On Monday, January 6th, the 2014 Idaho Legislature began its 63rd Legislative Session. The kick-off of the session was marked by Governor C.L. Butch Otter’s annual State of the State Address. The remark offers his office’s priorities for the year and is as an opportunity for Idahoans and community organizations to see their visions and hopes for a better Idaho addressed.
In his State of the State address, Governor Otter missed the mark and big time. Given an opportunity to address what clearly appears to be an unconstitutional sytem of public defense in Idaho, he said not a single word. This, despite multiple warnings and red flags all pointing to a public defense so broken that it’s conceivable that innocent Idahoans sit in jail while they wait for a chance to speak with their public defenders.
Even his own Criminal Justice Commission has pointed to a broken system in a report, conducted by the National Legal Aid and Defenders Association (NLADA), that found that not a single County studied in Idaho meets the minimum standards of effective assistance of counsel as a result of a severely broken public defense system.
With no state-wide oversight program, counties are left to manage their own public defender programs, often contracting out to the lowest bidder in order to save money in a cash-strapped economy. Public defenders across Idaho are currently being asked to do two, three and even four times more work than they are reasonably able to do. Their case overloads, lack of sufficient resources and lack of any state funding at the trial level have forced them to compromise the integrity of their work and potentially the freedom and liberty of Idahoans they are asked to defend.
Governor Otter should have used his pulpit to address his fellow policy makers to make public defense reform a top priority and assure all Idahoans that their constitutional rights in Idaho are being looked after. But not a single word.
Just the week before in a briefing to the media, the Governor made headwaves when he announced that he was putting the state back in control of the controversial private prison Idaho Correctional Center, run by the Tennessee corporation Corrections Corporation of America. This marked a significant step for prison reform; an important decision that many stakeholders have been urging elected officials to make since the ACLU of Idaho filed our first lawsuit against the private prison in 2010.
While the Governor announced positive changes about the ownership of ICC, he failed to mention that Idaho is still bound by a $14.4 million interstate prison contract with CCA that funnels prisoners out of the state and houses them in the privately run Kit Carson Correctional Center in Burlington, Colorado. As outlined by a Grassroots Leadership recent report, “Locked Up and Shipped Away”, the practice of “interstate transfers of prisoners to private for-profit prisons serves the interests of an industry that views prisoners as commodities and perpetuate our nation’s mass incarceration crisis.” Idaho is one of only four states across the United States that still participates in this inhumane practice, a practice that has been in place for 16 years and continues to currently separate 245 individuals from their families and communities.
Until Governor Otter realizes the imminent collapse of Idaho’s justice system, many individuals caught in Idaho’s courts, jails, and prisons will continue to see their civil liberties deteriorated at an alarming rate. The start of a new year, and a new legislative session, is an opportunity for change and reform, an opportunity Idaho can’t stand to pass. We encourage our state’s lawmakers to do the right thing and show Idahoans that they stand for preserving liberty and the Constitution while also upholding their responsibility to maintain public safety.