Public Defender Jeff Adachi is off to Washington D.C. this week for a national conference on criminal defense for the poor.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is hosting the “National Symposium on Indigent Defense: Looking Back, Looking Forward 2010. More than 600 public defenders, judges and elected officials are expected to attend and discuss ways to better defend those without the means to hire their own attorneys.

Adachi’s presentation on Thursday is sure to bring up the lingering battle with Mayor Gavin Newsom over funding for his office. The public defender has been passing high-profile cases to outside council for months in an effort to save the office money.

At the Mo’MAGIC offices in the Fillmore, high school students mingle with each other as they paint and decorate big plastic spheres with bright colors that will adorn the Davies Symphony Hall christmas tree. This is a small activity out of many that Mo’MAGIC organizes to help and unite Western Addition youth and families.

The Fillmore/Western Addition Mobilization of Adolescent Growth In our Communities, or Mo’MAGIC, is a convener institution that coordinates projects and complimentary activities community-wide by getting service providers within organizations like the police department, city agencies, nonprofit and community-based organizations, merchants and community members to bring different services to children, youth and families.

Some services Mo’MAGIC offers include help obtaining public housing, mental health assistance, help with employment or school, advocacy to maintain public safety and a violence prevention program.

Impressed with the results at the Bayview-Hunters Point Mobilization for Adolescent Growth in our Communities program started by Public Defender Jeff Adachi in 2004, Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi brought the program to the Western Addition in November 2006. The area was called “the mo” — a nickname given to the Fillmore — and the community picked the name Mo’MAGIC, according to Sheryl Davis, Mo’MAGIC program director.

Through different activities and projects, the organization serves around 1,500 participants between kids, youth and families. Initially, Mo’MAGIC participants were mostly African American, but the project grew to also serve about 10-20 percent members of Asian, Latino and Russian backgrounds. Typically, the youth programs focus their resources on adolescents ages five to 18.

“The core is children and youth, but you can’t help them without supporting the family,” Davis said.

Meetings twice a month help groups identify the issues and challenges in the neighborhood, and develop strategies to address them.

“The area had been resource-thin and neglected by the city. I worked to implement and infuse resources in new programs,” Mirkarimi said. Some of the challenges faced were getting Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office to redirect resources into new programs, and convincing the community and different organizations to accept a new program and collaborate, he added.

To some, Mo’MAGIC has been a cohesive force in the community, as well as an influential factor in decreasing violence in the Western Addition.

“It has helped to get our groups together and get rid of the destructive kind of competitiveness,” Rev. Arnold Townsend, a volunteer since 2006 who counsels youth through different workshops, said. “Our community has changed for the better,” he added.

“We are stronger because we work together,” said London Breed, executive director of the African American Art and Culture Complex where many of Mo’MAGIC programs and events occur.

Having the organizations working comprehensively to help kids with academic, social and recreational activities through different programs like helping them with homework, artistic activities and sports has made a huge difference, Davis said. “Kids get to know kids from the other side of the street and they don’t view each other as enemies,” she added.

A variety of events and activities are offered at different facilities. During the summer, centers for literacy and youth development programs work on keeping the young engaged as well as preparing them for jobs.

With respect to the crime reduction during the last years, Townsend said, “I’m convinced Mo’MAGIC has a lot to do with that.”

“2007, 2008, and 2009 have been really good summers,” Davis said. “We have seen a huge drop in teen violence and homicides.”

To Davis, the collaboration and partnership between the community, the police department and all organizations working together instead of independently, has helped keep the neighborhood safer.

“When you look, a good portion of these crimes were happening in this community,” Davis said. “Because it has decreased, the whole numbers in the city has decreased,” she said of crime in the Western Addition.

In the future, Davis hopes to implement early childhood programs and create projects to work with preschoolers, as well as projects to work with older kids who get out of high school and need help with getting a job and becoming self-sufficient.

Mirkarimi added that he wants to make sure “our families and our youth are getting the resources they need on their behalf and also teach them how they can stand by themselves.”

