At The Top Of The List

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ABA House Urges Congress to Improve Pay Structure for Federal Judges

June 2007 Issue
By Jake Solspace

ABA president Alfred P. Carlton jr. says the need to improve salaries for federal judges should top the list of legislative priorities the association is pushing in Congress.

That issue “must become job one and priority one” of the ABA, Carlton told the House of Delegates during the midyear meeting in Seattle.

Soon after, the policy-making House took just the kind of action Carlton was calling for when it overwhelmingly endorsed provisions in a report by the National Commission on the Public Service that urge Congress to ease the financial burden on federal judges. The commission headed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker is a project of the Brookings Institution.

In a report issued earlier this year, the commission said Congress, in seeking to bring salaries in all three branches of the federal government more in line with those of the private sector, should make its first priority “an immediate and substantial increase in judicial salaries.”

The House also endorsed a second commission recommendation urging Congress to eliminate legislative measures linking its own pay increases to salary and cost-of-living adjustments for federal judges.

“This linkage causes federal judges to suffer the consequences of Congress’ reluctance to award itself a pay increase or even to accept cost-of-living adjustments that have been provided for by statute” for fear of incurring public wrath, states a report to the House from the ABA Standing Committee on Federal Judicial Improvements. “The time has come, however, for Congress to realize that its refusal to delink salaries has had a cumulative and deleterious effect on the federal judiciary, and evinces a disregard for a co-equal branch of government,” the report states.

The ABA and the Federal Bar Association are completing an update to a report they issued two years ago that calls attention to the salary disparity between federal judges and lawyers in the private sector. The update report was expected to be released in March. “We are at a crisis point,” says Carlton. “It boils down to having an adequately paid, capable and competent judiciary the public can have confidence and trust in.” —James Podgers

Promise Still Unfulfilled

Witnesses at Hearing Say Criminal Defense Services Still Aren’t Adequate Four decades after the u.s. supreme court issued its landmark 1963 decision in Gideon v. Wainwright affirming the right of all criminal defendants to legal counsel even when they cannot afford to pay for it, the concept still hasn’t taken hold completely.

States have not always effectively carried out the mandate of Gideon, said witnesses at a hearing conducted during the ABA Midyear Meeting in Seattle by the Standing Committee on Legal Aid and Indigent Defendants.

The hearings are part of an ongoing campaign to raise awareness about the need for effective indigent defense throughout the country, says committee chair L. Jonathan Ross of Manchester, N.H. The committee will hold additional hearings on the issue in August at the ABA Annual Meeting in San Francisco and in the fall during the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys meeting in New Orleans.

In Over Their Heads

The committee heard that, in montana, for instance, some jurisdictions assign criminal cases to private attorneys on a strict rotating basis, according to the testimony of Deirdre Caughlan, who works as a public defender in Butte, Mont., on a contract basis. The result is that an inexperienced attorney may wind up with a homicide case, while a more experienced lawyer who happens to be next on the list draws a relatively minor case. Many jurisdictions in the state also fund public defender offices at much lower rates than prosecutors’ offices, Caughlan said.

Witnesses from Nevada and Washington state presented similar testimony to the committee. Ross said the hearings are being held to collect information that will “shed light on the lack of parity between the resources available to the state vs. those available to the defense.” —Margaret Graham Tebo