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Attorney Steve Rease is a 29-year veteran of the Monterey County Public DefenderÕs Office.


These words — and the basic right they represent — were not a guarantee 50 years ago.

Monday marks the 50th anniversary of Gideon v. Wainwright, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that guaranteed everyone's right to counsel regardless of income and led to the creation of public defenders' offices all over the country.

For many local defense attorneys, it's a bittersweet celebration.

They're grateful for Gideon's promise, but are worried it may never be fully realized.

Overworked and lacking resources, public defenders in Monterey County are outspent 2 to 1 compared to prosecutors.

'Great shining moment'

Attorney Steve Rease, a 29-year veteran of the Monterey County Public Defender's Office, calls the Gideon decision "one of the great shining moments of the Supreme Court — that they paid attention to some non-lawyer, just a guy saying, 'Hey, I think I got denied my rights here.'"

On March 18, 1963, Clarence Earl Gideon hand wrote a petition in his jail cell to the U.S. Supreme Court, appealing his misdemeanor conviction for breaking into a pool hall.

He had been forced to defend himself because he couldn't afford a lawyer.

The Supreme Court justices unanimously ruled that defendants have a constitutional right to counsel and that a lawyer must be appointed by the state if they could not afford one.

"We established this ideal in the Constitution of the right to a fair trial," Rease said. "Gideon is the payment of delivery of that promise."

Put more simply, he said, "If it's a fundamental right, it can't be based on how much change you got in your pocket."

The Gideon case did not create the concept of public defenders, but it did ensure they exist everywhere in the country.

California had the first public defender's office in the nation, opening in Los Angeles in 1914.

Monterey County's office wasn't established until six years after the Gideon ruling. Its doors opened in May 1969, when the county's first public defender was 32-year-old Harkjoon Paik, a Korean War refugee who went on to become a superior court judge.

Jeff Adachi of San Francisco, the only elected public defender in the state, says California has an uneven history when it comes to indigent defense.

"It wasn't something that was common to most states until the Gideon decision," he said. "Gideon made it official, but they didn't say who was going to pay for it."

Because of this funding uncertainty, he said, "you have an uneven patchwork quilt. Every county has its own system."

Adachi said this patchwork also means some areas in California invest more in their defenders than others.

In the U.S., he said, public defenders' offices tend to receive a much smaller share of funds than district attorneys' offices.

"In California, it's 60 to 65 cents on the dollar," he said. Monterey County's ratio is even lower, varying in recent years between 48 to 53 cents per prosecutor dollar.

The current year's budget has it at 51 cents, down from 53 the year before.

"The integrity of the criminal justice system depends on both the prosecutor and the defender being adequately funded," Adachi said. "The U.K. spends three times as much on defense as (on) prosecutors."

Some would argue the ratio is lower because some defendants can afford their own attorneys, but Rease said even when taking that into account, public defenders are under-funded.

At least one researcher has agreed, noting that the Monterey County Public Defender's Office reported "serious excessive attorney and investigator workloads, had no paralegal staff, and had handled a death penalty case while laboring under caseloads that exceed national standards."

That observation came from California Western School of Law professor Laurence A. Benner in a 2009 law review article analyzing public defenders' budgets and caseloads around the state.

Practically speaking, those pressures combined with lowered budgets mean essentials like investigators and expert witnesses are in shorter supply, and the attorney a client gets may be too overworked to do the job right.

"Where Gideon falls short is not having adequate funding," Adachi said. "And it didn't say what kind of lawyer you'd get. Is your lawyer like a potted plant standing next to you?"

Most indigent defendants, he said, "are assigned to an overburdened, under-resourced public defender or private contractor, and they're probably going to plead guilty."

And, he added, it's almost impossible to measure how often defendants plead guilty to the wrong crime.

"Gideon was about making sure the promise that every American is born with — liberty and justice for all — is a reality. It wasn't then, and it still isn't," Adachi said. "We still have a long way to go before Gideon's promise is met."

Until you need them

Rease came to work as a Monterey County defense attorney in 1984, a few years after getting his start in Riverside County.

Today he works in the public defender trailers across from the county courthouse on West Alisal Street in Salinas. On his desk sits a plaster sculpture of Jackie Robinson.

He was raised to be a defender of the underdog, he said, and he shrugs off the slurs often leveled at defense attorneys.

"We hear all the jokes about 'how can you defend those people?' and 'you must not have any mirrors in your house,'" he said. "Until it's somebody that you care about, and then (you) want the most zealous advocate possible."

Society, he said, tends to believe "the police are going to get it right, that the prosecutors are going to get it right, the judges are going to get it right. And they often do. ... (But) somebody's got to be there to make sure that they are right."

Noting the hundreds of cases of exonerated prisoners, many of them saved from death row by DNA tests, he said, "Somebody was absolutely certain at the time of that trial that that man was guilty. They happened to be wrong. But at the time, those 12 people on that jury believed beyond a reasonable doubt that defendant was guilty.

"It's a human system ... and sometimes we get it wrong. And that's another legacy of Gideon. It's easier to avoid those kinds of mistakes and correct those kinds of mistakes if the accused has counsel to protect him."

Julia Reynolds can be reached at 648-1187 or