ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Innovation in a Crisis

Lawyers in Orange County long have resisted efforts to establish a second public defender’s office to represent criminal defendants too poor to hire an attorney. Their contention was that it would cost too much to start a new office. But the bankruptcy overrode those objections, and the county will now be forced to test assertions that it can save money by keeping more legal work in-house.

The county pays about $20 million a year for the public defender’s office; the objective of creating a second such office is to pare the $12 million a year spent on private lawyers who supplement deputy public defenders in complex cases such as murder trials or when there are two or more poor defendants. The U.S. Constitution requires that defendants be given a lawyer, but state conflict-of-interest rules bar the public defender’s office from representing two or more accused in a case. The work of the second office will be to handle such cases exclusively.

The office appears to have taken the proper precautions to avoid possible legal hazards. The divisions must be separate, with different staffs and computers, to avoid conflict-of-interest allegations that could lead an appeals court to overturn a conviction.

Though some private attorneys will be required at county expense in multi-defendant cases, officials said the new office could save more than $3 million this year and more in future years.

Several counties already have the dual-office system. If it works in Orange County, there will be a question of why it was not done sooner.