Louisiana public defenders lacking resources needed to adequately prepare for Miller resentencings in old juve LWOP cases

This interesting local article highlights the economic challenges posed for some local courts and lawyers when now having to implement retroactively the Supreme Court's Miller ruling precluding mandatory LWOP sentences for juvenile murderers.  The article is headlined "'Unfunded mandate' of individualized sentencing hearings for some juveniles causing headaches for public defenders," and here are excerpts:

A 2012 U.S. Supreme Court decision ruled out laws mandating life without parole for juveniles as unconstitutional, and a subsequent decision last year made that ruling retroactive. Now, those juveniles are required to get what’s called “individualized sentencing hearings” before such a harsh sentence can be handed down, said Carol Kolinchak, a compliance officer for the Louisiana Public Defender Board.

And those hearings take resources. “You have to investigate and develop evidence (about) the youth and the circumstances surrounding the crime,” Kolinchak told [Judge Arthur] Hunter, adding that it is the defense’s “ethical obligation” to make sure each juvenile offender gets a proper investigation into their backgrounds prior to their hearing.

But, she added, the mandate isn’t cheap, and it’s also unfunded. At a cost of $60,000 to $75,000 a client, both [Orleans Parish Chief Public Defender Derwyn] Bunton and State Public Defender Jay Dixon said they were at a loss for how to properly prepare for each client’s sentencing hearing.

According to Kolinchak, there are nearly 300 juveniles eligible for such individualized hearings throughout the state. “The question in Louisiana is the same as it is nationally, which is that it has really been an unfunded mandate,” she said. “It places burdens on defense counsel with no discussion of funding.”

The issue came up in Hunter’s courtroom Tuesday in the case of Joseph Morgan, a defendant convicted in 2015 of second-degree murder in the death of Gervais "Gee" Nicholas, a teenager gunned down in 2008 outside the Chat Club at Tulane Avenue and South Lopez Street. Morgan was 16 at the time of the shooting, but prosecutors are nevertheless seeking life without parole.

Defense attorney Tom Shlosman, who is representing Morgan pro bono, told the judge he doesn't have the resources for the elaborate proceedings now required in Morgan's case. The other officials who testified before Hunter were brought in to help bolster the broader case that more money needs to be set aside statewide to handle these types of defendants....

In New Orleans, the question is how to proceed with about 72 cases that now qualify for a so-called “Miller hearing,” Kolinchak said. On Tuesday, both Bunton and Dixon said they didn’t anticipate being able to pay for those hearings, at least for indigent clients, anytime soon, because there’s no money available to properly investigate possible mitigating circumstances for those clients.

Dixon said the state public defender’s budget has been “stagnant” at about $33 million for the past several years. Moreover, he said, the threat of a 5 percent cut to his budget looms ahead, a move he said would be “devastating” for both death penalty cases and juvenile cases like Morgan’s. That’s because Dixon's office is required to distribute about 65 percent of its budget to district defenders' offices throughout the parishes, and so the cuts would have to come from the more complex pool of cases that his office contracts out to other law firms.

Bunton said he has to stretch an $8 million budget to cover nearly 22,000 cases a year — a situation that he said leaves him no room for taking on new work like individualized sentencing hearings for indigent juveniles....

“We don’t have an answer. This is the kind of thing that funding or lack of funding creates,” Dixon said. “You’re talking about basically a juggling act with a lack of funds. And we’re both in that trick box. We do not have an answer for that.”