Topeka ? State officials Monday said the system of court-appointed attorneys for indigent criminal defendants was near collapse because of a lack of funding. Even so, key legislators declined to recommend an increase in the hourly rate paid to court-appointed attorneys.

Patricia Scalia, executive director of the Board of Indigents’ Defense Services, said the payment of $50 per hour for a court-appointed attorney should be increased to $80 per hour “to avoid the wholesale resignation of our assigned counsel throughout the state and to avoid a lawsuit for fair compensation.”

Members of the Legislative Budget Committee, however, said the state didn’t have much money to spare.

“It doesn’t look optimistic this year that we’ll be putting a lot of money into it,” said Chairman Melvin Neufeld, a Republican state representative from Ingalls.

Scalia requested a $4 million increase to fund an $80-per-hour rate for private attorneys who are assigned to defend poor people who can’t afford a lawyer to represent them in criminal matters.

If all court-appointed counsel were to resign, the state would be forced to open 16 public defender offices at a cost of at least $6.5 million, Scalia said.

Statewide, including in Lawrence, attorneys are refusing to handle assigned cases because of the $50-per-hour rate, which has been in effect since 1987.

“I’ve pleaded with attorneys to handle cases,” said Judge Rawley Judd Dent, who is chief judge of the district that includes Montgomery and Chautauqua counties in southeast Kansas.

Judicial officials said they feared more convictions would be overturned on appeal because they were having to assign cases to attorneys who aren’t qualified to handle them.

Kansas State Board of Indigents’ Defense Services

“Courts have not been bashful in overturning cases when they feel the defendant was not adequately represented,” said Larry Daniels, an assigned counsel panel member from Dodge City.

The budget committee declined recommending a funding increase but directed the House and Senate budget committees to consider the issue when the 2004 legislative session starts. Neufeld said those committees should work on a multiyear proposal to phase in some kind of increase, but the details of such a proposal would depend on what is available in an already tight budget.

Some lawmakers appeared more interested in paying for additional staff for the Board of Indigents’ Defense Services to more closely monitor billing by court-appointed attorneys and to make sure defendants getting court-appointed attorneys are really indigent. The committee directed the budget-writing committees during the session to consider providing enough funds to hire an additional assistant for Scalia to cover those concerns.

Patrick Lewis, executive director of the Kansas Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said he was “quite surprised” when told of the committee’s discussion about possible overbilling.

He said any billing by an attorney above a set limit for each criminal offense must be approved by the judge in the case and the Board of Indigents’ Defense Services. He said lawmakers should focus on increasing the hourly rate of court-appointed attorneys.

“The compensation rate per hour and the low level of those caps really need to be where the attention is at this time,” he said.