A third or more of the Hawaii federal public defender’s staff might have to be laid off in coming months as a result of sequestration and other budget cuts, said Peter Wolff, the federal public defender for the District of Hawaii.
The office started fiscal 2013 with an approved $3 million budget but will end it with an 8 percent reduction, to $2.77 million, because of a former continuing resolution budget shortfall and sequestration.
Wolff’s office expects to begin fiscal 2014 in October with $2.18 million — $595,000 less than 2013, a year that will include some 20 furlough days.
The public defender said he feels terrible that he expects to lay off "several" members of his staff, including some attorneys.
"I don’t feel good about it at all, because we have people that moved here to take a job here," Wolff said. "I mean, all the people are good people. They are all smart. They’ve worked hard, and, you know, they took these jobs and they didn’t expect or anticipate — and neither did I — that they would be in this situation."
Across the country, federal public defenders — attorneys who represent the poor as mandated by the U.S. Constitution — might be forced to lay off up to half their staffs as a result of similar budget squeezes, officials said.
The cuts are so harsh that alarm bells are ringing.
"Following deep funding cuts that began before the federal sequester and were increased after the sequester took effect, the nation’s federal indigent defense system is in crisis," the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers said in a statement Tuesday.
Paul Friedman and Reggie Walton, federal judges for the District of Columbia, penned an opinion piece in April for the Washington Post saying that generally, federal judges should not become embroiled in political disputes.
"But we feel compelled to speak out because sequestration poses an existential threat to the right of indigent defendants to have publicly funded legal representation," the judges said.
The effect of sequestration on the courts "severely threatens the rights guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment to those accused of crimes," Friedman and Walton said.
Among the rights the amendment guarantees is the right to a defense lawyer.
In some cases trials are being delayed, and public defender offices are thinking twice about the cost of hiring experts to investigate cases and testify at trial.
The federal public defender for northern Alabama said he plans to lay off at least three people on his 15-member staff due to budget cuts, media group AL.com reported.
National Public Radio said June 12 that a federal public defender in Idaho asked to opt out of a terrorism case involving an Uzbek national because of the anticipated cost.
The federal judiciary’s Office of Finance and Budget is predicting a $100 million shortfall in the national Defender Services account for fiscal 2014.
According to a "fact sheet" put out by federal defender offices around the country, 23 percent budget cuts mandated for next year mean, for instance, that the defender for the Northern District of California would have to lay off 31 percent of his staff. With mandatory severance costs factored in, the defender would have to lay off 52 percent of his staff, the report said.
"The ultimate irony" of cutting federal defender budgets across the country is that more cases will have to be assigned to private attorneys who supplement legal representation under the Criminal Justice Act, according to the federal defender report.
"CJA counsel are consistently more expensive than federal defenders, and the shift will cause the cost of indigent defense to explode," it predicts.
In May the Judicial Conference of the United States sought $72.9 million in emergency funding, including $41.4 million for the Defender Services account.
Sylvia Burwell, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said in a June 7 memo that sequestration fixes of the type sought by the Judicial Conference would "still leave in place damaging cuts in other critical areas across the government."
She added, "The administration has been clear that the only way to truly fix sequestration is to replace it with balanced deficit reduction."
Wolff said he had 18 people in his Honolulu office (eight attorneys and 10 non-attorneys) in October. One person retired in December and was not replaced, and another was approved for early retirement.
He said he still had to implement furloughs expected to reach 20 days by the end of the fiscal year for all staff, resulting in the office being closed every other Friday except for one attorney who takes a furlough day on another day of the week.
He also said he eliminated all training-related travel, curtailed most other travel and cut costs for experts, interpreters and transcripts.
Wolff said because of the severity of next year’s budget crunch, any severance pay and unemployment benefits would have to come out of this year’s budget, which means some of the layoffs would have to be made well before the end of the 2013 fiscal year, Sept. 30.
In the meantime, judiciary officials in Hawaii expect to meet with members of Hawaii’s congressional delegation this week to see whether there is any possibility of relief.
