According to St. Clair County District Attorney Richard Minor, his office had a budget of $550,000 for 2003-2004. The state of Alabama provided $295,000 leaving the remainder to the county and the district attorney's Worthless Check and Recovery and Restitution Units. "The state's General Fund provides 36.73 percent of our budget," Minor said. "The county provides 20.26 percent. I'm grateful to our county commission for these funds because in reality they're not responsible for providing revenue for our office. They realize we are a state agency, but that almost 100 percent of our clientele are from St. Clair County." Because the district attorney's office handles every type of criminal offense ranging from traffic tickets to capital murder, caseloads have continued to climb over the last 14 years even though funding has remained level. "We are number four in the state in caseload for our area," Minor said. "From 1990 to 2004 the budget has not increased proportionately to the caseload increase. As our county continues to grow we're only going to see more and more cases." Randy Hillman, the Executive Director of the Alabama Association of District Attorneys, agrees with Minor saying state funding has had no rhyme or reason to increases since the state took it over in the 1970s. According to Hillman, who is also the Executive Director of the Office of Prosecution Services, the cost to run district attorney offices statewide each year runs around $70 million with the state providing only about $25 million. "Only about 37 percent of the budget comes from the state so the state gets our services for about 37 cents on the dollar," he said. Hillman said between 1990 and 2004 the average felony caseload went up 118 percent with some counties seeing as much as a 300 percent increase. "For fiscal year 2004, if you took all cases and spread them evenly across the state and then divided by the number of prosecutors you would come out with about 2,100 cases per lawyer in a year's time," Hillman said. "Most offices are grossly under-funded and under-staffed." To help relieve the budget crunch, district attorney's operate what is essentially a small business from their office collecting fines and fees for worthless checks and child support. "Our worthless check units account for $12 million of the $70 million a year needed to operate," Hillman said. In St. Clair County, a little over 17 percent of the office's budget is made up of worthless check collections. However, Minor is already concerned with a major decrease in those funds as well. With the implementation of Check 21 and the increased use of debit and credit cards, fewer and fewer people are "floating" bad checks. "People are not writing as many checks as they used to," Hillman said. "The number of checks we used to rely on is going down. Couple that with Check 21 and it's bad voodoo for us." Minor said at the rate bad checks are decreasing, his office will be doing without them completely within four to five years. Hillman said he doesn't feel state legislators fully understand yet the dilemma the offices are looking at in the very near future, but his office and association are working to gain a higher profile in Montgomery to bring the situation to light. One of the areas being looked at by legislators is the amount of money paid to defense lawyers for defendants who can't afford an attorney. According to Minor, in 2004 the state paid $657,000 for indigent defense in St. Clair County. In 2003, it was $750,000 — more than twice what the state allocates the DA's office. Hillman said indigent defense attorneys are paid $40 per hour out of court and $60 per hour in court, plus an overhead fee of as much as $45 per hour. "We've told our legislators we can't continue to do this," Hillman said. "Overhead costs of $14-15 million each year is going to pay secretaries, phone bills, and copiers." He said the Alabama Attorney General has issued an opinion that blanket payments of overhead to indigent defense lawyers should not be made. "These are good defense lawyers and they do a good job," Hillman said. "But the state is paying them twice as much to keep them out of jail as they are us. There's an inequity there." Both Minor and Hillman have an unsure outlook for district attorneys if the funding crunch is not addressed soon. "Regardless of criminal nature, everything goes through the DA. They're the bottleneck in the hourglass. If we don't find the money the whole judicial system is in trouble," Hillman said. Without increased funding for district attorneys, according to Hillman, layoffs of prosecutors and personnel will create a logjam in the system possibly pushing back cases normally heard within a year to 18 months back to two and three years. "In that time witnesses die or forget what they saw, victims want to put things behind them and cases can fall apart," he said. "Public safety has to be paramount otherwise the rest of what we do means nothing. People must feel safe."
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About Kellie L. Long
| Kellie Long is Editor of The St. Clair Times. |
Contact Kellie L. Long
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Phone::
E-mail: |
(205) 884-3400
klong@thestclairtimes.com |