Public defenders object to Gov. Jeff Landry’s move to take control

Over a quarter of the people who run Louisiana’s local public defender offices showed up in person Tuesday at the state Capitol to push back on Gov. Jeff Landry’s proposal to take over the state’s public defense system.

“This bill seeks to overhaul a third of our criminal justice system overnight,” said Maggie LeBlanc, who runs the 16th Judicial District public defender office that covers Iberia, St. Martin and St. Mary parishes.

The Louisiana Senate Judiciary B Committee narrowly voted 4-3 to push forward legislation that would transfer power over public defense finances and personnel from an 11-member board to a single director appointed by the governor. It now heads to the full Senate for consideration. 

Landry’s staff put together the bill, according to its sponsor, Sen. Mike Reese, R-Leesville.

“The concentration in the governor’s office is, I think, unconstitutional,” said Ross Foote, a retired state district judge who used to sit on the Louisiana Public Defender Board. 

Board members are currently picked by the governor, Louisiana Supreme Court and legislative leaders. The governor’s selections must come from a list of nominees assembled by district defenders, who manage the local public defender offices.

The board oversees the state’s $50 million public defense budget and hiring of personnel. If Reese’s legislation passes, those responsibilities will all fall to the state public defender picked by the governor. 

Reese said he thinks the proposed structure would give lawmakers more confidence in Louisiana’s public defender system and open them up to the possibility of more funding. Legislators have been skeptical of how the board allocates public defense resources for years, particularly how much money is spent on death penalty defense.

“This is an attempt to fund the public defender office,” Reese said of his legislation. 

Yet over a three-hour hearing, dozens of people — attorneys, district defenders, former Public Defender Board members and academics who study the legal system — testified in opposition to Landry’s proposal. They came from all corners of the state and across the political spectrum.

“I’m a conservative Republican, but I love the constitution and this is not the way we advance it,” said Royal Alexander, a Landry supporter and private attorney who the Caddo Parish public defender’s office pays to work cases.

The only member of Louisiana’s public defender community who showed up to the committee hearing to support the bill was Rémy Starns, the current state public defender.

“In every iteration of the public defender board that I’ve experienced, the structure has not worked well,” Starns said. 

During his testimony, Starns criticized the state Public Defender Board for spending millions of dollars on private attorneys at nonprofit organizations, even though board records show it tried to reduce those expenses over the last year. 

Starns specifically mentioned the board’s contracts with one nonprofit, the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, as being misguided. The board used to pay this organization hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to represent people serving life sentences for crimes they committed while underage. Those incarcerated people, known as juvenile lifers, were only recently given access to parole, and their cases are considered legally complex.

The board also hired the same nonprofit group to represent children and teenagers accused of crimes in Orleans Parish.

Contrary to Starns’ suggestion, the board decided last June to cancel its contracts with the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, according to public defender office records. It won’t renew any funding for the organization after this spring. 

Board members also initially voted to cut millions of dollars in payments to other nonprofit legal organizations that handle death penalty cases, an area of spending that often draws complaints from legislators. But Starns protested and convinced board members to reverse themselves and restore the funding, out of fear it could derail death penalty cases, according to records from the public defender’s office. 

At Tuesday’s hearing, Starns also sought to blame the board for destabilizing the public defender budget by giving out raises to district defenders that total $1 million annually. He implied the system might be not able to afford the payments in future years. 

In interviews, board members have said they felt compelled to give the pay hike because of wide discrepancies in district defender salaries. Some hadn’t seen any pay increase since 2007, and the compensation didn’t correspond to the amount of experience or workload a particular person had.

The raises came through the board’s adoption of a standardized pay scale to address the inequity, district defenders said.

Reese tweaked his bill in response to previous complaints from district defenders.

The legislation no longer requires all public defenders in the state to become contract workers, and it would allow local public defender offices to keep their local revenue instead of sending it to the state. The appointed state public defender, once confirmed, would also serve a two-year term instead of a six-year term as originally proposed.

A provision that could lower district defender salaries to their 2007 level remains in the legislation, however. The state public defender would also be able to fire a district defender without cause as of July 1, 2025.

If the bill passes, Starns has expressed an interest in staying in the state public defender position in Landry’s office.