E-Mail This Article to a Friend CRIMINAL JUSTICE Unacceptable, outrageous, but okay for now BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN

Every year around this time, as the fiscal year begins, the state’s court-appointed attorneys — the lowest-paid defenders of the indigent in the country — warn of impending crisis. This time, it’s here.

In courtrooms across the state, lawyers are simply not available to represent indigent accused criminals. In Suffolk County, of the 320 private attorneys who took court-appointed cases last year, only 130 have renewed their contracts for FY ’06. Just 90 of 325 have signed on in Middlesex County.

As a result, Roxbury, Dorchester, and Chelsea district courts had one defense attorney each on Tuesday to represent a total of about 120 new criminal defendants. Suffolk and Middlesex Superior Courts, which handle the most serious crimes in Eastern Massachusetts, had no defense attorneys scheduled for "duty days" all week. All but one of Middlesex’s 22 courts were understaffed on Tuesday — there were no court-appointed defense attorneys at all in Cambridge and Woburn district courts. "I couldn’t find bodies to fill the courts if my life depended on it," says Robyn Larsen, scheduling coordinator for Middlesex Defense Attorneys, which subcontracts the services.

Court officers were still trying to tally the number of unrepresented defendants at press time. There were 16 in Woburn alone, four of whom were still being detained awaiting arraignment.

This matters, of course, because it compromises the quality of representation defendants are likely to receive. But it also matters because, quite suddenly, we could see our streets flooded with potentially dangerous persons: in the midst of a similar situation last July, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled that after seven days without representation, indigent defendants must be set free, regardless of what criminal charges they face. Those seven-day deadlines are now ticking. The release next week of criminals accused of violent crimes "is a very real possibility" in Boston, says Daniel Hogan, clerk-magistrate of Boston Municipal Court. The same goes for Cambridge, Lowell, Framingham, and elsewhere.

A year ago, Governor Mitt Romney called the release of prisoners in Springfield an "unacceptable" and "outrageous" threat to public safety. Today, the problem is much worse, and he is mum; his office provided no comment for this article. Perhaps that’s because the FY ’06 budget, which took effect on July 1 and which Romney signed last week, included no rate increases for publicly appointed counsel, even though a state commission — staffed with Romney appointees — recommended appropriating $40 million for such increases in a report released on April 1 of this year.

The crisis may be short-lived: a bill to implement the commission’s recommendations, including a rate increase phased in over three years, went to the House Ways and Means Committee this week. It would immediately boost the basic rate paid to court-appointed defense attorneys for district-court cases from $37.50 an hour to $50. John Rogers, House majority leader and a member of that committee, is optimistic that the bill will be quickly passed and signed — perhaps within a couple of weeks. "Some thought that because it was not in the FY ’06 budget, it was the death knell for the year," Rogers says. "That is not my sense at all." If he’s right, this is just a tough few weeks for the courts. If he’s wrong, it could be a rough year for the Commonwealth.