Cook County Public Defender Rita Fry said Thursday that she will seek up to a one-year freeze in the assignment of new appellate cases to her office in the face of a massive backlog of appeals that has led to a judicial threat to hold the office in contempt.
Fry said her office will submit the request for the freeze to Circuit Judge Thomas Fitzgerald, the presiding judge of the Criminal Division, in an effort to “get some breathing room” and attack a backlog of some 800 cases.
Fry said the freeze request is also designed to forestall a threat by the Illinois Appellate Court to dismiss appeals in about 175 of the oldest cases in the backlog. Most of those cases involve felony convictions where legal paperwork was filed to start the appeals process as far back as 1998 but no further action has been taken.
There is little debate about the reason for the backlog: an increasing workload and fewer people to carry it out.
Thanks to county hiring freezes and the shifting of lawyers in the defender’s office to other departments, staffing in the appellate section has dropped from 60 lawyers a decade ago to 46 now. Over the same period, the number of appeals assigned to the office at any one time has risen by about 30 percent to around 1,300.
“We don’t have enough attorneys to brief the cases fast enough,” said James Reddy, chief of the public defender’s appellate division.
Reddy said the office is staffed to “reasonably” handle 900 cases a year.
To ease that problem, county officials said Thursday that Fry has received approval from County Board President John Stroger to hire 10 more lawyers for the appeals division, which has not hired a new lawyer for four years. Fry also said that she wants to talk to the union that represents the public defenders to see if some of the cases can be turned over to private attorneys.
Legal experts say that the backlog of cases in Fry’s office translates into the denial of justice for defendants.
“There’s nothing more frustrating than sitting in prison waiting for the wheels of justice to turn,” said Randolph Stone, former Cook County public defender and now head of the University of Chicago’s Mandel Legal Aid Clinic. “It’s a very serious issue for clients.”
“These excessive caseloads compromise the attorneys’ ability to provide effective representation to each client,” Joseph Gump, an assistant public defender and union official, wrote to Fry in December. “There are serious ethical and professional consequences for such lapses.”
The backlog has become so severe, lawyers say, that some clients of the appellate defender’s office have served their time before the appeals process is completed.
“There’s nothing worse than getting an appeal, seeing a valid issue and finding out the guy has already served his time,” said Assistant Public Defender Todd Shanker, an eight-year veteran of the office. “That’s not due process to me.”
This is not the first time that lengthy delays in cases involving appeals by indigent defendants have attracted judicial attention. In 1996, U.S. District Judge Milton Shadur chastised the state for failing to adequately fund the state appellate defender’s office–a failure that caused many inmates represented by that office to wait up to three years for an appeal of their convictions to be filed.
Shadur ruled that such delays were violations of the inmates’ due-process rights.
Fry said the concern over the delay in appeals bubbled up three weeks ago, when she received a letter from Appellate Court Judge Alan Greiman about the backlog.
Although the letter was diplomatic, Fry said, Greiman made it clear in meetings that the backlog merited immediate attention.
“In person it was, `Guess what, we have contempt powers, and you’re late,”‘ Fry said.
Fry said that when she explained her staffing problem to Greiman, “The court took a position that I needed to work something out. Let me suggest there was a certain level of immediacy,” Fry said.
In an interview, Greiman declined to discuss the details of his conversation with Fry, saying that he was satisfied with her response.
“We’re going to monitor them,” Greiman said. “But they’ve acknowledged that they are going to hire people and have a full commitment to solving appeals.”
If Fry’s request for a freeze is granted, the office of State Appellate Defender Ted Gottfried, which shares indigent appellate duties with Fry’s office, is sure to see its workload increase. The prospect is unsettling to Gottfried.
“If we take more cases, we’ll need more resources,” said Gottfried, whose office handled 700 Cook County appeals last year.
