The Bronx Legal Aid Society will lose 16 of its 91 lawyers this Friday if the state legislature upholds the governor's proposed budget cuts, threatening to overburden an already strained criminal justice system.
The organization is part of the Legal Aid Society of New York, which had expected $10.8 million from the state to pay for its legal defense of those who can't afford lawyers. But when the governor introduced his budget in February, he proposed nothing for public defenders.
Without state support, Bronx Legal Aid's criminal defense division will be severely cut, said Pat Bath, the society's spokeswoman. Managers have circulated termination notices effective Friday, April 28, but will retract some or all of them if the state legislature reinstates funds by then.
"We have to plan for the worst," Bath said of the proposed budget. "No one knows what will happen in Albany. We can only hope that there will be something in it for us."
The private organization, which functions like a law firm, handles the majority of indigent criminal cases on a contract basis. The city has agreed to pay $66.4 million of Legal Aid's citywide $130 million budget through September 1996. State and federal funds and private donations are expected to make up the difference.
Bronx Legal Aid handles 35,000 to 45,000 cases a year -- about 70 percent of the total indigent cases in the borough. Judges appoint private lawyers, who bill by the hour and typically cost more than Legal Aid, to handle the remainder.
State cuts would follow deep reductions in city funding that hurt the Legal Aid Society of New York earlier this year. The organization lost $12 million when it signed a new contract with the city, and was forced to eliminate 116 lawyers through layoffs and buyouts, 10 from the borough office. But the workload didn't decrease.
"This round of cuts, if they happen, will require us to lower our intake," said Irwin Shaw, attorney-in-charge of the criminal defense division at Bronx Legal Aid. "We're cutting into the bone. The result is that defendants will spend more time in jail, on Riker's Island, awaiting trial."
Courts and jails in the borough have been backed up for years, but two recent changes have made the situation much worse: borough District Attorney Robert T. Johnson's no-plea-bargain policy and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's focus on quality-of-life crimes.
This year, more than any other, police are rounding up scofflaws whom they used to ignore. There were 28,710 misdemeanor arrests in the borough in 1994, up 23 percent from the previous year, according to police data.
"We are very backed up," said Gail Geltman, a lawyer at the Legal Aid office on Grand Concourse. "They are bringing in flower vendors and squeegee men who could have been given desk-appearance tickets instead of going through the system in police custody."
Since the first round of layoffs earlier this year, staff lawyers say their case loads have increased in size and scope.
"Arraignments, court appearances, lineups," complained Geltman, who used to focus her skills more narrowly. "There are fewer of us and more places to be." Five times a day now, Geltman runs back and forth between Supreme Court and Criminal Court. As for research and writing, Geltman's only option is to squeeze them in during lulls in the courtroom.
"There are no office days anymore," she said.