MOULTRIE — In its first year of existence, Georgia’s new public defender system saved Colquitt County about $90 per case.

Colquitt County Chairman Max Hancock was pleasantly surprised at the numbers given the start-up costs to the new system.

“If there is any savings there, it certainly will be well received I can tell you,” Hancock said. “... That is a sizable expense to our taxpayers — the cost of indigent defense.”

The public defender’s (PD) office opened 813 felony criminal and juvenile criminal cases in Colquitt County in 2005. Of these, the office was unable to handle 36 because of conflicts, and the state had to hire private attorneys. The Moultrie office closed 434 cases by the end of the year and had 344 still open. Two assistant public defenders (APDs) handled the caseload.

Colquitt County paid $276,875.24 for indigent defense in 2005 for Superior and Juvenile court cases at an average of $358.18 per case. In 2004, the average cost per case was $448.92 under the former system in which local attorneys were appointed for indigent cases. In 2003, the average cost was $414.37.

Southern Judicial Circuit Public Defender J. Kent Edwards believes the new system is working much better than the former court-appointed system, and he was one of the skeptics, he said. The district attorney’s office and the PD’s office are cooperating better, he said, with sort of a one-stop shop for most cases rather than dealing with a list of court appointed attorneys. And since the PD’s office is, by statute, handling nothing but criminal cases in Juvenile and Superior courts, the process is speeded up and cases are adjudicated more quickly.

Edwards hopes the lines of communications will become more clear between his offices and the DA’s offices using more electronically transferred documents rather than relying on the sluggish, costly paper trail.

“Right now, we have tremendous amount of copy being done,” he said.

In the past, defendants didn’t have an attorney court-appointed for them until they went to an arraignment. Sometimes, it could mean that a person could sit in jail for three or four months until arraignment, he said.

“We’re now seeing everyone who is arrested in every county jail in the Southern Circuit within 72 hours of their arrest. Actually, we’re seeing most of them within 24 hours of their arrest,” he said. “... We don’t have people falling through the cracks as we’ve had in the past. We found some people who had been jail for months and months and never had spoke to an attorney when we got this program under way.”

By having instant defense applications, Edwards has found that the overall cost per case is going down not only in Colquitt County but every county in the circuit.

Still, the extreme caseload was a surprise to Edwards — as it was to every other public defender in the state, he said. He was expecting about half the number of cases.

“We weren’t expecting this,” he said, adding that the district attorney’s office is under a similar load and that the public defender’s office has the additional burden of having to investigate the case from the beginning.

At its start, the new system had trouble recruiting attorneys to commit to work as a public defender, he said. But that has eased somewhat. One good thing: The public defender, like the district attorney, can hire law students in their third year of law school to handle certain matters in court under direct supervision of an attorney.

The biggest challenge has been getting three new offices up and running, while at the same time diving into the caseload right from the start, he said. The office’s first arraignment was Jan. 3, 2005, in Moultrie, so the PD’s office certainly went through a trial by fire. Edwards had 10 of his staff at the jail that day interviewing people, he said.

With the addition of a new Superior Court judge, the Southern Judicial Circuit also gets another assistant district attorney and another assistant public defender. Edwards recently hired an assistant public defender who will be based in Colquitt County. Two APDs likely will staff the local office still, so one of the two APDs currently working here will move to another office in the circuit, he said.