Increasing Access to Justice through a New Public Defender’s Office
After years of addressing its challenge of jail overcrowding by outsourcing inmates to other county jails, the pandemic’s court backlog prompted Hays County to seek alternative strategies to stem the inflow. A solution was being proposed by an ongoing grassroots community campaign led by Mano Amiga to address the “jail to deportation” pipeline that was landing immigrants in deportation proceedings: create a public defender’s office to ensure access to justice and reduce incarceration through quality legal representation. Meenu Walters, Managing Director at Neighborhood Defender Services (NDS) Texas explains, “There's an incarceration problem in Hays County, that's pretty readily recognized. The County wanted to work on ways that they could address the jail population, the build out of mental health resources, and the backlog in the courts caused by COVID.” With government and community interests aligning, in November 2022, Hays County, Texas dedicated $5 million in ARPA funds to establish one of the few public defender’s offices in the state of Texas.
Why this investment?
In 2017, the state of Texas passed Senate Bill 4 (S.B. 4), known to advocates as the “show me your papers” law, which allowed police to inquire about an individual's immigration status at any detainment, such as a traffic stop. In reaction, San Marcos residents came together after a screening of Selena at Cuauhtémoc Hall, a 70-year-old Mutual Aid Society, to form a grassroots organization named Mano Amiga. The organization began holding individual deportation defense campaigns and were able to free five out of six immigrants from deportation proceedings. Even with this success, the organization was still receiving far more requests for assistance than they could feasibly accommodate and realized they needed a more systemic solution.
Parts of S.B. 4 were eventually struck out by courts, and Mano Amiga shifted to become a “crim-imm organization,” working at the intersection of criminality and immigration and in particular, pre-trial intervention. The majority of people detained at Hays County Jail are being held pretrial, meaning that they are still legally innocent, only charged but not convicted as they await trial. Cyrus Gray, reentry investigator for Mano Amiga, spent four and half years in jail awaiting trial because he was not given the opportunity to pay bail, and when he was, he could not afford it. “If we could stop and intervene and prohibit or prevent that initial interaction with law enforcement, then we could prevent people from being put into deportation proceedings, from the jail or detention to deportation pipeline,” explains Eric Martinez, Executive and Policy Director at Mano Amiga, “And we could help prevent our indigent neighbors from being incarcerated in our jail.”
With their work expanding across Hays County, Mano Amiga began to receive letters from incarcerated people concerned about their legal representation. Some described being assigned defense attorneys who never met with them, or met with them for the first and only time just 15 minutes before court. This forced individuals to make consequential decisions such as whether to take a plea deal for a 15-year jail sentence or go to trial and face life imprisonment with no time to contemplate their options or chances. Mano Amiga, Immigrant Legal Resource Center, and other partners began investigating Texas’s privately assigned counsel system, in which most counties meet their constitutional requirement of providing representation for no-to-low-income people in criminal court by allowing private attorneys to supplement their practice with these indigent cases. They found that privately assigned counsel are not able to fully represent low-income defendants because, as business owners, they have to worry about overhead, staff, and their other cases, which often pay three to five times as much as indigent cases. Recognizing the community need for quality legal representation, Mano Amiga and its partners launched their campaign to create a public defender’s office in Hays County.
Convincing the Hays County Commissioners Court of the need for a public defender’s office was their major hurdle. For years, the County has been addressing jail overcrowding with the costly solution of outsourcing inmates to other county jails. While Hays County had been seeking alternative strategies to better address the problem, they were not yet convinced on the option to create a public defender’s office. Mano Amiga continued to build community support by engaging with residents who had experienced the system through public and political education. Through their persistent communications and organizing, they were able to flip one of the three Republicans on the five-member Commissioner's Court, which controls the County budget, making the issue bipartisan. Even with this major win, various power players resisted the idea. Mano Amiga remained relentless in their advocacy, continuing to engage with community, particularly justice-involved residents and their loved ones, sharing their stories and communicating with key figures to build political will.
