On many Sunday afternoons, Elizabeth L. Julian visits what she calls the "house of sadness" -- City Jail.
The folders she carries are filled with notes chronicling death, drugs and lives gone mad.
On this day, Julian passes a long line of women visitors, some with packages of cigarettes and toiletries, others carrying infants.
The women stare at her, wondering why she doesn't have to wait in line.
Julian, 37, is an assistant public defender in the office's felony trial section, where lawyers say the workload is so heavy that effective representation of clients is virtually impossible.
She and the 15 other lawyers in the felony section each handle 400 to 450 felony cases a year -- nearly three times the maximum recommended by national guidelines -- and that's why Julian and her colleagues spend time on weekends visiting clients in jail.
The pressures on public defenders contribute to the fast-forward pace of justice these days in the city's felony arraignment court, Part 17 of Circuit Court, which has come to resemble a plea-bargaining machine.
Baltimore's court system faces such an avalanche of drug cases that judges, prosecutors and public defenders -- who represent indigent defendants -- together must resort to wholesale deal-making: leniency in exchange for guilty pleas.
And there is little time for thorough evaluation of cases.
Indigent defendants unable to post bail often wait in jail for two or three months, without seeing a lawyer, until they appear in court to enter a plea.
And public defenders often come to arraignment court unprepared, meeting clients there for the first time.
Moreover, the constant procession of defendants -- up to 60 a day -- rules out in-depth discussions between lawyers and clients. Usually pleas are agreed on in a matter of minutes.
Julian and other public defenders try to get around this problem by visiting some jailed clients on weekends, although there is no money in the office budget for such overtime.
"I seem to get a lot further on Sundays," Julian says. "The clients are surprised to see you. You get a lot more respect for taking the time. And basically, this is the only time I have to do it."
At the jail, Julian sits in one of the seven glass-enclosed attorney booths. On her side of a partition are scribbled the words "Bastard Scum!" -- apparently an exercise in frustration by another defense lawyer.
Julian chats with a chubby-faced youth who is charged with the armed robbery of a fast-food restaurant. He has spent four months in jail, and this is the second meeting between lawyer and client.
The youth, a shy 16-year-old, wishes he had seen Julian more often. "It helps to know what's going on . . . to relieve the tension," he says.
FANCY SNEAKERS, GOLD TOOTH CAPS
At first, the youth and Julian, who is smoking a Newport, talk about expensive sneakers, sweat suits and gold tooth caps. Then the discussion focuses on the criminal charges.
"I'm not a bad person," the youth, a 10th-grade dropout, tells his lawyer.
Police say the teen-ager was a lookout in the holdup. He had been at the restaurant earlier looking for a job. After the crime, the restaurant manager identified him as the suspect who stood by the door.
Weeks after Julian's Sunday visit to City Jail, the youth's case comes up in Baltimore Circuit Court. Arguing that it is dangerous to "warehouse" the 16-year-old in the adult penal system, the public defender persuades a judge to send the case to the juvenile courts.
Julian says of her young client, "I hope I pointed him in the right direction." But there is little time to think about it, because there is always another case. And another. And another.
Besides handling an overwhelming caseload, Maryland's public defender's office is being hurt by budget cuts, low morale and a decreasing public tolerance of the rights of poor people accused of crimes, insiders say.
The office must represent "the guy who just raped your sister, the guy who just murdered your uncle, the guy who just broke into your house to steal property to buy drugs," says Baltimore defense lawyer Carl J. Sacks, a former public defender who says he "burned out" after more than 10 years in the job and now is in private practice.
FUND SCARCITY IS CRIPPLING
He adds, "How can legislators then go back to their communities and say, 'Well, we want to give [the public defender's office] more money.' "
Robert Spangenberg, a lawyer whose Massachusetts firm has studied public defender systems around the country, says budget woes are crippling legal services for the poor nationwide. "There is no lobby for indigent defendants," he says. "They're kind of at the bottom of the list."
The Maryland public defender's office, which employs 450 people statewide, has a $29.4 million budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1. Its budget for the present fiscal year is $32 million.
The head of the office is Stephen E. Harris, 53, who was district public defender for Anne Arundel County when he was 'f appointed to the top job last August. From his first day, Sept. 1, Harris has had to wrestle with budget problems.
"I hadn't taken my coat off yet and a fax came from the governor's office that there was a hiring freeze," Harris says. "And we had to give back 3.5 percent of our operating budget."