San Francisco’s impending $522 million budget deficit may come with a silver lining: It may finally force San Francisco city leaders and the electorate to make the tough decisions needed to turn things around.

Over the past decade, the cost of city government has increased 58 percent, from $4.2 billion to $6.6 billion, while the city has continued to experience huge budget deficits each year. The cause, according to the controller, is that “citywide costs have continued to climb, in large part due to escalating salary and benefit costs related to labor agreement provisions, new mandates and capital funding.” Put another way, the city is paying for salaries, pension plans and mandated spending levels that it simply can’t afford.

Like the state Legislature in Sacramento, San Francisco has tried to triage each year’s budget deficit, delaying important capital projects, bargaining for short-term salary concessions while hoping that the economy improves. These temporary fixes ultimately make the problem worse by passing the buck.

But this dire situation can be reversed if immediate changes are made.

The city’s pension system must be redesigned to ensure that it is able to meet the needs of retirees without bankrupting the city. According to findings of the civil grand jury, the city’s cost from its retiree pension system will triple from $175 million in 2005 to $544 million by 2012. With more than 40 percent of active employees eligible for retirement, this will create a huge cash flow problem and add to future years’ deficits. Abuses to the system, such as “pension spiking,” where employees are allowed to artificially increase their pension before retiring, must be stopped. The grand jury estimated that this practice has cost the city $132 million.

It is also time to evaluate spending voter-approved set-asides that require the city to spend certain amounts on specific programs regardless of the city’s financial standing. Currently, 60 percent of San Francisco’s general fund budget is spent through mandated spending formulas. However, in an economic recession, all mandates, except those established to protect extremely vulnerable populations, should be suspended or reduced.

Pay raises should be limited during deficit years. Just two years ago, city officials voted to give a 25 percent increase to police officers over four years at a cost of $64 million and a 19 percent increase to registered nurses over three years at a cost of $39 million. In order to pay these increases, from 300 to 400 employees, including police officers and nurses, would have to be laid off.

But even if these changes are made, the budget process itself needs to be reformed. Having managed a city department for 10 years, I’ve witnessed firsthand the inefficiencies of the current budgetary process.

San Francisco’s budget process resembles a poker game, where the mayor and supervisors bargain for and against each other’s programs, without knowledge of what cards the other is holding. The rules of the game are constantly changing, and the parties rarely share the information they are relying upon in making budgetary decisions with each other. Witness the three different deficit estimates coming from the mayor’s office during a single week, or the political battle stemming from the supervisors’ recent attempt to override last year’s budget to restore positions. The city’s departments and programs are treated as the ante, with the winnings going to those who are best at playing the game.

San Francisco needs an independent, nonpartisan budget office that is accountable for guarding the city’s long-term fiscal health. This practice, employed by most similarly sized counties in California and across the nation, would require the mayor, the Board of Supervisors and department heads work collaboratively with the budget office to develop a balanced budget from the priorities set by the mayor and board. The office’s proposed budget would be submitted to the mayor and the board for their review and approval.

The budget office would also be responsible for providing policymakers and the public with an objective evaluation of the performance of the city’s departments and programs, and would also advise the mayor and the board on projected salary costs. Armed with this information, the mayor and the board would decide the appropriate funding level for each program or department after receiving public input. This would increase the transparency, accountability and long-term focus of the process.

Of course, these fundamental changes, like the efforts to redesign our nation’s health system, won’t come easy. Changing the city’s budget process requires amending the City Charter and combining the city’s various budget agencies into a single, independent budget office. But the failure to act will mean more mass layoffs, a severe decrease in city services and a bankrupt pension system. Only by enacting real, structural reforms to our fiscal process will we get San Francisco’s city government back on the road to a sound and sustainable economic recovery.

Jeff Adachi is San Francisco’s public defender.

Ben Trefny of KALW’s Crosscurrents sits down with Jeff Adachi to ask him what’s going on with his work at the Community Justice Center.

SAN FRANCISCO — In a Tenderloin courtroom, a sleeping woman is roused to stand before Judge Ron Albers.

