An independent agency would oversee most indigent defense in the Austin area, with a staff of nearly a dozen and an annual budget of more than $1 million. With the help of nearly $2 million in state funding over the last three years, the agency would make sure private lawyers who agreed to represent low-income people were doing a good job for their clients and weren’t juggling too many cases at once.
If it worked, they thought, Travis County’s solution could become a model for the whole state.
So the architect of the new system was surprised to learn recently that despite all the reforms, one local attorney, Cheryl Hindera, was appointed to a whopping 349 felony and 434 misdemeanor cases last year. According to state guidelines, that should be the work of about four full-time lawyers.
“That’s too many cases,” Mike Lynch, a retired Travis County judge who came up with the idea for the new local indigent defense system, said when a Texas Tribune reporter informed him of Hindera’s caseload. “I practiced law for 20 years, and I don’t think I could handle that many cases, or that any lawyer should. I didn’t know the numbers were that high.”
Because Travis County doesn’t have a public defender’s office — except for juveniles and some of the most mentally ill defendants — the county pays more than 200 private local attorneys like Hindera to represent adults who can’t afford a lawyer. And the numbers show that she is among a small group of Austin attorneys who are being appointed to far more cases than experts believe any one lawyer could handle.
