By Johanna S. Zapp, Esq.
Everyone is asking the same question. Why is it taking so long to get anything done on my case? For months now I have been trying to explain to my clients that budget cuts have led to a slower prosecutor’s office. AUSAs are leaving, either moving on to bigger and better jobs, or simply leaving for personal reasons. The problem is, when an AUSA leaves, they aren’t being replaced. This means that the 20, 30, or 40 cases that this prosecutor was working on, now gets delegated to all of the other prosecutors remaining in the office.
According to an article recently published in the New York Times (parts of which appear below) 22 prosecutors are leaving the US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York every year without being replaced (you can be sure that the same is true for the Eastern District of New York too.) So, when you’re sitting there at MCC or MDC and your lawyer explains that things are moving slowly, and calls aren’t being returned, this is why. These prosecutors are over worked and under paid. They have more cases on their desk than ever before.
Its frustrating for everyone. But rest assured, you will be taken care of. Patience is necessary, and I’ve said this before, your patience will be rewarded. A prosecutor’s goal is to get your file off their desk as soon as possible. However, there aren’t enough hours in the day to do it efficiently or quickly, and there aren’t enough prosecutors around to attend to all of the cases that exist. The result is this – why is my case moving so slowly?
Prosecutor Sees Danger in Budget Cuts
By Benjamin Weiser, Published in The New York Times December 2nd, 2013
Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, told a lawyers group on Monday that at some point, his office could reach crisis mode.
His office has 210 assistant United States attorneys assigned to criminal and civil cases, which is almost 20 fewer than it had in 2011. The office also loses about 22 a year through attrition, and they are not being replaced.
In a phone interview, he added that with his office pursuing so many kinds of important cases, “the Hobson’s choice of picking one over another as resources dwindle away is, you know, a bit horrifying.”
Mr. Bharara appeared with other leading court and bar figures at a public hearing organized by the New York County Lawyers’ Association on the continuing impact of budget cuts on the justice system. The other witnesses who testified included the chief judges of the city’s federal courts; Loretta E. Lynch, the United States attorney in Brooklyn; and David E. Patton, the federal public defender.
The issue has become a heated one: Last week, Judge Kimba M. Wood of Federal District Court in Manhattan told another bar group that in October, the court came within one day of not being able to pay jurors for their service, which could have led to a suspension of jury trials.
Mr. Patton, whose office currently represents about 40 percent of indigent defendants in federal courthouses in Brooklyn, Long Island, Manhattan and Westchester County, has said that cutbacks had resulted in 12 days of unpaid furloughs for his staff, which includes 35 lawyers. One result was that his office had asked judges to reassign about half a dozen cases to private court-appointed lawyers so that defendants could be adequately represented.