She is dazed and dirty, but she is there. She staggers to face the judge, shrinking into her baggy sweatshirt and casting her eyes downward.

She knows she missed her last appearance, she says. But she made it here today and she still wants treatment. Albers’ response is gentle.

“You deserve it if you can follow through,” he tells her. He reminds her that she has a lot of good people — such as social workers and drug counsellors — in her corner.

Albers, a San Francisco Superior Court commissioner, has presided over San Francisco’s Community Justice Center since its inception five months ago.

The spirit of the center is in contrast with that of a traditional courtroom, where an endless string of offenders is pushed through a clogged system.

The 9,000-square-foot center handles misdemeanor and nonviolent felonies in the SoMa, the Tenderloin and the area around Civic Center. It was created to treat the root problems associated with so-called quality-of-life crimes such as graffiti, drug sale and use, and shoplifting. Offenders are given on-site and immediate access to counseling and are referred to housing and treatment for substance abuse and mental health issues. They can sign up for state and federal assistance and are walked through what can be complicated bureaucratic processes by justice center staff.

Yet for all its noble intentions, the center has been caught in San Francisco’s thorny politics from the start.

Before it even opened, the center was mired in funding battles at the Board of Supervisors and the ballot box.

The center was championed by Mayor Gavin Newsom, but its critics says it duplicates efforts already handled elsewhere in the justice system.

Now, in its fifth month of serving clients, the difficulties have only intensified.

San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi says the Community Justice Center is a duplication of the longtime efforts of The City’s two other specialty courts: the drug court and the behavioral health court.

“Other than being able to sign up for [social security insurance] and in some cases get shelter, the services at the CJC were essentially the same type of outcomes as at the Hall of Justice,” said Adachi, who has tried to pull his staff out of the center, which he views as a waste of scant public resources. “This court was set up to provide different outcomes than what would happen at the Hall of Justice.”

A study commissioned by Adachi’s office found that 90 percent of justice center clients — the percentage served by a public defender — were found to be eligible for drug court and several other drug diversion programs already in place.

Much of the study, which was prepared by UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate Melissa Sills using public defender data from March to June of this year, is disputed by the justice center. Measuring duplication of services requires further analysis, said the center’s coordinator, Tomiquia Moss.

Nathan Ballard, a spokesman for Mayor Gavin Newsom, also disagreed with Adachi.

“He’s wrong,” Ballard said. “A similar program transformed Midtown Manhattan in the 1990s and we need to give it a chance to succeed here in San Francisco.”

Statistics from both the CJC and the Public Defender’s Office show that about 55 percent of cases handled by the justice center are dismissed. But supporters say that even in those cases, people are referred to critically needed services. About 55 percent of offenders showed up to court in the first four months, compared to 25 percent at the Hall of Justice, according to CJC data.

That attendance rate is steadily improving, and is currently at more than 60 percent, Albers said.

Both sides of the debate acknowledge that the type of court cases being handled isn’t what was initially anticipated. Before it opened, advocates said the court would be a place where police officers would send low-level offenders for citations like camping on the sidewalk or graffiti.

Today, most cases are funneled into the justice center from the District Attorney’s Office instead of the police. About 60 percent are probation violations from felony drug convictions, Albers said.

“It’s perfect for the population we’re targeting,” Albers said. These types of offenders are in and out of prison, costing the neighborhood its safety and the taxpayers their money, he said.

While supporters of the court describe its goals as organic, Adachi says the lack of clear definition is part of the problem.

“Courts like the Community Justice Center are best when they are dealing with real cases, substantial cases, and they have a high quality of service to offer. When you have both of those things, people will come to court. The challenge of the first phase of the CJC is it wasn’t clear what the focus was: Was it homeless people? Low-level drug cases? They relied on police to send cases to court and the volume was very low,” he said.

Albers acknowledged that police aren’t sending as many cases his way as the District Attorney’s Office is due to the sheer size and variation of the police units that serve the area.

But communication is improving and justice center staff is trying to increase the number, he said.

