Sign of the times spotted in the Criminal Justice Center:
We are out of paper. No copying folks. (Unless you supply!!)
Here's another sign. Defense attorney Sanjai Weaver has started taking SEPTA to work. The court has not paid the former prosecutor and judicial candidate since May, though she continues her court-appointed advocacy.
"It finally dawned on me last Monday," she says, "You can't pay for parking, you can't pay for the gas." She is owed more than $15,000.
As the economy has turned downward, Weaver has relied more and more on assignments from judges to represent the poor in criminal cases. Such work now represents close to 90 percent of her income. But government work turns out to have been a gamble.
She had to give up her parking space as of Aug. 1 and buy a monthly pass to travel from her Northwood home to the Center City courthouse, bad hip and bum ankle notwithstanding.
"Thank God I don't have a jury trial right now," she says, "because I don't know how I'd lug all those files around."
Looking around for a small violin to play as you read this? But this issue is not so easy to dismiss.
What you're hearing is the sound of the wheels of justice riding on the rims. You can thank the state's budget impasse. And you can thank the system of paying those who represent poor children and criminal defendants, which is burdened even when the state honors its bills.
Since July 1, the start of the fiscal year, the Philadelphia courts have submitted more than $2 million in legal fees that cannot be reimbursed because the legislature has not funded the city, which funds the courts.
The courts' bank account should be flush with millions of dollars at this time of year. Instead, it has a balance of only $10,000, says Pamela Pryor Dembe, president judge of the Court of Common Pleas. She calls the situation catastrophic.
"We are a city being held hostage," she says, "by politicians who are remarkably unconcerned about the damage they do."
Dembe has had to declare all court-appointed attorneys to be nonessential, meaning they cannot be paid until the governor and the legislature finish their "mud wrestling," as Dembe puts it, over the budget.
She insists that the services these lawyers provide - at a fraction of the market rate - are anything but nonessential.
