• By JASON BROWN
• Advocate Acadiana bureau
• Published: May 29, 2010 - Page: 2BA

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The Calcasieu Parish Public Defenders’ Office will stop accepting new indigent defense cases starting Aug. 1.

The moratorium will remain in effect until the office workload conforms to standards and guidelines established by the Louisiana Public Defender Board, District Defender Mitchell Bergeron wrote in a May 25 letter to 14th Judicial District Chief Judge Robert Wyatt.

“While this has been a difficult decision, it is a necessary one,” Bergeron wrote.

The state of Louisiana, the Louisiana Public Defender Board and Bergeron are all named defendants in a pending class-action lawsuit claiming indigent defendants are being denied their constitutional right to effective counsel because of the lack of adequate funding.

The suit originally was filed in 2004 in Calcasieu Parish, moved by the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeal to the 19th Judicial District in Baton Rouge, stayed to allow the state to address the funding issue, and reopened in 2008.

As a result of the continued lack of funding, the Calcasieu office is “unable to carry out even the most basic functions of legal representation, such as properly conferring with clients, engaging in substantive investigation of cases, reviewing client files, securing witnesses, and preparing for hearings and trials,” Bergeron wrote of the allegations.

The letter stated that attorneys in the office have caseloads that are 2 to 2‰ times higher than those set by the Louisiana Standards on Indigent Defense.

John F. DeRosier, 14th Judicial District Attorney, said he does not agree with those figures and believes the Public Defender Office is not nearly as overloaded as they say they are.

“Our numbers show far fewer cases and defendants,” DeRosier said.

He said his office is conducting its own study to determine caseload levels. He said he believes his attorneys have the same number of cases as the public defenders, anywhere from 350 to 450 felony cases per prosecutor.

The caseload for Calcasieu public defenders, however, ranges from 661 to 2,794, according to an October 2009 site visit by the LPDB.

State Public Defender Jean Faria said they hope to sit down with the District Attorney’s Office to go through all the cases to determine the status of each case in an effort to develop a true case count.

Bergeron wrote that the decision to stop taking cases is partially based on the fact that he is unaware of any statute or case that provides him or his attorneys with either limited or absolute immunity from civil liability.

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