Paul Henderson, chief of administration for District Attorney Kamala Harris, said people who make use of the justice center’s large array of services and get the individual attention the center provides may be more successful than if they were offered the help through traditional courts or the prison system.

The battles over the Community Justice Center’s $1.3 million budget — which supervisors twice threatened to defund after voters rejected the center — fails to acknowledge the money saved by preventing recidivism, he said.

“That cost at the front end is always less than what it will be on the back end, once someone is in custody,” Henderson said.

But at only five months old, the court’s effect on the recidivism rate is too new to be measured.

“You have to build the car before you start measuring the amount of miles traveled,” he said.

Public defender says court stretches resources thin

A judge will decide today whether the Public Defender’s Office can drop its remaining cases at the Community Justice Center.

Citing insufficient staffing, Public Defender Jeff Adachi stopped taking new cases at the Tenderloin community court Aug. 3. Three days later, San Francisco Superior Court Judge Harold Kahn ruled that Adachi could drop cases in which his staff attorney had not yet established a working relationship with the defendant.

Kahn’s ruling relieved the public defender of about 200 cases at the justice center, or 75 percent of its caseload at the Polk Street facility, Adachi said. Today, Adachi will provide details of the remaining cases in the hopes they can be dropped as well.

At last week’s hearing, Adachi told Kahn he simply could not provide staffing to the justice center without causing problems for the majority of the public defender’s clients.

According to a 2009 Controller’s Office audit, San Francisco’s public defenders in 2008 were each handling, on average, 218 felony cases and 666 misdemeanor cases. That caseload is already well in excess of the American Bar Association’s standard of no more than 150 felony and 400 misdemeanor cases.

The overwhelming tide of cases appears to be calming. According to San Francisco Superior Court 2009 midyear criminal caseload statistics provided to the Mayor’s Office, new cases have dropped to nearly three-year lows. New felony filings through the first half of 2009 are down 8 percent from the first half of 2008. The court’s analysis also shows a two-year high on backlogged felony cases.

Meanwhile, monthly new misdemeanors filed remain near 30-year lows, according to the analysis, which was prepared by Presiding Judge James McBride. The judge attributed the drop in misdemeanor filings to a steady decrease in arrests for petty crimes and a decline in the district attorney filing charges in misdemeanor cases.

But while the caseload may be getting smaller, so is Adachi’s staff. This year, citywide budget cuts cost the office four attorneys, three paralegals, one investigator and two support staffers, Adachi said. It is facing additional cuts of $950,000.

Adachi said he agreed to staff the Community Justice Center because Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office promised to fund two attorneys to work there. Two weeks before the center opened in March, the Mayor’s Office informed Adachi that no attorneys would be provided due to budget cuts.

“I had two choices. I could not show up at court or I could staff it myself,” he said. Adachi spent up to six to seven hours a day at the Community Justice Center doing everything from data entry to paralegal work, he said.

The Public Defender’s Office has served about 200 clients in the five months the justice center has been open, Adachi said. In contrast, his office serves 29,000 clients a year at the Hall of Justice.

“We have 29,000 other clients who need help,” he said, adding that going back and forth from the Tenderloin to the Hall of Justice on Bryant Street would be a scheduling nightmare for attorneys who are already juggling too many cases.

Mayor’s Office spokesman Nathan Ballard called the dropped cases “a minor setback.”

“We’ve already started lining up volunteer attorneys who are eager to step in and represent the vulnerable people Jeff Adachi has abandoned,” Ballard said.

The cost of the court

Staffing and funding the Community Justice Center:

$1.3 million: Total staff budget this fiscal year

$800,000: Federal grant covering The City’s contribution to the center

- District Attorney’s Office staff: 2
- Department of Public Health staff: 3
- Health and Human Services staff: 1
- CJC administration: 1
- Probation staff: 3
- Sheriff’s Department staff: 2

Who uses the CJC?

