By Noreen Marcus, Florida Bulldog.org
Broward Public Defender Gordon Weekes had to waste $468,000 of his operating budget on suing Clerk of Courts Brenda Forman and forcing her to adopt rules to ensure that millions of dollars in PD client fees reach the PD.
Neither Forman nor apparently any court clerk this century had written up such obvious guidelines. Finally, on Oct. 8, Broward Circuit Judge David Haimes approved a settlement between the two elected officials that should restore a big chunk of the public defender’s funding.
Forensic auditors retained by PD Weekes estimated that from 2010 to 2018, the PD’s office was shortchanged $18 million.
The settlement has an unusual enforcement clause like one that’s imposed on inept prison or police executives. Going forward, if there’s an issue with PD client fees, a judge may investigate and, if necessary, order the clerk to honor the agreement.
Even after signing the 983-page pact, however, Forman’s office insisted nothing’s wrong.
“The Broward County Clerk of Courts denies …the allegations asserted by the Law Office of the Public Defender for Broward County,” Dian Diaz wrote in response to questions from Florida Bulldog. Diaz, the clerk’s chief operating officer, was Forman’s point person on the PD case.
Diaz claimed the clerk’s office collects and turns over all PD-related fees, fines and costs. “There is no court order or judgment stating anything to the contrary,” she added.
That’s true. There might have been a judgment stating otherwise, but in May, just ahead of a scheduled non-jury trial, the clerk and the PD told Haimes they were on the verge of settling. It took another five months to hammer out the details.
Weekes told Florida Bulldog he had to end years of talks with Forman’s office and start litigating last year in order to “stop the bleeding.”
“There was only so much energy we could continue to exhaust trying to get them to fix our issue,” Weekes said. He started noodling the problem when he was a chief assistant to Public Defender Howard Finkelstein, who retired in 2020 and endorsed Weekes to replace him.
PD COULDN’T WALK AWAY
“It was a Pandora’s box that we knew we had to open,” Weekes said. “We knew that it was going to be very complicated and cost-intensive, but we could not walk away from this issue.”
Starting with Al Schreiber, the late public defender who served for 28 years until he retired in 2005, Broward PDs compared their client fees to other same-sized circuits. They suspected a problem because they had significantly less money coming in, Weekes said.
The fees PD clients pay aren’t huge, but they add up. There’s a $50 application fee when the case begins and, at the back end, an assistance fee of $50 to $100. When a client pays off a fee, the money goes directly from the clerk’s office to the PD’s office, said Dacia Riley-Taylor, Weekes’s general counsel.
No problem. But the process turns opaque when a client fails to pay and the clerk sends their unpaid fee account to a collection agency. Whatever’s collected goes to the clerk’s office in a lump sum; then it’s time to sort out who gets how much of the total, also maybe including restitution and/or costs, and who’s paid first, Weekes said.
“They had no rules around this and because there were no rules, it was a very, very gray area, where we need everything transparent,” he said.
Once Weekes brought in forensic auditors to unscramble the process, they estimated that over the years 2010 to 2018, the PD’s office was shorted $18 million. He agreed that a definite figure is unavailable because the money is extremely hard to trace.
Also, there was no consistency from courtroom to courtroom, Riley-Taylor said, since some judges imposed certain fees and others waived them.
“Now it’s clearly delineated that public defender fees are mandatory and we don’t have forms that say one thing one year and another thing another year,” she said.
WEEKES CLAIMS A WIN*
Weekes wasn’t able to sue the clerk’s office for money damages because that’s not how these squabbles are resolved; it would be like suing Peter to pay Paul when both are government agencies.
He had to request a writ of mandamus, a court order directing an official to perform a legally required task. The judge is a neutral third party who declares whether or not the defendant official failed to act.
Even without recouping the lost millions, Weekes is claiming a win – with an asterisk. The vast majority of public defender clients are indigent and many don’t pay their fees, meaning a lot of accounts go to collection agencies, he said.
Under the settlement, fees should be tracked and tallied so clients know exactly how much they owe.
“You need clarity about what your obligations are to this system when you leave this system,” Weekes said. “That way they can make better decisions about their lives.”
The asterisk represents the fact that the Broward clerk of courts, unlike some other Florida clerks, hasn’t gone totally electronic. “Now that we’re in a digital age it’s important to move dispositions and record-keeping into that digital age,” Weekes said.
What can happen without a digitized system became clear when the Florida Legislature passed a law in 2019 requiring former inmates to pay all outstanding fees, fines and restitution before they can vote. A 2018 amendment had restored voting rights to most felons who complete their sentences.
Advocates said the law places an unfair burden on former inmates because there’s no statewide database showing how much they owe. The American Civil Liberties Union protested that the law creates “two classes of returning citizens: a group wealthy enough to afford their voting rights and another group who cannot afford to vote.”
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