The Associated Press
ATLANTA (AP) —
Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue sought Wednesday to shake up the state’s public defender system with a surprising appointment, crossing party lines to select Democratic state Rep. Rob Teilhet to lead the agency as it tries to mend a reputation tarnished by lagging support from conservatives and legal challenges from liberals.
Teilhet, who lost a bid for his party’s nomination for attorney general in July, said he’ll aim to be a consensus builder who will broker compromises on some of the issues that have plagued the Public Defender Standards Council since it launched in 2005.
“The various stakeholders who have been fighting amongst themselves about the system all agree about some pretty important things,” he said. “My goal is to bring people’s focus back on these things that we agree on and repair some of these breaches.”
Teilhet succeeds Mack Crawford, a former GOP lawmaker who was tapped for a superior court judgeship. The cash-strapped public defender system has struggled almost since its start.
Civil rights groups have targeted the system with a flurry of challenges claiming it is failing its mission to provide adequate legal defense for Georgia’s poor defendants.
Among other complaints, they say the state failed to hire attorneys for 100 or so convicted inmates who are seeking to file an appeal. And they claim that some defendants have waited in jail for years for public defenders because the cash-strapped system can’t afford to pay for attorneys.
The statewide system has also been a favorite target of conservative lawmakers, who have peppered the system with criticism ever since it picked up the $3 million taxpayer-funded defense tab for the 2008 trial of Atlanta courthouse gunman Brian Nichols. Prosecutors said Nichols’ defense should have cost about $500,000.
Teilhet said he doesn’t have any specifics yet with how to deal with the struggles, but plans to spend the next few weeks meeting with stakeholders and assessing the office.
He said he hopes to use the legislative connections he’s honed during his eight years representing Smyrna in the statehouse to secure more financial support. And he said he wants to emphasize the unsung heroes who represent tens of thousands of poor defendants every year.
“The press is only interested when things go wrong, but one of the untold stories is the success happening over there,” he said. “There’s a lot of good work done that’s often overlooked.”
Perdue said he tapped Teilhet for the post partly for his legal and legislative experience, but also because he “brings to this position a passion for seeking justice and protecting Georgia’s citizens.” Perdue has a longstanding relationship with Teilhet, whose wife Heather was the governor’s former press secretary.
Critics of the agency welcomed his appointment. Sara Totonchi of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights, which has filed several of the legal challenges against the council, said she looked forward to working with Teilhet.
“Georgia’s old ’meet ’em and plead ’em’ system failed to provide adequate representation to thousands of poor people accused of crimes in the state’s courts,” she said. “We have made too much progress in creating a better system to risk going backward, so we are counting on Rep. Teilhet’s already-proven ability to solve problems and be forward thinking.”
Board member Wyc Orr, one of the more outspoken members of the council’s board, said Teilhet’s first priority should be working with lawmakers to secure more funding for the system. He said a constitutional amendment may ultimately be required to make sure that the court fees that were supposed to fund the system aren’t diverted.
“The system can’t stand that. This money is desperately needed,” he said. “It’s an embarrassment to the state of Georgia no matter how serious the alleged crime that we keep people locked up for years because there’s no money to defend them. That sounds like totalitarian treatment, and our state should not tolerate it.”
