Save our pay: lawyers
Defense att’ys with indigent clients are vulnerable to mail theft
A frustrating legal technicality has made defense lawyers who represent indigent clients vulnerable to fraud and identity theft because the federal government is required by law to send their paychecks in the mail and not through direct deposit.
The arrest of a half-dozen identity theft suspects in Brooklyn last week highlighted the problem: Lawyers assigned to federal defendants through a Criminal Justice Act Panel must wait for five- and six-figure checks to come in the mail in a conspicuous envelope that leaves no question it contains a government check.
And it will take a literal act of Congress to change the process and use direct deposit.
“The checks come in a windowed envelope with all the information,” Brooklyn-based defense lawyer Natali Todd told the Daily News. “It says right there that it’s a check. … I’ve been targeted several times.”
Todd said she spent months figuring out which agency to go to for help. “Kudos to the Eastern District of New York for taking this up,” she said of the recent arrests. “I was determined to find a solution. Prosecutions can sometimes slow people down and let other people know this is not OK.”
She is not alone. Several lawyers who are appointed to indigent federal defendants through the Criminal Justice Act Panel told The News that several of their checks have gone missing or been stolen.
In the 2022 fiscal year, the federal judiciary sent out $358 million in paper checks to CJA lawyers. Those checks are four times more expensive to send out than direct deposit, seven times more likely to be lost, stolen or returned, “and 14 times more likely to have a nonreceipt claim,” according to the Judicial Department’s latest budget request.
Michael Hueston, who is representing one of the men accused of killing RunDMC co-founder Jam Master Jay, said he’s had three of his checks from Manhattan Federal Court cases stolen. It’s taken months to get reimbursed, he complained.
“A lot of this could be avoided if we could just have direct deposit,” he said. “The irony is we who work for the indigent are having our checks stolen.”
U.S. Treasury Department officials say they prefer sending out payments through direct deposit, but they rely on the paying agency’s rules, and that means deferring to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, or AO Courts.
The AO Courts are bound by an awkwardly phrased bit of federal law that, under the government’s interpretation, says payments to Criminal Justice Act lawyers must go directly to the attorneys, not to their law firms.
A change is in the works, said Jackie Koszczuk, an AO Courts spokeswoman. The federal judiciary plans to add language to the law through the latest appropriations bill before Congress, “and we are hopeful that the change will be enacted into law this year.”
While the attorneys wait for the law to change, the judiciary’s staff is working on making sure its computer system can handle the rush of direct deposit payments, she said. And lost or stolen checks can now be reissued through direct deposit, she said.
Check theft is not a problem limited to New York, Koszczuk said.
“It’s a national issue. It’s come up in multiple states, particularly for [Criminal Justice Act Panel] attorneys working in major metropolitan areas,” she said.
Meanwhile, the Brooklyn criminal case continues. Three of the six defendants, Tyquan Robinson, Ada Tavarez and Markel Washington, are accused of stealing a more than $125,000 check last year. Tavarez is accused of impersonating the CJA lawyer to open an account in the attorney’s name so the trio could get access to the money.
Three more defendants, Nicholas Barton, Richard Reid and Omar Clarke, are accused of stealing another CJA lawyer’s check for nearly $15,000.
Lawyers for Clarke and Washington did not return messages seeking comment; lawyers for the remaining four defendants declined to comment.
Of the six defendants, four are represented by CJA-appointed lawyers.