2014 Caseload Assignments for County & Juvenile Division Attorneys in Lake County

The county division and juvenile division of the Lake County Superior Court do not participate in the Commission non-capital indigent expense reimbursement program, so Lake County does not report information about them to the Commission. Lake County did not make its caseload assignments available for these courts. To estimate the caseloads of the individual attorneys, 6AC relied on publicly available data from the indiana Judicial Service Report for 2014 for the numbers of cases assigned to pauper counsel for each court and case type. SUPREME COURT OF INDIANA, 2014 INDIANA JUDICIAL SERVICE REPORT Vol. 2 at 708-709 (2014).

To calculate estimates for each defender’s caseload, 6AC divided caseloads within each court by the number of defenders contracted in that court.

There were only seven public defenders contracted to the juvenile division in 2014.  Three more were contracted in 2015. All ten are shown here, and as a result the caseloads of the seven 2014 attorneys would actually be higher than shown. (See ***** in the table below.)

The juvenile division judge and chief juvenile public defender (Geoff Giorgi) work out a schedule to cover each court that is in session on each day, so every contract defender does not cover every type of case. The actual number of case assignments to each attorney, then, depends on the courts and days they are assigned. Because the available data is only by case type, 6AC shows average caseloads for the ten attorneys.

NOTE: based on the Judicial Service Report, 6AC is unable to distinguish among types of juvenile cases and is unable to distinguish among types of appeals.

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