Errol Louis, Columnist Daily News | Opinion

The Court's mistreatment of New York State's poor is the real crime

Updated Thursday, May 7th 2009, 7:42 AM

Go to any Criminal Court in the five boroughs - and in many counties statewide - and you can see one of the greatest injustices imaginable played out over and over.

You'll see lots of people - young black and Latino men, mostly - meeting their Legal Aid attorneys for the first time just minutes before they stand before the judge and enter a plea.

It is a monstrous miscarriage of justice. All across New York State, indigent defendants arrive at the bar of justice with legal assistance that is rushed, cursory, inadequate or nonexistent - a situation that is blatantly unconstitutional.

In the landmark 1963 case of Gideon vs. Wainwright, the Supreme Court ruled that all defendants charged with a crime have the right to a lawyer. In New York, the right is violated on a daily basis.

Just ask Lane Loyzelle of upstate Ontario County, who was arrested in 2007 and charged with stealing $20 from two acquaintances. He was held in lieu of $2,500 bail and spent six weeks in jail until one of the overworked lawyers assigned to low-income clients could handle his case.

In Onondaga County, James Adams was busted in 2007 for allegedly shoplifting several sticks of deodorant from a drugstore.

An unaffordable $2,500 bail was set, and Adams spent three months in jail while frantically trying to contact an attorney who never met with him outside of open court.

The defense was so shoddy that the judge in the case had to direct Adams' attorney to file a motion to dismiss.

These cases, cited in a class-action lawsuit filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union, are not rare.

Only about 6,000 lawyers statewide deal with low-income defendants. Some work at groups like Legal Aid or Bronx Defenders, while others are private attorneys who get huge caseloads and meager reimbursement through New York's 18-b program.

"It's a broken system. Nobody's minding the store," says Jonathan Gradess, executive director of the New York State Defenders Association, a not-for-profit group that aims to improve legal representation for low-income people.

Gradess says 108,000 New York City cases were disposed of by guilty pleas last year. In most of these cases, says Gradess, there had been no investigation, no witness interviews and no meaningful conversation about legal strategy. 

That can have grave consequences for defendants. For instance, conviction of some crimes can lead to immediate deportation of noncitizens. But many pleas get entered on the advice of lawyers who never even ask about citizenship status.

New York desperately needs a politically independent, properly funded public defender commission - a statewide agency that would provide the funding, training and enforceable legal standards currently absent from so many county defenders' offices. 

A two-year investigation by a special commission created by former Chief Judge Judith Kaye concluded that "nothing short of major, far-reaching reform can ensure that New York meets its constitutional and statutory obligations to provide quality representation to every indigent person accused of a crime or other offense."

Money is the main issue. And that brings us to Albany, and the state budget. 

Right now, individual counties spend about $278 million a year to pay for indigent defense, with the state adding $78 million.

Far more is needed - an estimated $67 million more, according to Gradess - and the state should take over the entire function from counties reluctant to keep paying for indigent defense.

"The reason it's a crisis is that everybody looks the other way," says Gradess. 

Justice demands that we stop looking away.

elouis@nydailynews.com