OVERWORKED UNDERFUNDED and
Harried lawyers carry heavy caseloads
From head to toe, his attire is befitting of an important and busy man. Bob Ravitz, the county public defender, sports a blazer, slacks and a necktie. Also, a pair of running shoes.
“I got plantar fasciitis,” he says, before joking about having to change into dress shoes before he enters a courtroom.
Ravitz, whose office handles thousands of Oklahoma County cases each year, leads a quick tour of his sixth-floor dwellings in the courthouse, his voice crackling and accented as though it was forged in a Northeastern pub, despite growing up in Florida.
“Get your feet down,” he tells an attorney propping
them on a desk. “There’s a reporter here.”
In another lawyer’s office, that of a man they call “Tarzan,” manila folders and paperwork rise from the floor to the ceiling, and on a chair, a doll’s face, in the likeness of what appears to be professional wrestler Ultimate Warrior, peeks out from under a pile of legal field detritus.
Another attorney toils in a makeshift office stuffed with filing cabinets.
“Typical public defender style,” the lawyer says. “Do the most with the least.”
Burdened with heavy workloads, and dealing with a county jail beset by understaffing and limited space, public defenders in Oklahoma County face weeks of delays even trying to meet with their clients. The delays contribute to slow case processing and long stays behind bars.
Those are some of the conclusions reached by the nonprofit and New York-based Vera Institute of Justice, which in December released a 90-page report on the county jail and the criminal justice system in Oklahoma County.
As inmates languish in jail, they may lose their jobs, their housing and their families. About 80 percent of inmates are held pretrial, meaning they have not yet been convicted of a crime in their case.
“We’ve done so much in transforming this community over the last 20 years with MAPS, but we still have this huge issue in our community, and it’s not getting addressed,” says Roy Williams, president and CEO of the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce.
Losing lawyers
Sitting at a desk laden with yellow legal pads and staggered stacks of paperwork, Ravitz either leans forward in his zeal for helping people, or else reclines in resignation to the economics of justice.
His office is shortstaffed, underfunded, overworked and plagued by turnover.
Thirty-one lawyers in the county Public Defender’s office handle criminal cases involving adult inmates. They each close an average between 250 and 270 felony cases each year, up about 80 cases per lawyer over the last five years. National standards recommend lawyers handle about 150 felony cases per year.
Because of low pay, Ravitz’ has lost lawyers with experience. That means caseloads can be turned over to lessexperienced lawyers, and in many instances, the cases must be restarted. Twelve felony lawyers earn about $52,000 a year. Misdemeanor lawyers earn less than $45,000.
With 10 more lawyers, Ravitz says he would guarantee the public his office would see clients within 72 hours of the filing of criminal charges, versus the two to four weeks it takes now.
“It is clear to me that any time you have inexperienced lawyers handling cases at the jail, or you have insufficient staff, you’re going to have increased jail population,” Ravitz says.
Indeed, many delays are beyond the public defender’s control. For example, neither Ravitz’s office nor the District Attorney’s office are notified when bondsmen surrender defendants directly to the jail.
As strapped as his office is, Ravitz continues to look for ways to speed up cases while properly representing defendants.
He’s working with the district attorney, the Sheriff’s Department and the district court’s presiding judge to build a room in the jail where defendants can communicate with a judge via video. Rather than bring defendants to the courthouse, in many instances they will be able to appear by video to request a continuance, or seek entry into a community program.
Ravitz also is pushing for special judges to have the authority — granted by the presiding judge — to release certain offenders on their own recognizance, based on proven risk assessments. “Until the community buys in, you’re putting the judge in an awful jam, because no matter how good the risk assessment, no matter how good your screeners are, at some point in the next five years, they’re going to get out on one of those lower bonds and they’re going to commit a bad crime,” Ravitz says. “And it’s not fair to the judge who signs his name to a system we all believe is the best, who might be beat in an election.”
So-called sharks
On the fifth floor of the county courthouse, a man stands outside a courtroom door and peers through the window. Kenneth Hill says he offers paralegal services to low-income families. He’s waiting for some of them to exit the courtroom.
“Everybody’s all like one family,” he says of the private attorneys and paralegals seen trolling the courthouse for new clients. “It’s not a competition. Everybody’s here to do one thing. To assist the individual.”
Part of his business is to connect defendants with lawyers, he says.
“If I can get the attorney to settle for $500 down and they make payments on the rest, it’s good,” he says.
Some in the courthouse refer to Hill and those of his ilk as “the sharks.”
“You shouldn’t be allowed to just hang out there,” Ravitz says. “The Oklahoma Bar Association should do something about it. They need to send an investigator up here. I think that’s a disgrace.”
Ravitz says it is common for lawyers to prey on desperate defendants and their families. A lawyer may take a couple of hundred dollars from someone, who then doesn’t agree with sentencing offers made by a prosecutor, and the lawyer will get out of the case “just like that,” Ravitz says.
