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Or worse. In Indiana's Marion County, which includes Indianapolis, reform was sparked after a 1991 study documented abuses in a system where the six superior court judges hired defense lawyers for $20,800 a year to handle the area's indigent work on a part-time basis. Bobby Lee Houston, a truck driver, hired a private counselor whom he couldn't afford when he was arrested in 1989 on charges of child molestation. The lawyer urged him to plead guilty and serve five years; Houston insisted he was innocent. He wrote to a judge complaining of delays and, after 14 months, was assigned David Sexson, one of the contract lawyers. Sexson suggested that Houston plead guilty and get off with time served. Houston was firm: no dice.
One month later, Houston's case was dismissed -- but no one bothered to tell him. It would be four more months before Houston learned that he was a free man. After 19 pointless months in a jail cell, Houston has his own bottom line: "Justice is a money thing."
That is precisely what Clarence Earl Gideon complained of in 1962 when he put pencil to lined paper in his Florida cell and and wrote the Supreme Court: "The question is very simple. I requested the court to appoint me attorney and the court refused." Since then, lawyers and judges have stated and restated Gideon's assertion of a fundamental right to adequate representation. Chief Justice Harold Clarke of the Georgia Supreme Court warned state legislators earlier this year, "We need to remember that if the state can deny justice to the poor, it has within its grasp the power to deny justice to anybody." Richard Teissier and his fellow public defenders surely would agree with Judge Clarke: Justice on the cheap is no justice at all.