Story and map by Lia Salvatierra
Audio story by Isabella Geskos
Jimbo Perry, a lawyer in Kinston, North Carolina, once defended a man responsible for causing a car accident and successfully argued the charge be reduced from a felony to a misdemeanor.
The client paid him with a box of Special K with Almonds.
Perry runs a successful private practice, but he also trades in this type of low-bono, pay-what-you-can currency.
“I’ve done lots and lots of different kinds of work,” Perry said. “I have probably represented 50 murder cases and clients, have represented people who steal things from the Walmart. I’ve helped people buy houses. I’ve walked with people when they’ve had death in their family. And help them with just any kind of law that you can imagine in a small community.”
Perry takes on all types of cases because of his commitment to Kinston, but also because even in Lenoir County’s largest city, he needs to. As of last month, there were no court-appointed attorneys in Lenoir County available to process low-level crimes, such as the car-wreck Perry described.
Officials have attempted to quantify attorney shortages facing counties like Lenoir County.
The North Carolina State Bar follows the American Bar Association’s definition of a ‘legal desert,’ applied to counties with fewer than one lawyer per 1,000 residents. By this measure, nearly half of the state’s counties are legal deserts. The same data indicate that more than half of the state’s attorneys practice in urban Wake and Mecklenburg counties.
Another way to measure shortages comes from the state’s Office of Indigent Defense Services (IDS), which provides state-appointed lawyers for people who can’t afford them in criminal court.
IDS looks at the ability of legal districts – made up of multiple counties – to provide legal services without importing lawyers from elsewhere. When using this evaluation, Lenoir County falls in a district where only 50 percent of its cases are able to be covered by in-district attorneys.
These two evaluations of legal needs differ. However, using either method, North Carolina is rife with areas where there are insufficient numbers of attorneys to represent the accused.
“While the market has placed attorneys efficiently around the state to generally meet the needs of private industry and retained clients, there is a clear market failure because the market hasn’t allocated attorneys in a way that would best suit the Constitutional needs of the people living in N.C.,” said Christopher Sadler, research director for the Office of Indigent Defense Services.
Diagnosing the drought
The deficit of lawyers, especially in small towns and rural areas, is both an acute and chronic problem, Perry said. He was tasked with remedying the issue when appointed co-chair of the Chief Justice’s Commission on Professionalism (CJCP) in January.
Long-term, public and private attorneys in these areas are aging out of their practices without younger lawyers interested in replacing them.
Immediately, the lack of attorneys, often in rural counties, leaves the remaining lawyers overwhelmed and unable to meet the needs of indigent clients.
“This hurts poor people the most obviously,” said Keith Gordon, an assistant district attorney in Johnston County and member of the CJCP. “And disenfranchised groups generally. So, economically disadvantaged people, racial minorities, gender minorities all of that, that’s who suffers the most in these situations. So it’s an issue of justice is really what it is. And so I think it’s a big problem.”
On the civil side, 71 percent of low-income families will experience at least one civil legal issue a year, according to Legal Aid NC. Further, in 75 percent of civil cases, one side isn’t represented by an attorney.
Barriers to accessing civil lawyers include limited transportation especially in rural areas, perceived costs, length of process, and general distrust, as cited in a report published by the NC Legal Justice Alliance.
In criminal court, both public defenders and court-appointed attorneys are overstretched. Prior to Oct. 1, the state funded only 19 public defender offices covering 38 counties.
Sadler’s team found that increasing the number of in-district lawyers able to cover in-district cases has the potential to improve indigent client outcomes by up to 2.5 percentage points.
“Lawyers will have 400 to 500 cases that they're just trying to handle and keep their head above water to process, as cases come up for hearing. So it wouldn't be unusual then for a lawyer to go in and see (a) young person on the Friday before Monday, when they've got to court, and the lawyer would say, ‘I've got a plea offer for you,’” Perry said.
“I want to emphasize these lawyers that are doing this kind of work all over the state in big towns and little, they genuinely care about their clients and they genuinely want to do a good job. But they can't do better than they can do with what they've got,” Perry said.
Watering the holes
Elected co-executive director of CJCP at the start of the year, Perry is working to replenish the pool of attorneys in small towns on both the public and private sides.
Mary Pollard, the state’s director for indigent defense services (IDS) – overseeing public defenders and court-appointed attorneys – agrees that all types of lawyers are needed.
“(Hiring more lawyers is) just the best way to get justice,” Pollard said. “We have this adversarial system, right, that's how we’ve designed this.”
But Pollard is specifically focused on funding and opening public defender offices across the state. A 2016 report looking into IDS outcomes highlighted an increase in public defenders as the best way forward.
In just three years since taking office, Pollard’s push in this direction has worked.
As of Oct. 1, the legislature’s newly approved budget provided for an additional eight public defender offices that will serve 22 counties.
“The legislature has been supportive, for the most part, and it’s not a partisan issue,” Pollard said.
But the Office of Indigent Defense Services needs a larger budget to pay court-appointed lawyers who take on indigent defense cases where there's no public defender's office, she said, or the shortage will continue.
The agency intends to ask for another eight public defender offices in the next budget cycle.
Perry is working to recruit lawyers for underserved areas by connecting with aspiring lawyers early on.
“The law schools and the law students are the solution,” Gordon said. “We're tapping in and capturing some of those people and getting them motivated to public service or to serving underserved areas even before they get to law school.”
Perry has been visiting law schools and connecting with students statewide to build up this infrastructure. Since January he has been following up on a regular basis with about 150 law students across North Carolina.
“I pretty much believe it's based on relationship building, it’s based on continuing to say ‘we need you, we want you,’” Perry said.
Legal oases
Most emerging lawyers he's spoken with are interested in making a difference. But once they graduate, he said, there’s no clear path for them to find their way to smaller communities.
“Literally before day one, your inbox is full of people from Career Services in firms saying, ‘you need to get your stuff together, we've got great internships for the summer, we're gonna pay you a lot of money,’ and before you know it, the hype gets going,” Perry said. “This vision of what brought you to law school in the first place of helping people and making a difference in your community gets darker and darker and further and further away.”
Though it's not for everyone, Perry believes that the pace of life in a smaller community can make sense for many people while allowing them to practice in meaningful ways.
“If the thing you put up front is helping your community and helping the people in your community, then the money part of it will take care of itself more than any of us can even imagine,” Perry said.
Recently, Perry served on a legal career panel at UNC-Chapel Hill Law School.
Joining him was recent East Carolina University graduate Darrius Rhodes.
Rhodes was working in the front office of Perry’s firm when the two became acquainted.
“[Perry] approached me and was just really welcoming in his way of showing me the way to successfully go about going to law school,” Rhodes said.
In Kinston, if there happens to be a Black lawyer they usually leave, he said.
Rhodes is currently studying for his November LSAT. Rhodes originally had dreams of practicing entertainment law somewhere like California, but the need for attorneys in his hometown is tugging him home.
“As a Black man, in America, it's not every day that you see a black attorney. And also in the same community that [Jimbo] live in, I live in. It's a predominantly Black area. There's, for us, not much representation, and hopefully I can be that change for the community,” