photo by: Chris Conde/ Journal-World

The Douglas County Judicial and Law Enforcement Center is pictured in September 2018.

The Douglas County District Court has stopped assessing fees to indigent offenders in misdemeanor cases.

The county made the change to make the court more efficient; in trying to collect from people who could not pay, the court was expending more resources than it was recovering in money owed, said Douglas County Administrator Sarah Plinsky.

“That fee did not offset the cost of that expense,” Plinsky said.

As previously reported by the Journal-World, in November, the County Commission voted to contract with a nonprofit called Kansas Holistic Defenders (KHD) to handle the majority of misdemeanor criminal cases for indigent defendants. At the same time, the county decided to stop collecting attorney fees in District Court misdemeanor cases, Plinsky said.

The KHD’s contract with the county is for $425,000 to cover the attorney fees of any indigent client it takes on in a District Court misdemeanor case. The cases that cannot be taken by KHD are sent to attorneys registered with the county who are on a list to represent indigent clients, Plinsky said.

Before the KHD contract, all indigent clients were referred to those attorneys, and fees were assessed by judges on a case-by-case basis. For the cases where an attorney fee was assigned, the fee was collected only about 25% of the time, Plinsky said.

“If you charge a fee and only 25% of the people can pay, maybe it’s an indication that the clients can’t afford the fee,” Plinsky said.

Panel attorneys retained by the county for public defense are contracted for a significantly reduced rate than the attorney’s standard rate, and those reduced costs would be added to the offenders’ court costs.

Kansas law requires the court to determine whether court-related costs would create a financial hardship for the offender beyond just the punishment for a crime, and when that person had appointed counsel, those attorney fees are one of the costs considered, said Douglas County Chief Judge James McCabria.

“The courts in Douglas County made those determinations and it was not uncommon for attorney fees to be waived,” McCabria said.

The County Commission decided to waive attorney fees for cases taken by the KHD so the local District Court is no longer ordering indigent defendants to repay any portion of the attorney fees in misdemeanor cases, including those handled by panel attorneys, McCabria said.

“I’m not sure it is accurate to continue to view the issue as one of waiver. The county is not requesting reimbursement, so there is nothing to waive,” McCabria said.

The county is working to “decriminalize” poverty, and re-evaluating fees on indigent offenders is part of that plan, Plinsky said.

Attorney fees are only one of many fees that can be assessed to a defendant, and the court still assigns those as necessary, but the county is still looking at other fees the court assesses to find ways to further help indigent offenders avoid other fees they cannot pay, Plinsky said.

“Douglas County has a long-standing tradition of examining fees and fines,” she said.

The attorney fees the county has chosen to stop collecting only apply to misdemeanor cases, Plinsky said. Indigent felony cases are assigned to a state-managed group called the Board of Indigents’ Defense Services, or BIDS, which uses individual panel attorneys and does not have a local office.