Pay per plea: public defenders come at a price.

• Author: Middlewood, Erin
• Position: Trend toward fees for public-defender representation - Cover Story

Five women sit around a table in a stark, cement-walled holding room at the Rock County Jail in Janesville, Wisconsin. The women, recently arrested and dressed in jailhouse orange, talk with a paralegal, who is evaluating their eligibility for public defense.

One of the women receives welfare benefits. Two have no means of support. One works part-time and pulls in only $30 a week. Another sells her plasma. All of them qualify for public defense. And all of them will have to pay for it.

Paralegal Amy Kelber explains to them that Wisconsin started a new program in August 1995 requiring poor people to pay for their public representation. Defense costs $200 for a misdemeanor, Kelber tells the women, and $400 for a felony-unless the defendant pays $50 within thirty days. Kelber emphasizes that even if they never pay, the women will still get a lawyer, but their accounts will be turned over to a collection agency

At the end of the interview, Kelber gives each woman an envelope for her nonrefundable payment.

"Will I pay in the next thirty days? No," says Laureanette Ingram, twenty-nine, who has been living with her brother and has no job. "I can't. I got to find something to eat with. I got to put shoes on my feet."

Wisconsin is one of a growing number of states, including Kansas and Virginia, that now charge indigent defendants for public representation. Many states charge those seeking a public defender an evaluation fee ranging from $10 to $100. Last fall, California passed a law allowing its counties to charge $25. On January 1, 1997, Florida will implement a $40 fee.

Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Carolina have all implemented fees in the last several years.

None of these states deny representation to those who can't pay. Even so, public-defender fees represent a small but significant erosion of the Sixth-Amendment right to legal counsel. The fees could drive away potential public-defender clients. And, as public-defender offices begin to rely on their indigent clients for funding they are likely to encounter major cashflow problems.

Justice Hugo Black wrote in the unanimous 1963 Gideon Supreme Court decision that "any person haled into court who is too poor to hire a lawyer cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him."

More than thirty years later, some state legislatures are asking public-defender offices to fudge on that assurance.

Waring Fincke argued in a March 1996 Wisconsin...