- Clients engaged in services: 140
- Cases: 528

- Appearance rate of CJC clients: 55%
- Appearance rate at Hall of Justice: 25%

- Average number of days from police contact to court appearance at the CJC: 2
- Average number of days from police contact to court appearance at Hall of Justice: 45

Top three charges seen:

- Disorderly conduct/lodging
- Public nuisance
- Drug paraphernalia

Total referred to temporary shelter: 113

Overall case dismissal rate: 55%

What is treatment?

Treatment can include counseling for addiction and trauma, drug detox and comprehensive mental health care.

Who enters treatment?

- Clients mandated to treatment: 46%
- Clients voluntarily engaging in treatment: 30%

- Retention rate for clients mandated to undergo treatment: 98
- Retention rate for clients who voluntarily undergo treatment: 30

Source: Office of Collaborative Justice Programs

Add justice to the list of California’s budget victims. The Alameda County public defender’s office is telling judges that it can’t represent about 10,200 clients over the next year. Public Defender Diane Bellas doesn’t have much choice: Because of budget cuts, she’s losing 14 attorneys in September.

Public defenders, like all attorneys, have an ethical responsibility to provide adequate representation to their clients, and Bellas decided that she wouldn’t be able to do so with a skeleton staff.

So Bellas’ office will be turning away about 600 misdemeanor defendants and 350 probation-violation defendants each month. Fortunately for these clients, they still have their constitutional rights: They will be defended, at public cost, by private lawyers. But their defense will probably wind up costing the county more. Private attorneys charge hourly rates; studies have shown that it is nearly always more cost-effective to use public defenders.

San Francisco’s public defender, Jeff Adachi, has made this struggle his cause in recent years. Facing big budget cuts, he’s fought tooth and nail to keep his attorneys – and angered City Hall in the process. This week, he received clearance from a judge to withdraw from 75 percent of his cases at the Community Justice Center, one of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s favorite projects. Adachi, who is elected, says he can speak up where other public defenders, who are usually appointed, cannot.

“This is a pattern we’re seeing in public defender’s offices around the country,” he said. “It’s becoming more common, and in every case it’s going to cost the county more.” Adachi added that while all the public defender’s offices are struggling, he knew of only four counties in California that had “severely” cut them: Shasta, Fresno, San Francisco and Alameda.

Alameda County is in a far worse budget situation than San Francisco, so the cut is not surprising, even if the result is unsatisfying for both defendants and taxpayers in the long run.

This article appeared on page A – 7 of the San Francisco Chronicle

San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi is facing a $1.9 million dollar cut from his budget. The cut comprises nearly 10 percent of his operating budget, which is primarily used to pay for lawyers who provide services to the City’s poor.

No other big city department in San Francisco is facing cuts of this magnitude and the machinations that have led to this are among the most unusual at City Hall.

First, Mayor Gavin Newsom proposed cutting the public defender budget under the guise of saving money. He decided, against a trend followed in many other California cities (who are working to expand or create “second” public defense offices), that the public defender is too expensive and a large portion of its cases could be transferred to the private defense bar at a savings.

But audits by the City’s controller showed that Newsom’s plan to substitute private attorneys for public defenders would cost the city more, for simple reasons. Public defender lawyers work on a salary and do not earn overtime, even though their workload routinely compels a 10-hour+ workday. Private attorneys, by contrast, who customarily only handle cases the public defender cannot due to a conflict of interest, charge $85-$125 an hour. Not surprisingly, the evidence established Newsom’s plan to transfer cases to private attorneys would significantly increase the costs to the City by over $1 million dollars each year.

So why was this plan put forward in the first place?

Jeff Adachi, the only publicly elected Public Defender in California, is unafraid to disagree with our mayor (or any other public official) on policy issues and routinely exhibits independence.

For example, Adachi is a vocal opponent of the City Attorney’s use of so-called “gang injunctions,” that facilitate the profiling and unlawful arrest of African-American and Latino youth based on vague criteria easily susceptible to abuse. Adachi’s critique has proved prescient, as trial courts have found that several men have already been wrongfully identified by police as gang members.

