County to state: We need more assistant DAs
The Dane County Board's Public Protection and Judiciary Committee will get a chance Tuesday night to weigh in on what just about everybody involved in the courts considers to be the major problem in the judicial system these days: the understaffing of District Attorney's Offices.
County Supervisors Melanie Hampton, District 14, and Dianne Hesselbein, District 9, both members of the committee, have introduced a resolution calling on Gov. Jim Doyle, himself a former district attorney in Dane County, and the county's legislative delegation to fund DA offices across the state at levels recommended by a Legislative Audit Bureau Report last year.
That would mean an additional 11 attorneys for the Dane County office, said Dane County district attorney Brian Blanchard. Blanchard, however, is not at all certain he will be getting that help, although Dane County has the biggest need for additional personnel in the state.
"Every two years we ask from the state, and every two years help is not provided," he said.
District Attorneys and their assistants were once funded by local property taxpayers but with passage of the state lottery, which provided the money, a shift was made in 1990, and the state took over paying the salaries of the attorneys in the DA's office, judges and court reporters.
The resolution by Hampton and Hesselbein quotes the Institute for Law and Policy Planning, in a study done for Dane County in 2007, as saying that law enforcement staffing, such as police and sheriff's departments, has grown at five times the rate of the DA's office and arrests referred to the DA's office has grown 15 times. "However, the number of prosecutions of cases filed has only grown slightly because cases that could be filed are limited by the number of ADAs available to file them," the resolution says.
The resolution also addresses a companion problem -- pay for prosecutors. "In addition to the lack of funded positions, the lack of pay progression for Assistant District Attorneys ... is resulting in alarming departures of experienced ADAs from state service in counties across the state," the resolution says. "A high attrition rate among ADAs is creating a downward spiral of decreasing experience and efficiency in the state's courthouses where the turnover rate amongst prosecutors has reached approximately 60 percent since 2001."
Blanchard agrees and says Milwaukee County is the parakeet in the coal mine in the world of prosecutors in Wisconsin. "The future is being written in Milwaukee County," Blanchard said. "They are losing their core," of experienced prosecutors, he said.
In Dane County several veteran prosecutors with years of experience, such as first assistant district attorney John Burr and assistant district attorneys Gretchen Hayward and Jac Heitz, have retired within the past few years and more retirements are forthcoming.
By one calculation, 200 years of experience
have been lost to retirement in the last five years.
While those slots can be filled with new hires, the loss of experienced prosecutors is compounded by the growing workload, Blanchard said.
"There isn't any substitute for having those who have experience," he said.
If there is no growth in either the number of prosecutors or the pay scale, Blanchard says, adding that Milwaukee's problems will spread statewide as experienced prosecutors leave the office for other jobs.
That could mark a return to the days of the 1970s and earlier, when young lawyers would work for a few years in criminal prosecution, then take much higher-paying jobs in the private sector, meaning few stuck around to make careers in prosecution.
The trend changed in the '70s with legislation that made criminal prosecution more career-friendly, but Blanchard and others fear strides made in keeping experienced prosecutors on the job could be lost.
"Dane County has a serious problem," said Dane County Circuit Court Judge Patrick Fiedler, who heads the judges assigned to criminal cases. "There are not enough assistant district attorneys to handle the ever-increasing caseload," Fiedler said, adding, "This is by far the most important need of the justice system."
Numerous stakeholders in the courts, from police to victims to the state public defender, have all endorsed the idea of the state providing greater numbers of prosecutors, but so far the cry has fallen on deaf ears in the Capitol.
