Public Defender

If you are a teacher in debt, there's good news and bad news. There are literally dozens of programs that could potentially help wipe out your student loans. But most of them have narrow requirements that may lock you out. Just ask Troy Dale, a high school counselor from Ellis, Kan. He and his wife have $23,000 in student loans that they've been paying down for nearly a decade. At their current rate, they'll still be paying off their student debts when their oldest child enrolls in college.

Despite publicly defending his second-in-command for months amid an abuse scandal in the Los Angeles County jail system, Sheriff Lee Baca pressured Undersheriff Paul Tanaka into stepping down, several sources said. The Sheriff's Department has repeatedly portrayed Tanaka's decision to retire earlier this month as a move Tanaka initiated. But sources said Baca met with Tanaka and told him he should retire. The conversation, they said, stunned his once-trusted confidant. One source close to Tanaka said the undersheriff believes Baca views him as a political liability and is trying to use him as a scapegoat for the jail's problems as the sheriff seeks reelection to a fifth term.

Name: Lorene Mies Employer: Orange County public defender's office Thumbs up: "Before becoming a public defender, I had my own civil law practice and hated the endless paperwork and trivial issues. Here, we're in court every day dealing with real, human problems. To me, that's what being an attorney is all about. We may not always deal with the best people, but we have to make sure they are treated with respect.

Re "Violating the right to a lawyer," Opinion, March 18 I read this piece on inadequate representation for poor criminal defendants with mixed feelings. I have been a deputy public defender in Los Angeles County for nearly 13 years, and during that time I've worked with attorneys whom I believe to be among the country's finest criminal defense attorneys. The nearly 700 attorneys in our office receive special training at the misdemeanor, juvenile delinquency and felony levels; in fact, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors recognized our felony training program in 2010.

Los Angeles Public Defender Michael P. Judge will be honored tonight as Lawyer of the Year by the John M. Langston Bar Assn., one of the largest associations of African American attorneys. The association cited Judge for recruiting and training a large and ethnically diverse work force, defending legal traditions and questioning the disproportionate impact of California's three-strikes law on African American defendants.

Unable to pay for his own attorney, former Moorpark City Councilman Scott Montgomery will be represented by a lawyer from the public defender's office in his sentencing hearing for felony and misdemeanor conflict of interest charges. On Friday, Ventura County Superior Court Judge Vincent O'Neill said he would give Montgomery's court-appointed attorney two weeks to review the case before setting the date for sentencing.

He has been my husband for 22 years and he has been a public defender for 24 years. His name is Howard Waco and he has never been a victim. After we had been married for a few years, I began to tell him about my family's background. My parents had been victims, survivors of concentration camps in Germany, where I was born and raised. My father's entire family was murdered. My mother lost her parents, a sister, a brother, a niece and many other family members. The most important loss of all was the loss of human dignity, the loss of trust, the loss of security, the loss of self-worth.

A longtime deputy public defender has been named commissioner for Ventura County Superior Court. Douglas W. Daily, 52, will fill the vacancy created this week with the promotion of William Liebmann to the bench. Daily, a graduate of USC and Loyola Law School, has been a county public defender since 1980 and handled a wide range of criminal cases as well as juvenile dependency, mental health and child support matters. Commissioners are selected by Superior Court judges.

A deputy public defender based at the San Fernando Courthouse was arrested at a demonstration against a white supremacist who was leading a meeting inside the Glendale Holiday Inn. John Michael Lee, 41, a nine-year veteran of the Los Angeles County public defender's office, was arrested on suspicion of failure to disperse during the Sunday demonstration against white supremacist J.B. Stoner. No charge had been filed against Lee, who is scheduled to be arraigned in Glendale Municipal Court Dec.

In my years covering criminal courts, I always had a soft spot for the young deputy public defender. The court clerk, the bailiff, the court reporter, the court watchers, the opposing counsel, and likely even the judge knew that this five-years-removed-from-law-school attorney was going to get whacked by the jury. Or at least her/his client would. And when you pour your soul and sweat into defending someone, it's about the same thing.