Adachi also is a vocal critic of the community courts, a pet project of the mayor that diverts enormous funds to the prosecution of “quality of life” crimes – a project that many view as more important to Newsom’s gubernatorial aspirations than to making San Francisco a safer place to live. (Adachi staffed the court himself after the Mayor refused to allocate any resources to his office for doing so and a recent report shows that the court has been ineffective in its first three months of operation.)

Newsom’s proposed cuts would effectively require Adachi to lay off at least 15 lawyers – each of whom already handles a caseload that would stagger the average San Francisco attorney. The impact of such a reduction on the ability of attorneys to provide the poor and indigent with a basic criminal defense is hard to overstate.

Facing such severe budget cuts, Adachi sought help from the Board of Supervisors. Given the uncontested evidence that slashing the Public Defender’s office would cost the City greatly – in addition to harming the poorest among us – one would assume he would have found a receptive, or at least fiscally responsible ear.

But several members of the Board including many “progressives,” have endorsed a new, equally foolish and, in fact, more suspect justification for not helping preserve the Public Defender’s resources, inexplicably not understanding Adachi’s office’s role in aiding the poor.

The Board’s budget and finance committee initially voted 4-1 to reinstate $600,000 of his budget, but under the direction of Board President David Chiu, the budget committee decided to transfer $300,000 from Adachi’s budget to the District Attorney’s office. Chiu, a former prosecutor who once handled misdemeanor cases, justified his actions on July 1, 2009 by saying he could not support giving money to the Public Defender and not giving the equivalent to the District Attorney’s office.

Chiu’s reasoning is flawed for a number of reasons. Budgeting is based on need. Adachi established that his caseloads were high and that he would most likely be forced to outsource cases if the cuts took effect. So why on earth should there be an expectation that some of these monies first cut from, then restored to, his budget should be allocated to the District Attorney’s office?

But Chiu’s comments also demonstrate a deep misunderstanding of the fundamental differences between each office. The District Attorney’s office budget is $40 million, nearly twice the amount of the Public Defender’s budget. And the District Attorney receives over $7 million a year in state and federal grant funding not available to the Public Defender’s office.

Under these circumstances, simply taking $300,000 from the Public Defender’s office and giving it to the District Attorney for the sake of “equity” makes little sense, to put it mildly.

Even the San Francisco Chronicle published an editorial in Adachi’s favor. On June 29, 2009 they called the Mayor’s proposed cuts “seriously shortsighted and dishonest”. They noted the Public Defender’s office of 90 lawyers handle nearly 29,000 cases a year.

No Supervisor that votes to cut this budget while transferring monies to the District Attorney’s office should call themselves “progressive.” By comparison, the District Attorney’s office has only suffered a 3 percent general fund cut (more easily absorbed in a budget twice the size) and will likely grow in size when homeland security and stimulus package money is taken into account.

So why are progressives taking money from our public defender and transferring it to the District Attorney’s office? That’s a question that the full Board will answer when it reconsiders the Public Defender’s budget on July 14th – ironically, Bastille Day.

In trying economic times, the workload of our public defender’s office is only going to expand. Gutting a department that is already overloaded with cases with substantially fewer attorneys and resources than the City Attorney’s office and District Attorney’s office doesn’t make sense. And turning a blind eye to the effect such cuts will have – on poor people accused of crimes denied adequate representation – or to the increased costs the City will incur as a result, is not consistent with San Francisco values, or common sense.

Matt Gonzalez & G. Whitney Leigh are partners in the law firm Gonzalez & Leigh LLP that primarily handles civil rights cases. They are both former deputy public defenders in San Francisco. Leigh also served as a deputy public defender in Santa Clara County and was a partner at Keker & Van Ness LLP, and Gonzalez is a former San Francisco Supervisor.

In my earlier submission, I predicted that the budget battle between the Mayor and the Public Defender’s office would end badly. What I didn’t predict is what actually happened.

