In full disclosure, I am an attorney at the Knox County Public Defenders Community Law office. I work for the elected District Public Defender, Mark Stephens.

I really can't say what the average size of a public defender's office is for our population. I can say the number of attorneys we have is too few for our caseload.

The Problem and Proposed Solution

There are national caseload standards as well as a TN weighted caseload study that determines if an attorney has too many clients. By any of these objective standards, we have too many clients. Based on the ethical standards to which all attorneys are bound, public defenders believe that effective representation requires more time to meet with clients, investigate the facts, and research the law. To fulfill the obligations required by the U.S. Constitutional guarantee of the right to counsel, we either need more attorneys or fewer clients.

We can't make the legislature give us more staff so we are relying on our ethical duty to inform the courts that we must have fewer clients. We are asking that we receive no more misdemeanor case appointments in Knox County General Sessions Court.

If we are not appointed, our office will move the six attorneys currently in misdemeanor sessions to the other courts to alleviate the overburdened workloads in those courts. We believe that if we can reallocate our attorneys in this way we can fulfill our ethical obligation to competently represent our clients.

Were this to happen and we were no longer appointed to these cases, private attorneys will be appointed to the misdemeanor cases in Knox County General Sessions Court. This is the best solution because 1) the misdemeanor fee claims are less than in any of the others, thus costing less than other possible solutions, 2) misdemeanor cases rarely advance to trial courts and so the defendants won't be inefficiently passed to different attorneys when counsel is re-appointed in Criminal Court (as occurs more frequently in felony and DUI cases).

This is the best solution we can propose until we are given additional staff to handle the cases to which we are currently appointed.

Knox County's relative crime rate

Regarding your second question concerning the relative crime rates, Knoxville's crime rate is not out of line for an urban area for our size. Comparisons to overall national statistics are skewed because of factors related to higher urban concentration vs. lower rural concentration.

Here's a comparison to Chattanooga that appears similar in ratios of reported crime per 100,000 residents.

Looking to a similarly situated city to our east, Durham, NC has a similar crime rate.

I will upload a pdf of the Public Defender's petition to suspend appointments later this evening for those that are interested. The numbers are pretty shocking. We have worked for the past 7 months to prepare a petition that is soundly documented and argued. This isn't a new problem but we have hopes that we can begin to address it with this request for relief.

SC, thanks for the background. I seem to recall hearing about this problem for a while. It sounds like nothing much has been done about it, forcing the PD's office into triage mode.

From what I've read re. representation for death penalty defendants in other states around the South, one has to wonder if all of this is a systemic problem tracing back to some kind of agenda trickling down from the current administration and their dysfunctional DOJ.

Regardless, my takeaway is that justice for some (i.e. those who can afford adequate representation) is justice for none.

The Petition to Suspend further appointments to the Public Defender's office is downloadable for those interested (1.5M PDF). The affidavits & exhibits aren't included in this PDF (sorry).

Tennessee crime rates from TBI Statistical Analysis Center
(link...)