Bennett Brummer commended Reno for incorporating all 10 of when they worked together on designing the nation's first drug court in Miami in 1989. Reno expressed approval of the principles, while singling out one, the fifth: that an accused individual should not be required to plead guilty in order to enter a problem-solving court -- which she said may be too lenient for a serious violent offender in a domestic violence court.

The chief defenders also presented Reno with a variety of real-life stories about the impact of disparities and staffing between prosecution and defense. Several speakers addressed the crushing burden of student loan payments for committed young staff attorneys, the resulting recruitment and retention problems, the unfairness of prosecutor access to loan forgiveness under the federal Perkins loan program, and the need for legislation granting equal defender access [see "Defender Loan Forgiveness Passed By House," page 15]. Columbia, South Carolina, Public Defender Lee Coggiola told of walking to work each morning past the $26 million National Advocacy Center, which provides free, Congressionally-funded training for federal and local prosecutors, only to arrive at her office and struggle with how to divide up a $1,500 training budget for her entire staff of 14 lawyers.

Reno expressed preference for the concept of deferring, rather than forgiving, student loan obligations of both defenders and prosecutors. Unlike other categories of public service that qualify for student loan forgiveness, such as teachers, police, or nurses, Reno said she was concerned that lawyers - both prosecutors and public defenders - have a fallback option for paying off burdensome loans: leaving public service and entering lucrative private practice. She left the door open to working together on loan-deferral legislation - i.e., a moratorium on payment and on the accrual of interest as long as an individual remains in the field of indigent defense.

Reno agreed to work with the leadership of the Conference of Chief Justices and the National District Attorneys Association to gain their support for the concept of defender parity, including convening a meeting of all three groups in her office as a formal "Courts Group" that future attorneys general might be encouraged to continue. On training, she offered to look into defender utilization of the prosecutor college in South Carolina for some portion of the year.

On problem-solving courts, Reno agreed to take a public defender with her as she continues to tour different problem-solving courts around the country, to spotlight for the media and the other justice-system players the integral role of defenders. The group also asked her to consider integrating its Ten Tenets into DOJ guidelines for local jurisdictions receiving federal grants to support problem-solving courts. Reno agreed to meet again with the ACCD while in office, and to continue her work on behalf of indigent defense after end of her term in office.

In presenting the Robert F. Kennedy Award to her friend and former indigent defense leader Nancy Gist, Reno said that "it is great fun for me to extend this recognition on behalf of the chief defenders of this nation."

Expressing great pride and pleasure in the creation of the ACCD and in being selected to receive its first award, Gist told the gathering, "This recognition for this work on this issue from this group will be by far the most meaningful of my tenure here in the DOJ."

The Robert F. Kennedy Award honors the first U.S. Attorney General to make indigent defense a priority, including designing the first federal indigent defense program - the Criminal Justice Act - in 1963, the year that Gideon v. Wainwright was handed down. In a letter to NLADA, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., an environmental activist and law professor in New York, wrote of his "sincerest appreciation to the American Council of Chief Defenders and its parent organization, the National Legal Aid and Defender Association, for thinking of my father in connection with this cause he valued so highly."

As Kennedy wrote to NLADA, the award, which will be given annually by the ACCD, "is, appropriately, not just about indigent defense and not just given to a public defender. Rather, it is about the responsibility of other criminal justice system leaders to do all they can to promote quality indigent defense, funded in parity with the prosecution, to ensure a fair trial and protect the innocent. It is about bringing other criminal justice system leaders together, to say jointly to legislatures, executive branch officials, and other policymakers, that the problem of underfunded or inadequate indigent defense is not just a problem for indigent defendants, but a problem for our democracy."