William Melhado for the Texas Tribune reports under the headline, "In rural counties, Texas law puts low-income defendants at a disadvantage." The subhead is, "A two-tiered system gives less populated counties more time to provide court-appointed lawyers, requiring creative responses to a long-standing problem."
Here's an excerpt:
While indigent residents — those who can’t afford an attorney — of counties with more than 250,000 people must be provided with a court-appointed lawyer within one day of requesting counsel, the wait for rural Texans could stretch up to five days.
Lawmakers approved this system 22 years ago, in part to address a long-standing problem — a persistent shortage of lawyers working in rural Texas — by requiring counties to create appointment procedures and establish qualifications for attorneys representing indigent clients.
The law, however, also gave the state’s less populous counties more time to assign a court-appointed attorney, jeopardizing the right to legal representation as guaranteed by the U.S. and Texas constitutions.
“That’s changing the law to make the problem legal. It’s not fixing the problem,” said Pamela Metzger, a law professor and director of the Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
For low-income residents of almost 200 rural counties, where few if any lawyers may practice, delays in representation can translate into more time in jail and rushed plea deals — both of which can lead to loss of jobs, housing and child custody.
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The problem has drawn the attention of several Republican lawmakers who recently filed identical House and Senate bills to establish a favorable loan repayment program for lawyers who choose to work in rural parts of the state where relatively lower salaries and few law firms can limit opportunities, particularly for young lawyers struggling with law school debt.
Under House Bill 4487 and Senate Bill 1906, lawyers would receive up to $180,000 to repay student loans if they practice criminal law in a rural area for four years. The goal is to encourage novice legal professionals to build careers, families and community ties in rural Texas.
In addition, some rural counties have banded together to create public defender offices that provide lawyers for indigent residents. Although the offices are providing needed relief, hundreds of rural defense attorneys have retired, died or moved away in recent years, leaving some areas underserved.
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According to research by the Deason Center at SMU, there were 181 different plans for appointing counsel in 2019, each with their own standards of determining when someone meets the financial threshold to receive a court-appointed attorney. Those plans can consider income, assets, financial obligations and more when considering if someone is “not financially able to employ counsel,” which is the state’s definition of indigent.
My work on spatial inequality in indigent defense provision in Arizona is here.
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