District 11 Public Defender Steve Smith urged local lawyers and citizens to join him in brainstorming reform of the public defender system during his talk at the Rotary Club of Chattanooga on Thursday.
Distrust of police nationwide in recent years has spread to distrust of the whole criminal justice system, including judges and lawyers, but “that’s not the right direction,” Mr. Smith said. “We’re losing confidence in our own institutions to resolve these issues.”
He traced solutions to better post-incarceration data which tracks certain “key indicators,” and spending money to rebuild families.
“That family is where people learn to be connected to one another,” Mr. Smith said. Disconnection causes crime, he added.
The speaker asked the audience, and seemed to ask local governments, to spend money on non-profits that help teach families how to be families, echoing District Attorney Coty Wamp’s pleas to church leaders to engage in neighborhoods where teenagers are murdering each other.
“I would have fewer clients, and I would appreciate it,” he said. The courts system is not instilling family values, he stated.
The right to a public defender was established in the 1960s, a landmark for human rights at the time.
“We don’t want the government determining who is guilty,” Mr. Smith said.
But some grumble that public defenders have used the courtroom for biased political advocacy, or that defendants are coerced to take plea deals, muddling those rights. Plea deals deprive the defendant and the community of public trial but save the courts system time and money, it was stated.
Mr. Smith said District 11 had 10,000 cases in 2023, which he compared to a hose spraying indiscriminately at a wall. Each of his office’s 24 lawyers had 250 clients that year, or one whole case every day, and made $300 per case.
“Do (defendants) come out better at the end of the process?” he asked.
“Our response to crime is more important than the crime,” he told club members.
Mr. Smith, a former prosecutor, said the system takes emotional and knee-jerk reactions out of response to wrongdoing, so that crime can be somewhat controlled.
“We have to manage crime,” Mr. Smith said. “(Crime) is a part of human nature.”
Mr. Smith was elected in 2014 and oversees a staff of 32 who help defend members of the community who are indigent.
In his tenure he helped found the district’s first mental health court, first recovery court and first juvenile recovery court.
Mr. Smith worked as a geologist after graduating from UTC, camping for weeks at a time to study rocks in Death Valley or Costa Rica.
“I wanted to be a scientist,” he said. It was on a backpacking trip with friends that he decided to run for public defender, “on a lark,” he said.
When he won, “it was almost a dog-catches-car moment,” he said.
“I’ve played music my whole life, on my couch,” he joked. Mr. Smith plays guitar in 7th Street Band with Criminal Court Judge Barry Steelman and several prosecutors. The group is set in the regular lineup at Cherry Street Tavern this February.