Here’s the quick summary: Jeff Adachi has been battling the Mayor’s office for months, arguing that cutting his staff would cost the city more than it would save. Although Adachi undertook a grassroots campaign — including a justice summit, a City Hall rally and a grassroots campaign to mail in thousands of postcards — Newsom nonetheless chopped $1.9 million from Adachi’s $23 million dollar budget. When a City Controller’s report was issued supporting Adachi’s arguments, and the usually conservative Chronicle issued a strong endorsement of Adachi’s position, the Board of Supervisors’ budget committee responded by voting 4-1 to redirect $600,000 from the Superior Court’s budget to help cover the Newsom’s cut to the Public Defender’s budget.

Here’s the kicker: After a closed door meeting with the Mayor’s folks, Board President David Chiu and Budget Committee Chair John Avalos agreed to transfer $300,000 from Adachi’s budget and award it to the District Attorney. That’s the equivalent of fleecing someone and giving it to his or her adversary.

While it’s unclear what motivated Chiu and Avalos to reverse the Budget Committee’s 4-1 vote, what is clear is that they delivered Adachi a big slap in the face. While they could have simply reduced his allocation, what they did instead was to take $300,000 from his budget and give it to the District Attorney. Ironically, the money that they unceremoniously handed over to the DA originally came from the Superior Court’s fund to provide attorneys for poor people. (The committee had voted to take $1.2 million from this fund, giving half of it to Adachi, and directing the other half to its spending pot.)

Chiu and Avalos’ move was not revealed until the list of budget items restored to the city’s budget —known as “addbacks” — were released at around 6:00pm last Wednesday. According to the web blog SF Appeal’s coverage of the night, Adachi was not happy with the outcome.

After each of the Supervisors on the budget committee gave their “this is a great budget” speech, vice-chair Ross Mirkarimi moved to amend the budget to add an additional $450,000 to the Public Defender’s office, noting that the add backs failed to address the shortfall in the office’s budget. Although Supervisors Campos and Dufty voiced their support of the amendment, Avalos balked, saying that he didn’t feel comfortable with the decision and wanted to think about it. President David Chiu, who isn’t on the committee but was seated at the hearing, chimed in and said that any money given to the Public Defender had to be split with the District Attorney. Chiu’s statement was curious, given the fact that the offices have very different budgets (the DA’s budget is almost twice that of the Public Defender’s budget) and very different functions (the DA charges crimes while the Public Defender’s office has clients who they are required to defend).

Avalos’ refusal to support Mirkarimi’s amendment effectively froze the effort to add funds to Adachi’s budget. However, because Supervisor Dufty felt that Avalos should have time to consider the amendment, the decision was put over until July 14, when the full board will vote on the city’s budget.

That David Chiu, who is a former SF Deputy District Attorney and a political climber, used this opportunity to gain favor with climber Kamala Harris is not surprising. Chiu probably figured that by transferring $300,000 into Harris’ budget, he would earn a few political chits with Harris, who has her sights on the state’s Attorney General’s office. But it’s rather odd that Avalos, who was a social worker and union organizer before serving as Chris Daly’s chief aide, would deliver Adachi such a humiliating blow. According to Avalos’ campaign site, Adachi was one of the few elected officials and department heads to endorse Avalos’ bid for office (a decision I’m sure Adachi now regrets).

City hall insiders say that Avalos, as the chair of the Budget Committee, had a $75 million list of programs and services he wanted to have added back, but only $22 million available to spend from the committee’s review of department budgets. When Chiu and Avalos met with the Mayor’s folks behind closed doors, the Mayor magically came up with another $25 plus million for Avalos to spend. But there was a price to pay for the money: save the Mayor’s pet programs, such as the Community Justice Center, and help us screw Jeff Adachi.

Avalos had staunchly opposed the Community Justice Center as a waste of public resources and recommended defunding it. He had also voted, along with three other committee members, to restore $600,000 to the Public Defender’s budget. Why the about face? It all comes down to money, honey. So Adachi’s budget loss was just a by-product of a mayoral deal Avalos and Chiu couldn’t refuse.

