Lawyers prosper by poor-mouthpiecing.

• Author: Speizer, Irwin
• Position: Tar Heel Tattler

Joe Cheshire once advocated paying lawyers in private practice rather than full-time public defenders to represent poor people in Wake County who can't afford a lawyer. But he has changed his mind now that the program is paying some of them more than the chief justice of the N.C. Supreme Court makes.

Cheshire, a criminal-defense lawyer who's chairman of the state Indigent Defense Services Commission, is getting his way. The General Assembly passed a law to create a Wake public-defender system next year. But the path was rocky, and feelings it bruised have yet to heal.

When the private-lawyer system began in the '80s, about 20 lawyers--including Cheshire--signed up to take cases. But as the population grew, so did the number of lawyers--Wake has 3,503, the most in the state--and things got out of hand. More specifically, Cheshire suggests, idle hands. "People who don't have jobs," he says, "gravitate to the one place where they can get paid without being monitored. That's representing indigent defendants." At least four lawyers or law firms got more for representing the indigent last year than Justice I. Beverly Lake did for presiding over the Supreme Court--$135,484.

Debate heated up this summer when a list of lawyers and how...