THE DEFENSE
NEVER RESTS
top while watching TV with his
girlfriend, Anne Marie. He shuttles regularly between Hazleton,
where a local magistrate arraigns
the newly arrested, and WilkesBarre, where the public defender’s
office, main county courthouses
and the county jail are located.
Olexa handled nearly 260 cases
last year, with more than half of
them felonies — mostly assaults
and robberies and the more serious drug charges. The rest of his
clients face misdemeanors, which
in Pennsylvania can bring a jail
or prison sentence of up to three
years. He also files his own appeals, a complicated, time-consuming process. The American
Bar Association recommends that
full-time public defenders handle
no more than 150 felony cases
in an entire year.
Olexa’s caseload far exceeds
those standards, but there’s a
twist: he technically works only
part-time for the county. Like the
majority of attorneys in the public defender’s office, his salary of
about $30,000 is based on the
pretext that he carries only half
the workload of a full-time attorney, and can earn a second income by taking on private clients.
In reality, Olexa works a grueling
HUFFINGTON
10.28.12
schedule simply to keep pace with
the constant influx of county cases and squeezes in private clients
whenever he can, often by working
through the weekends.
The volume of cases causes
pile-ups in the courtroom. The
previous week, Olexa represented 17 clients in a row before the
same judge over the course of an
afternoon. Authorities brought
many over in shackles and orange
jumpsuits from the nearby jail,
and several pleaded guilty to felonies that would follow them the
rest of their lives. Most wanted to
discuss their cases and have the
proceedings explained to them.
But the pace of the hearings made
it impossible for Olexa to consult
with them for more than a few
minutes before his next client was
called. And while he’d put hours
of work into preparing each case,
as the hearings progressed, fatigue
set in, and it took all his energy to
stay focused on the task at hand.
“It becomes assembly-line
justice,” he says. “It’s like a McDonald’s drive-through — just
moving the bodies along. Bottom
line, the only way that it gets
done r