SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Two key public defense reform bills, AB 690 and AB 2605, advanced out of the California Senate Appropriations Committee, moving legislation aimed at reforming flat-fee defense contracts and increasing oversight of public defense systems to the Senate floor.
The Fair Representation Act, AB 690, states that it would ban the practice of adopting “flat-fee” contracts that allow attorneys to receive a set amount of money to represent a significant number of cases of varying degrees of complexity.
The reform bill refers to the Fair Representation Act as “a landmark reform of the state’s privatized public defense system.” The bill details how the ban will require public defense contracts to cover all the basic standards, such as resources for investigators and caseworkers.
Creating safeguards through a set of protocols, as stated by AB 690, is necessary to prevent the “public defense caseload crisis” that is happening across California. The reform bill recognizes that up to eight public defender’s offices have had to decline taking new cases due to work overload.
According to AB 690, “23 counties use the long criticized, lump-sum ‘flat-fee’ contracts for their entire indigent defense systems while dozens more use them for a significant portion.” The bill states that equipping social workers with an adequate amount of resources would deter the accumulation of “astronomical caseloads.”
Assemblymember Nick Schultz, an author of AB 690, states that the caseload numbers in flat-fee counties surpass the ability of attorneys to perform. He elaborates that there is “no way a lawyer can diligently and effectively handle even half of some of the caseload numbers.”
The Wren Collective and UC Berkeley Law’s Criminal Law and Justice Center report caseloads in flat-fee counties where lawyers have to “frequently handle 500 to 600 cases a year.”
The AB 690 reform bill states that it supports the need to ban flat fees in elaborate, intensive cases since, in California, counties are allowed “to use sparsely regulated privatized public defense systems instead of public defender’s offices.”
The Fair Representation Act, according to reform bill AB 690, deters the flat-fee systems established in California from perpetuating patterns of mass incarceration by granting lawyers “enough resources to ensure competent legal representation.”
AB 690 continues to describe how the reform bill would support banning the practice of flat-fee counties since they spend “over 17% more per capita on detention and corrections.”
The source continues that those with combined jail and prison incarceration rates who use flat fees are reported to amount to “7 of the top 8 counties.”
According to the AB 690 reform bill, mass incarceration is fueled by flat-fee counties that increase detention and incarceration rates, as it reports that “70% of exclusively flat-fee counties have seen an increase in jail or prison incarceration rates over the last decade.”
The AB 2605 reform bill, co-authored by Assemblymember Schultz and Sen. Jesse Arreguín, details that it would manage flat-fee systems by reporting on systems that operate ineffectively by becoming the “first ever systematic reporting of attorney caseloads and basic public defense staffing.”
This need is echoed by Assemblymember Dr. Joaquin Arambula, author of AB 2605, who shares that California does not currently have a system for collecting information about attorney caseloads or public defense staffing.
As it is written in the reform bill, AB 2605 serves as “the first legislation to require counties to document their public defenders’ caseloads and provide that information to the State on a routinized basis.”
He highlights how the bill is addressing accountability by creating a system that reveals defendants who “report never even having met their attorney and repeated failures to investigate the accusations made against them.”
Schultz states, “The Fair Representation Act seeks to ban flat fees for the most serious cases and provides basic standards for public defense contracts that are long overdue.”
He continues to state that California’s public defense system is long overdue for reform, demanding that the system needs to be “up to code.”
Arambula emphasizes how AB 2605 provides a solution to flat-fee contracts in California by “establishing reporting requirements on the nature of public defense services provided.”
After being voted to advance by the California Senate Appropriations Committee, both the Fair Representation Act and AB 2605 are now heading to a Senate floor vote.
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