He also discovered that more than $965,000 in 1990 expenses would be charged to his 1991 budget.
The hiring freeze and 3.5 percent budget reduction were part of Gov. William Donald Schaefer's plan last year to balance the state budget in the face of a $420 million revenue shortfall.
Just before Christmas, Harris threatened to lay off up to 40 lawyers. "It was not a contrived crisis," he says. "This was what was going to happen."
NO MONEY FOR EXPERTS
The budget crunch had left the office without money to hire expert witnesses or hire outside lawyers as needed for cases with multiple defendants. But Harris persuaded state officials to restore $650,000 to his budget, averting the layoffs at least temporarily.
In August, though, Harris is expected to face another fiscal crisis. That is when budget money for hiring outside lawyers probably will run out.
To stretch its budget, the office already has tightened client eligibility requirements. Harris says the new rules will deny representation to about 1,000 people this year.
Public defenders in Baltimore say morale has hit an all-time low, partly because the job freeze forces lawyers to do most of their own secretarial and investigative work. In addition, the public defenders must pay their own way to training seminars, including ones out of state.
Even judges have noticed the morale problem. "You sense a lot of unhappiness in that office," a Circuit Court judge says.
Harris says his lawyers have not lost their dedication. "They work overtime without any compensation," he says. "They come in early and stay late. I can't pay bonuses. But people are still giving 110 percent."
CRISIS UPON CRISIS
Some outside experts say the budget crunch has had a crippling effect on Harris' operation. "They are beyond crisis," says Michael Millemann, an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Law and president of the Public Justice Center in Baltimore. "The size of their caseloads, the reduction in [money for outside] attorneys, the inability to hire expert witnesses -- all are evidence of a system that has broken down because of inadequate funding."
The office represented 10,500 people last year in Baltimore Circuit Court. The National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals has recommended that public defenders handle a maximum of 150 felony cases a year. In Baltimore, lawyers in the felony section handle 400 to 450 a year.
"You just can't see your clients as much," says Julian. "You can't go and hold your clients' hands as much as they would like."
More than half the caseload in the Baltimore office last year involved drug offenses, according to a report by the Baltimore City Bar Association.
The wholesale plea bargaining in city Circuit Court gives public defenders some caseload relief but also makes some of them uncomfortable.
"I tell clients not to take those pleas, but, inside, I ask myself, 'God, what if they start listening to me?' " says one public defender. "I don't think that's right. A lot of these cases should be tried. But the numbers are so great. It's impossible to give all these guys adequate representation."
Trials are rare in Circuit Court, where 7,141 guilty pleas were entered last year compared with 829 court or jury trials.
JUSTICE SEEMS FAR AWAY
In the rush to move cases, some innocent defendants fall through the cracks, public defenders concede. "Life is full of compromises," says one. "The criminal justice system still has a long way to go."
Julian agrees. "The justice I'm talking about is the right to be heard, the right to due process rather than being processed," she says. "That's being thwarted."
The pressures on public defenders in Circuit Court are mirrored in Baltimore's District Courts, which handle most misdemeanors and average 65,000 drug cases a year, or 44 percent of all misdemeanor drug prosecutions in Maryland.
"The emphasis is not necessarily on justice, but rather on moving cases through the pipeline as rapidly as possible because there are so many cases," says a former District Court public defender. "What happens is that a lot of cases that should be tried, that you would win in front of a jury, are pleaded out for probation or time served."
He adds, "When you sent cases downtown for jury trials, people in our office were really [angry] at you. They wanted to know why you sent so many cases downtown."
TOO FEW OF EVERYTHING
Judge John N. Prevas of Baltimore Circuit Court, a former prosecutor, says the entire criminal justice system is starved for funding.
"We have too few judges, too few prosecutors, too few public defenders," he says. "We have too few court stenographers, clerks, deputies, probation agents, correctional employees. So the public defender situation is not unique. I think the prosecutor and the public defender are fairly evenly matched."
Other judges disagree.
Public defenders are "taking a lot of chances" by not doing their homework, says a veteran of the city Circuit Court bench. "They assume that the case is going to plead out or the case is going to get postponed or real criminal lawyering is going to happen some other day. Not today.
"This was unheard of in my day -- the idea that I would come to the courthouse never having laid eyes on my client and expecting to deal with his case that day."