Defender asks for staff increase

COEUR d'ALENE - Kootenai County Chief Public Defender John Adams came in asking for an additional full-time attorney and an extra legal assistant.

The county commissioners on Friday turned him down on both, at least until budget season.

"I'm not a big fan of adding bodies outside the budget process," Commissioner Dan Green said.

"I have given the prior boards ample substantiation of why these attorneys are needed," said Adams, who has asked for additional attorneys in the past, too.

He said the Constitution mandates the county have more public defenders to provide adequate indigent defense services.

"You have to keep up with the growing population," Adams said.

His office handles more than 6,000 cases per year, he said, and caseloads of public defenders in the county have been pushed beyond constitutionally acceptable levels.

He knows his staff would give up pay raises to have extra people in the office to help share the workload.

"Don't take that out of context, that I don't want my people to get more money, but I think they would trade $300 per year for more companions in the trenches," Adams said.

The annual expense of the two additional positions Adams asked for Friday, including benefits, would have been $120,000. The cost would have been $70,000 through the remainder of fiscal year 2015.

While the board denied the request for those two positions, it did approve a raise and promotion for a temporary courier employee, who has been running files between offices for defense attorneys the past couple years.

The courier now becomes a full-time, permanent secretary in the public defender's office. She will get a pay raise from $10 per hour to $11.37, and she will also now get benefits, following the commission's vote Friday.

It's been roughly three years since Adams' office received additional staff. At that time he received two extra attorneys.

Also Friday, Adams asked for money to pay for a part-time attorney - working 30 hours per week - who could assist him with the defense of Angel Morales-Larranaga, who has been charged with the murder of his wife and 6-year-old stepdaughter in July.

Adams said the "capital" murder case of Morales-Larranaga, who is an illegal immigrant from Mexico, is an extraordinary amount of work for one attorney. The cost for some part-time help would be approximately $2,400 per month, Adams said.

"Now that there's a death-penalty case, there's a completely different funding mechanism potentially available to you," Green said.

Adams should be able to receive funds from the Capital Crimes Defense Fund, Green said.

"Let's use the insurance fund that we've been funding for all these years," Green said.

The fund was established by counties to fund costs in criminal cases when the death penalty is a legal possibility.