What remains now is that Adachi will have to do what he had hoped to avoid: lay-off public defenders and begin to outsource cases to private attorneys. He will finally have the chance to prove that firing public defenders will cost taxpayers $1 million more a year than what it would save by cutting his staff. But perhaps the moral of this twisted story is that San Francisco corruption isn‘t in the graft or the exchange of envelopes which ensnared former Supervisor Ed Jew. It’s in the way that political business is done in this town by officials such as Newsom, Chiu and Avalos who make decisions based on political expediency, not on what is right.

It will be interesting to see what the Board of Supervisors’ does on July 14th when the matter of restoring the Public Defender’s budget will be considered again. This time, Adachi will need six, not three votes, and he may not be able to count on Avalos or Chiu to get there.

San Francisco, like many other areas of the country, is facing an unprecedented budgetary crisis. However, proposed budget cuts to the Public Defender’s Office threaten to exact a toll on The City that would greatly outweigh their modest fiscal benefits.

More than 45 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision in Gideon v. Wainwright, which found that “lawyers in criminal courts are necessities, not luxuries.” The court concluded that governments have an obligation under the U.S. Constitution to provide legal representation for people charged with a felony who cannot afford to hire their own. Soon afterward, the court extended Gideon, applying the right to juvenile delinquency cases and to misdemeanor cases where imprisonment results.

This right to counsel is now accepted as a fundamental precept of American justice, yet is often implemented in ways that betray the great promise of Gideon. Only days ago, Attorney General Eric Holder said indigent defense services are in a state of crisis in our country.

We co-chaired the Constitution Project’s bipartisan National Right to Counsel Committee. Its members are individuals with expertise in every relevant part of the criminal justice system, including prosecutors, judges, victim advocates, defenders and scholars. In “Justice Denied: America’s Continuing Neglect of Our Constitutional Right to Counsel,” the committee unanimously concluded that this country’s indigent defense system is in crisis, that the government’s obligation to provide lawyers in these cases has for too long been ignored and that it cannot be ignored anymore. We issued 22 urgently needed recommendations for reforms, which we urge San Francisco to adopt.

Our recommendations are not just a matter of what the U.S. Constitution requires, they are also a means to conserve limited resources. Public defenders who are well trained and have the necessary resources can help ensure that a criminal trial is properly conducted and lower the chance of costly appeals. These public defenders can lessen the likelihood that innocent people will be wrongly convicted while the true perpetrators remain free, continuing to victimize society.

Every year, San Francisco’s public defenders represent more than 28,000 defendants, each handling a caseload that is two to three times what a private attorney would reasonably be expected to manage. Public defenders work extraordinarily long hours and, unlike other public servants such as police officers and firefighters, they are not paid any overtime compensation.

With such burdensome caseloads and work hours, the resources of the Public Defender’s Office are already stretched far beyond any reasonable limit. Any potential funding cut would only exacerbate the situation.

The proposed budget cut will also disproportionately affect minorities, who are most likely to need appointed lawyers. Compared to white defendants in San Francisco, blacks are 4.7 times and Hispanics 2.1 times as likely to need a public defender.

America’s criminal justice system is a model for the world. It contemplates defense lawyers who serve as the primary safeguard against the risk of wrongful conviction. It contemplates that the quality of justice should not be determined by the amount of money a criminal defendant has. The Sixth Amendment serves not just an individual charged with a crime, but all of us.

San Francisco is facing extraordinary budgetary pressure. However, the public defender model is the most cost-efficient way to fund this essential right to counsel. It appears that the Board of Supervisors’ Budget and Finance Committee recognized this when it voted to restore part of the office’s funding rather than to outsource cases to private attorneys.

However, the restoration of these funds will leave the office $1.3 million short of its proper funding level and will still require the office to withdraw from cases. Failing to fully fund the office will not only cost The City more in the long run, it will betray one of the U.S. Constitution’s most fundamental rights.

Rhoda Billings is a former chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, Robert M.A. Johnson is district attorney for Anoka County, Minn., and Timothy K. Lewis is a former judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit. The authors are co-chairs of the Constitution Project’s National Right to Counsel Committee.