When county legislators went looking for ways to cut expenses in 2012, they asked several department heads to target certain percentages of cost reductions.
Gary Horton, public defender, needed to trim 10 percent from his budget.
That meant ending one of the services his office provides, he said. He couldn't cut criminal defense, and he couldn't reduce family court expenditures.
That left, he told the Public Service Committee today, his office's appeals division.
The division was staffed by a single attorney, and that attorney is now in private practice, receiving assignments from Randy Zickl, the attorney who handles the county's assigned attorney program.
Zickl told the committee that while the assigned counsel program is slightly under budget, it won't end the year that way because the office will be picking up so much of the appeals work for indigent defendants.
It wasn't an expense anticipated in the county's budget for the assigned counsel office.
"It hasn't been too bad, but it's building up," Zickl said.
Committee Chairman Ray Cianfrini guesstimated the eventual cost overrun could be $100,000. Zickl didn't argue the estimate and Horton told Cianfrini if the original appeals attorney was still on his staff, the cost would be significantly less.
An appeal can cost the county from $2,400 (sometimes, but rarely, less) up to the thousands of dollars, Zickl said.
And since defendants have a constitutional right to adequate defense, the county has no choice but to foot the bill one way or the other.
"There's much more work to do on the defense side of an appeal," Horton said.
The defense attorney must read every page of every transcript from every appearance a defendant makes in court, identify points to appeal, formulate an argument, find the proper citations and write a 50-page or longer brief.
The prosecution, he said, need only respond to the points raised by the defense and such responses tend to be about only five pages long, Horton said.
That's why, he said, appeals can get so expensive.
Years ago, he said, his office didn't handle appeals. They were always handled by assigned counsel, and that's another reason he said that if cuts to his office were mandated, cutting appeals made the most sense.
Horton also explained that Genesee County is joining with several other counties in the region to apply for a grant that would create a regionwide appeals office that would assist defendents with appeals throughout the region.
If the program doesn't come together, Horton still hopes Genesee County will get the grant -- it was the first county to apply for the funds from the state. The money can be applied to funding a local appeals division.
