"Offices of Criminal Conflict and Civil Regional Counsel" now have the task of employing attorneys to represent indigent clients on a relatively small budget.  There is one regional counsel office for each of Florida's five appellate districts.

The primary caseload, and primary focus, for these five offices will likely be criminal cases involving both adults and juveniles, when the public defender has a conflict of interest (such as when the public defender has two defendants charged in the same crime who have differing interests).  But what about dependency cases?

Child Dependency cases are unique
The new offices now have the job of providing attorneys for all indigent parents who have had children taken from them by DCF and/or have been accused of abusing, neglecting, or abandoning their children.  

Dependency law is a highly specialized field and one that involves, all at once, the most sensitive and difficult of subject matter, highly distraught clients who are almost always in crisis, and some of the most fundamental rights guaranteed by our Constitution. 

The regional counsel offices need the skills and experience of private dependency defense attorneys for at least two very important reasons:  

1.  The regional counsel will face a conflict of interest in nearly every dependency case.  Often parents in these cases are not married, and/or have conflicting views of who should have custody of the children, both temporarily and permanently.  Often cases involve multiple fathers in the same proceeding.  Not every parent will be accused of the same things, or even of anything at all, yet still face judicial intervention into their private lives. This more often than not would create a conflict of interest if only one law office represented each parent. Many times one or more parents will be considered "non-offending" making his or her interests in whether or not children are found to be dependent in conflict with the parent or parents accused of wrongdoing, and so on.  The solution is to have qualified and experienced private attorneys able to fill in the holes created by these conflicts and make sure that a parent who has done nothing wrong is not the only one without an attorney.

2.  The regional counsel offices face an enormous task on a challenging budget.  DependencyDefense.com is committed to the notion that whether or not a parent in a dependency case has done something wrong, it is in the interests of justice and judicial economy that specialized and experienced attorneys ably counsel those parents, regardless of who employs the attorneys to do so. That is, it is all about quality representation, so as the new agency gets up and running, private attorneys should be utilized by the regional counsel offices to help train and guide their new employees handling dependency cases. 

For an expanded discussion on what experience brings to dependency defense, click here.