Skip to content
Politics
Link copied to clipboard

Nutter administration defends privatization effort

Deputy Mayor Everett Gillison stood his ground Monday in a Philadelphia City Council hearing critical of his efforts to hire a law firm to handle a big slice of the city's poor defendants.

Deputy Mayor Everett Gillison stood his ground Monday in a Philadelphia City Council hearing critical of his efforts to hire a law firm to handle a big slice of the city's poor defendants.

Gillison, who spent 22 years as a public defender, said his "overriding goal" was to provide better services to indigent clients, and took exception with anyone who would "question my integrity when it comes to representing the poor."

Gillison, however, refused to answer a series of questions, mainly from Councilman Dennis O'Brien, about the presumed winning bidder of the contract or how that firm would operate.

"It's kind of like doing your contract negotiations in public," Gillison said. "We don't do that."

"My fear is that this contract will be signed the minute you walk out this door," O'Brien said. "And none of our founded questions will get answered."

When the Defender Association of Philadelphia has a conflict, judges appoint attorneys from a preapproved list of lawyers. In recent years, those court-appointed lawyers have handled 22,000 to 27,000 cases.

Last year, the city posted a request for proposals seeking a new entity to handle conflict cases. The city received five bids, Gillison said, adding that he was not "wedded to any particular model."

Multiple sources, however, have said the city is negotiating a contract with lawyer Daniel-Paul Alva, who has been assembling lawyers for a new, for-profit conflict-counsel firm. Alva's bid is for $9.5 million, about $1 million less than the city pays annually in conflict-counsel fees.

The majority of the court-appointed cases are dependency matters, although conflict lawyers also have handled 6,000 to 7,000 juvenile and adult criminal cases and appeals in recent years.

Many of the objections to Gillison's plans stem from the fear that a firm would put profits before clients, who were repeatedly referred to Monday as a "vulnerable" population struggling with poverty, addiction, and mental illness.

"The temptation will always exist to move cases along . . . to save the expense of investigation, mitigation, hiring experts, all of which impact the bottom line," Defender Association chief Ellen Greenlee said.

Gillison said a private firm would be able to provide better services than court-appointed attorneys can.

"Everyone seems to be all atwitter about the for-profit model," even though court-appointed attorneys work for profit as well, he said.

"Right now what we have is the equivalent of many hundreds of private law firms doing the work," he said. "I don't think that one law firm vs. hundreds of law firms makes much of a difference."