Fla. Judge Sends Hundreds of Cases to Private Defense Lawyers
Ruling today that the Miami-Dade Public Defender’s Office is too understaffed to handle most of the felony cases it is getting, a Florida judge said 60 percent must be handled by other counsel. However, Circuit Judge Stanford Blake didn’t go as far as Public Defender Bennett Brummer had requested.
He filed a motion in June seeking permission to refuse appointment in all cases except those implicating the death penalty because of a lack of funding to hire an adequate number of attorneys, reports the Miami Herald.
Blake’s ruling calls for some 2,000 third-degree felony cases in which the defendants can’t afford to hire lawyers to be sent each month to Office of Regional Counsel, effective Sept. 15.
Because “that office, established last year by the Legislature to save money on private attorneys, has only a handful of lawyers and will be unable to represent all the third-degree felony defendants,” the newspaper writes, Blake ordered that private criminal defense attorneys be appointed to represent the overflow.
