My readers give me feedback that the situation is rampant as to denials of assigned counsel where counsel is badly needed - and where people are entitled to assigned counsel by statute.
Examples are:
Family court and foreclosure proceedings.
In Family Court, judges started to require submission of tax refund information, and disregard the family's debt obligation, including child support and child support the arrears obligations. With a large refund, even if it has to be applied to the family's mortgage, car payment (and we have no public transportation where I live and practice law, so the car is the only way to get a job and provide a livelihood for the family and children), or court-ordered child support or arrears, assigned counsel is habitually denied in Family Court.
When individuals are appealing from Family Court decisions, appellate divisions impose a payment cap to the assigned appellate counsel which exists no matter how big the record is and can only be extended by pennies as compared to the work that is supposed to be done.
Online research databases are notoriously expensive, local law libraries understaffed, located far away from the assigned counsel (if this is a rural area), are not open during the weekend and evening hours where attorneys are free from court appearances and can do their work on the appeals
Thus, with research practically not covered by the payment cap, with review of large records not covered by the payment cap, indigent Family Court appellants are practically punished for taking the case to trial, as their assigned appellate counsel face the dilemma - to work without payment in reviewing the record, or to skip through it without proper research (which is what is often done).
Thus, the already given right to assigned counsel is frustrated - and Lippman could work at least on not frustrating rights to assigned counsel that already exist before trying to provide assigned counsel in more cases.
In foreclosures, assigned counsel is available to indigent homeowners by statute, but the first time the indigent homeowner appears before the judge to ask for that assigned counsel is usually at the "settlement conference", 60 days after the service of the foreclosure complaint, when the homeowner is usually in default and waived all of his or her affirmative defenses.
Assigning counsel at that point is more or less useless, and the statute does not presuppose a possibility of advising the homeowner of his right to apply for an assigned counsel in the text of the foreclosure complaint, nor to advise the homeowner that he will not be in default until he exercises that right, until the counsel is assigned and has 20 days after assignment to file the Answer and Affirmative defenses.
Also, the same indigent homeowner who has a right to an assigned counsel at the trial level, will be denied that right on appeal. By the courts over which Lippman supervises and has authority to change these rules, but doesn't, preferring instead to throw around populist slogans like this:
Unrealistic resolutions do not help much.
Resolutions without funding create false illusions and false hopes in people, which is cruel.
Lippman provided no promise that the "joint resolution" he is seeking with the Legislature will have any funding at all.
What "civil Gideon" rights exist now are already watered down and frustrated, as I explained above.
It appears that, for Lippman, it is more important to make "the first statement of its kind" than to make sure the statement will actually work or has sources of funding, or that before he makes such a statement, he mended the holes in how the already existing "civil Gideon" rights are (mis)handled by his courts.
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