Unlike most American cities, New York relies heavily on the Legal Aid Society to represent the indigent not just in civil matters, but in criminal cases as well.
The strike by the private nonprofit organization will affect the gamut of cases: everything from criminal prosecutions and appeals to tenant disputes, immigration hearings, child abuse and neglect proceedings, prisoners' rights suits, and unemployment and welfare benefits cases.
Courts in most major cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, and in states like New Jersey and Connecticut, are not nearly as vulnerable as those in New York to the strain imposed by a strike. They use public defenders to represent the poor in criminal cases; as government employees, public defenders are generally prohibited from striking. Civil cases are handled by a variety of local and Federal legal-services organizations including the Legal Aid Society.
The society was started in 1876, largely to offer services to new German immigrants, including representing them in criminal cases. It rapidly expanded, in large measure because of support from philanthropists like John D. Rockefeller Jr., to take on thousands of civil and criminal cases for the poor. In 1961, acknowledging the importance of the society in the lives of the indigent, New York City contributed about $100,000. Last year it paid the society $79 million just for its work on criminal cases.
By 1966, the society had contracted to become the city's primary defender for the poor. That decision was in response to a 1963 United States Supreme Court ruling, in the case of Gideon v. Wainwright, that insured that indigent defendants were entitled to lawyers.
The society does not handle all cases for indigent defendants, however. In matters involving multiple defendants, conflicts can arise, particularly if defendants want to testify against each other.
So a second tier of representation has sprung up, known as the Assigned Counsel Plan and consisting of private lawyers who charge the city by the hour. They are called upon when such conflicts arise. Considered more experienced than many Legal Aid lawyers, they also handle murder cases.
But after a 1982 strike by Legal Aid Society lawyers that crippled the city's courts for 10 weeks, judges increasingly turned to Assigned Counsel lawyers, who represent defendants in nearly half of the city's felony cases. Their bills were expected to reach $50 million this year.
This summer, in a cost-saving effort, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani proposed to return the bulk of the criminal caseload to the society. That program began scarcely two weeks ago. But with the onset of the strike, Assigned Counsel lawyers will presumably once again pick up thousands of new cases.
During the 1982 Legal Aid strike, the Koch administration commissioned a study of the feasibility of adopting a system of public defenders who would be employed directly by the city and prohibited from striking. The report, written by John F. Keenan, now a Federal judge, found the idea worth considering but advised against switching immediately to such a system from an established organization that the report said was well-qualified to perform its function.