In a Georgia courtroom last year, a poor, 17-year-old high school freshman, charged as an adult with stealing a go-cart, entered a guilty plea to a felony charge of theft. It was his first time in court, and he was startled and confused when the judge asked if he was satisfied with his lawyer. "I don't have one," he answered. He had not spoken to a lawyer. A public defender's investigator had told him what the charges against him were and suggested he plead guilty. A public defender quickly spoke up and asserted that he was representing the youth.

Re "Improbable redemption," Opinion, Dec. 9 Although I applaud Michael Krikorian's seemingly successful battle against alcoholism, I must take issue with his simplistic and disparaging comment regarding attorneys who work for the public defender's office. Specifically, he opines that he avoided a potential prison sentence because he was white and because his father could pay for a private attorney. As an attorney with the L.A. County Public Defender's Office, I know that our lawyers are some of the most highly skilled, extensively trained, experienced and passionate advocates in the criminal justice system.

CENTENNIAL, Colo. - The judge in the mass-murder case against James E. Holmes on Thursday weighed the interests of public transparency in the high-profile case against the privacy and potential safety of victims. Judge William Sylvester also granted a prosecution motion to add new attempted murder charges against Holmes, bringing the total charges to 166. Holmes, 24, who attended the hearing, was in the process of withdrawing as a student at the neuroscience department at the University of Colorado Denver when he allegedly opened fire in a crowded Aurora movie theater last July.

An undercover FBI agent on a case of weapons smuggling from the Philippines to the United States denied a defense attorney's allegation that he paid for sex for himself and the suspects using taxpayer dollars. The agent, a 16-year veteran who was not identified by name in court documents because he is working undercover in a separate investigation, in a sworn declaration strongly denied allegations of what a public defender contended was "outrageous government misconduct" and should be grounds for the case to be thrown out. Federal prosecutors have acknowledged that the government paid for $14,500 in expenses incurred by the agent for entertainment, cocktails and tips over the course of the investigation.

Now that a defense attorney for Colorado shooting suspect James E. Holmes has referred in court to his client's unspecified "mental illness," it is a near certainty that the trial of the 24-year-old former doctoral student will turn on his mental state, legal experts said. A desire to understand the motive behind the rampage that left 12 dead and 58 injured in a suburban Aurora movie theater has fed speculation about the inner logic of the accused. Was Holmes an angry depressive out to seek revenge, with knowledge of right and wrong?

Wilbur "Bill" Littlefield, a skillful trial lawyer who spent four decades with the Los Angeles County public defender's office, including 17 years as its chief, died Saturday in Van Nuys. He was 90. He had heart and kidney ailments, said granddaughter Christina Behle, a deputy public defender. Littlefield, who joined the office in 1957 and became public defender in 1976, "was a good lawyer, ethical, smart but always a gentleman," Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley said Thursday. "Unlike some out there who think … being rude or obnoxious is part of being an adversary, he was never that way. He was just an exquisite gentleman.

Rejecting the recommendations of a blue-ribbon commission and a legal advisory board, county Chief Administrative Officer Norman Hickey proposed Wednesday that supervisors establish an in-house public defender office to represent low-income defendants in criminal cases.

In a blow to the struggling state public defender's office, a state watchdog commission recommended today that the office be abolished in favor of a more efficient agency to represent indigents. The Little Hoover Commission said the state's cost of representing indigents who appeal criminal convictions has tripled, to $32 million, in the last six years, and at the same time more and more convicts have no attorney.

A Los Angeles County jury Thursday found the former business and personal manager of singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen guilty of violating restraining orders, making harassing phone calls and sending thousands of harassing emails. Kelley Lynch, 55, showed no emotion as a court clerk read the verdict. She had pleaded not guilty to five counts of violating protective orders and two counts of repeatedly contacting Cohen with the intent to annoy or harass. Over several days, prosecutors played voicemails said to be from Lynch, who had a business and personal relationship with Cohen for about 17 years.

The Supreme Court showed little enthusiasm Monday for reopening the cases of criminal defendants who lost out on good plea deals based on bad advice or bungling by their lawyers. In the past, the court has said that criminal defendants not only have a right to a lawyer, but a right to reopen their cases if a lawyer's bungling denied them a right to a fair trial. These days, however, about 95% of crime cases are resolved through a plea agreement, not a trial. At issue in two cases Monday was whether to extend the right to competent legal advice to plea deals.