Their path to success was revealed in 2021, when they partnered with the Texas Fair Defense Project and found out that the statutory minimum requirement in Texas to start a public defender's office required only a judge’s signature and the Commissioner’s Court’s earmarking of funds for the office. Knowing this, along with the Public Defender’s Priority Law, which required judges to give public defenders cases if they are able to receive them, convinced the Commissioner’s Court to set aside $5 million of ARPA funds, along with $5 million from the general fund, for a four-year contract to establish a public defender's office in Hays County.
What is this investment?
Hays County contracted with Neighborhood Defender Services to run the Hays County Public Defender’s Office in November 2022. Originally founded in Harlem in 1990, NDS is a community-based holistic public defense practice. In contrast to the traditional public defense approach, NDS offers clients a comprehensive team dedicated to their representation in and outside of the courtroom. Their approach goes beyond courtroom proceedings, providing wraparound services to shield clients from the multiple negative impacts of the criminal justice system. NDS works to enrich the entire criminal defense, social support, and social service ecosystem to address the root causes that bring individuals in contact with the criminal legal system.
The Hays County Public Defender’s Office is fully operational and has been taking on cases for fourteen months. The office structure consists of a managing attorney, two supervising attorneys, and five staff attorneys. In alignment with NDS’ full-service defense practice, the office also has investigators, client advocates, social workers, and general administrative support. Wraparound services include access to mental health services, Lyft vouchers, bus passes, clothing for court and/or interviews as well as access to a social worker and client advocate who provides support for clients beyond case resolution.
The Public Defender’s Office takes 25 percent of cases within the public defense criminal defense system in Hays County. By design, half of these cases have a mental health component in order to address the complex mental health needs of individuals in the criminal legal system. Traditionally, clients tend to be from marginalized communities who are over-represented in justice systems. In addition to representing clients, the office is actively working to build networks in the community with providers and other social service agencies to make sure that clients have wraparound services that are needed and intrinsic to their model.
Centering equity in the program
Equity is inherent to NDS’ approach. Their public defense practice is rooted in delivering equitable outcomes to historically disinvested communities. The Public Defender's Office prioritizes wraparound services related to social work and client advocacy with the goal of increasing accessibility to criminal defense for people across marginalized backgrounds., “Part of the holistic model is looking at people beyond the case and looking at the other aspects of their lives,” Walters, says. “We recognize that fixing the case before them does not fix the things that got them into the system in the first place, and so we look broader. It’s really a very client-centered practice.”
Currently, the Public Defender’s Office is working to address the effects of Hays County’s rapid population growth as a result of the overflow from neighboring Travis County, where the state capital, Austin, is located. Hays County is also uniquely located on a major corridor that spans from Mexico up to Chicago via the I-35 highway. The office has received a significant amount of cases from people living outside of the community who have different needs from community member clients. NDS is actively working with the County and community partners to address these challenges by identifying the needs of new populations and developing relevant wraparound services.
Outcomes to date
Evaluation continues to evolve for the Hays County Public Defender’s Office. They are required to share reports to the County and Texas Indigent Defense Commission outlining data points such as number of cases, specific number of cases with a mental health component, and number of dispositions. NDS is actively engaged in going beyond their reporting requirements. In evaluating success, they are analyzing the data to evaluate things such as number of cases connecting clients to social work services, the number of cases resolved with either community based or carceral outcomes, and plea changes.
As NDS continues to evolve its evaluation strategies, client testimonials mark the evident success of the Public Defender’s Office thus far. Due to significant mental health challenges, a client given the alias “Yolanda” spent over 700 days in custody before working with NDS. Upon introduction to NDS’ services, they were able to secure the dismissal of her felonies, empowering her to receive essential community-based mental health services through Mental Health Court. Additionally, NDS recognized the reentry challenges faced by Yolanda and consequently, they collaborated with the DA, jail staff, and out-of-county prosecutors to address these difficulties and ensure she received the necessary support for her release. After two years, Yolanda celebrated her reentry with family and her favorite meal at Panda Express.
Toward transformative change
NDS views the Public Defender’s Office as an ongoing process to build on with the community and fully develop a holistic model of public defense, ultimately working to establish a strong value proposition for the office and why it is needed in Hays County. Martinez envisions a bright future for the Public Defender’s Office, seeking it to be maintained from the general fund with supplemental funding from the Texas Indigent Defense Commission for new services along with other sources of grant funding.