In other instances, a private lawyer may take someone’s money, but when the client misses a court date and is brought to jail by a bondsman, the lawyer withdraws from the case.
“Guess who gets the case?” Ravitz asks. “We do. That’s not right.”
As Hill scrambles after clients in a clamoring courthouse hallway, a lawyer named Jerry Jones sits on a bench outside a courtroom. He is known as “the mayor of the courthouse,” according to a high-ranking prosecutor.
Jones says the calls start pouring in during the middle of the week. The calls may come from previous clients, or those who’ve heard of him in the courthouse, or those who’ve been recommended to him by other lawyers, because he’s cheaper.
A woman approaches him.
“Hi Mr. Jones, you handled one of my cases,” she says.
They walk off together. When Jones returns, he sits down again.
“See, just like I was telling you,” he says.
Hill returns. Asked if he feels like a salesman, he says: “It’s not about selling, it’s in demand.”
As Hill talks, Jones dawdles down the hallway, alongside a man, toward a courtroom. The man peels off some cash and hands it to Jones, who folds the money and slips it into his right pants pocket. They enter the courtroom.
‘A nonpartisan issue’
In a fifth-floor courthouse room sits the man responsible for prosecuting thousands of Oklahoma County cases each year.
David Prater, the district attorney, greets one with a friendly “hey brother,” his slight smile anchoring dark eyes and the poker face of a man tasked with decisions that determine the fate of countless Oklahomans.
Similar to Ravitz, his office faces several hurdles in quickly moving people through the criminal justice system, out of the jail and into community sentencing or prison.
“We’ve tried to work on a number of those things for years, and unfortunately it seems to all go back to resources, and the funding of those resources, and we’ve been challenged for decades,” he says. “Right now, we’re six judges down in our courthouse. Six judges. I’m down 20 positions, 12 of which are lawyers that I can’t fill.”
Some of his lawyers have up to 600 cases on their hands. In 2016, the district attorney’s office filed more than 10,000 felony charges in Oklahoma County. The number of felony filings were comparable to those of Queens and Manhattan combined.
Aware of the comparisons between Oklahoma County and the New York boroughs, Prater offers an explanation.
“We have diversion programs, but they have diversion programs that are funded at enormous levels,” Prater says. “We aren’t. Their mental health and substance abuse services in the community are funded, and they exist. We talk about it here. The beds are impossible to find. And if you can find an empty bed, most families can’t afford those beds.”
Prater agrees with Ravitz that the jail population can be reduced, if the court could be more flexible on bond amounts.
“There is a concern about judges reducing bond and someone gets out, they re-offend and maybe hurt someone,” Prater says. “The negative impact of that publicity, the uneducated scrutiny that might come to a judge in that situation. And when I say that, that gets blown up in the paper. ‘Man makes bond last night, this morning goes and murders his wife.’ That’s the reality of it. That’s probably a lot of what’s gone into bond schedules not being adjusted, and a different system not being realized in Oklahoma County.”
He calls on legislators to add more funding to programs aimed at curbing criminal behavior.
Poverty and poor education, unwed mothers and domestic violence, as well as untreated addiction and mental illness all lead to increased criminal behavior, Prater says. Lacking political courage, legislators give lip service to funding community programs, he says emphatically.
“As the DA of Oklahoma County I say, ‘Amen, you’re damn right that’s what we ought to be doing,’” Prater says. “So pay for it. And that’s when they turn away from you and act like they’re not even talking about the same issue anymore.”
He and Ravitz work together on issues of jail overcrowding and criminal justice reform.
They’ve examined which cases can be expedited by releasing people on little or no bond. They’ve considered “rocket dockets,” cases where they are confident of a plea deal, with each taking about 45 to 60 days to close, rather than months. These ideas require the cooperation of the courts, which has been hard to come by.
Indeed, the lack of cooperation from various agencies leads to case delays. The district attorney has 10 days after an arrest to file charges on those who have not posted bond.
“We are at the mercy of the arresting agency to bring us the information on the case to determine if we can or should file charges, and a lot of that lag time is with that,” Prater says. “Some agencies are real good about getting stuff over in a couple days, and others are walking in on the 10th day almost every time.”
As to one change in charges his office will be dealing with starting July 1, Prater says voters were duped into passing State Question 780, which reclassifies simple drug possession and property crimes involving less than $1,000 as misdemeanors instead of felonies. Its companion bill, SQ 781, will direct any savings toward diversion programs, proponents say.
Prater says the threat of a felony hanging over someone’s head can drive them to the very treatment so many criminal justice reformers demand.
“I don’t want to charge someone with a felony to put them in prison,” he says. “I don’t get off on that. I don’t get paid any more for that. There’s no benefit to society for doing that just for the sake of doing that. But if I say ‘you’re going to go to prison for 10 years because I’ve now charged you with a felony for possession of methamphetamine,’ now are you going to go to treatment?’”