Who said this was only in Missouri?  Michigan is the worst in the nation for accessing defense lawyers.  This is why the Medicaid fraud schemes are so powerful in child welfare.  There is nothing anyone can do about it...or is there?

Budget Woes Hit Defense Lawyers for the Indigent

OZARK, Mo. — Some public defenders in Missouri say the stressed state budget is interfering with their ability to provide poor defendants with their constitutional right to a lawyer.

Amber Arnold/Springfield News-LeaderJudge John S. Waters of Christian County insisted that the lawyers take Mr. Blacksher’s case.

They say they are so overworked and underfinanced that they have begun trying to reject new cases assigned to them late in the month, when, they say, their workloads are already beyond capacity.
Concerns about a deteriorating, overwhelmed public defender system in this country have been around for decades, but they have ballooned recently as state budgets shrink and more defendants qualify for free legal counsel.
“This has been a problem in good economic times, and now it’s only worse,” said Jo-Ann Wallace, president and chief executive of the National Legal Aid and Defender Association. “What you have is a situation where the eligible pool of clients is increasing, crime rates are potentially increasing, while the resources often for public defenders are going down.”
Missouri’s per capita spending on public defense ranks 49th in the nation (only Mississippi spends less), Ms. Wallace’s group says. State officials say the defenders system, with its 570 employees, is expected to receive more than $34 million this year. The state public defender’s office says a true solution would require 125 more lawyers, 90 more secretaries, 109 more investigators, 130 more legal assistants and more space — all of which would cost about $21 million a year — a seemingly impossible suggestion, given the fiscal climate.
In the meantime, they say, fiscal constraints are colliding with the requirement set forth in a 1963 Supreme Court decision, Gideon v. Wainwright, that poor people accused of serious crimes be provided with lawyers paid for by the government.
Last week, Jared Blacksher found his case sent to the Missouri Supreme Court — not over the accusations that he had stolen prescription pain pills and a blank check, but over the issue of whether the state’s public defender system is in such dismal shape that it ought not be forced to represent him.
The public defender’s office had pleaded with the judge, repeatedly, not to assign it Mr. Blacksher’s case. It was just the latest example of public defenders, charged with representing the poor and indigent, saying they cannot take a case because they have too many already and not enough staff to handle them all. Public defenders in jurisdictions from Florida to Minnesota to Arizona have either sued over their caseloads or refused to take new cases.
The judge in the Blacksher case rejected the public defender’s pleas not to be forced to take it. “It flies in the face of our Constitution,” Judge John S. Waters told his Christian County courtroom here last month. “It flies in the face of our culture. It flies in the face of the reason we came over here 300 and some-odd years ago to get out of debtors’ prison.”
“I’m not saying the public defenders aren’t overworked,” Judge Waters said, but, “I don’t know how to move his case and how to provide him what the law of the land provides.”
But last Friday, the Missouri Supreme Court issued an order temporarily rescinding the assignment of public defenders in Mr. Blacksher’s case, at least until the court can consider legal briefs on the question of the public defenders’ latest demand to refuse cases.
Mr. Blacksher’s case, which could now be delayed for several months, has become the center of a debate that long predates it in this state. To some, the signs of stress on the public defender system here have become overwhelming, even frightening: almost all the public defenders’ 35 trial division offices lately carried caseloads that would require more than the total number of staff hours available in a month — in some cases, more than two times the hours available, said Cat Kelly, deputy director for the Missouri State Public Defender System.
“Missouri’s public defender system has reached a point where what it provides is often nothing more than the illusion of a lawyer,” an outside report asked for by the Missouri Bar concluded last year.
Yet some county prosecutors here are deeply skeptical of the defenders’ complaints. With the state facing $550 million less in general fund revenues than a year ago, they say, defenders are no more burdened than the next department...more