CrimLaw

More on fees:

Previously I have blogged about articles in the Richmond paper and the Washington Post concerning the shameful caps on pay for the defense of indigents imposed by the Virginia Legislature.

Bryan Gates, over at I respectfully dissent, lays out how the North Carolina system works and suggests a solution which I suspect would lead to drastic pay raises for all of us doing criminal work.

John Hays, writes to suggest that perhaps a strike would be in order much as has occurred in this article. In Virginia criminal law circles this has been suggested more than once. However, I believe such an action would fail for several reasons. There is no centralized criminal defense organization powerful enough to pull it off, the Legislature could care less if the courts are closed for a day, well connected small, local firms would never risk their position in the eyes of the judges by allowing their attorneys to do something like this, and those of us that are single practitioners doing criminal law and relying on court appointed work to keep the doors open are even less in a position to risk it. I don't have a war chest. If I skip court for a day when I have 2 or 3 cases scheduled it hurts me in the near term because I have to keep churning in order to pay the bills - in the long term it could be an absolute disaster as the judges stop giving me cases and assign them to lawyers they can trust to come to court.

There is a story which has floated around among Defense attorneys for some time now - I have no idea whether it is apocryphal or based in reality. A few years back a criminal defense lawyer challenged the constitutionality of Virginia's caps as part of his defense in some criminal matter. This agitated a local judge so much that shortly thereafter, during pretrials (official judicial notification of charges & assignment of lawyers), he looked down from his bench and pointedly asked the attorneys sitting there waiting to be appointed to indigent defendants if anyone had problems with the fees paid to court appointed attorneys because he wouldn't want to assign cases to people who didn't think they would get paid enough for their work. Of course, not a single one of the attorneys said a word because they all knew it would preclude them from ever getting court appointed work again.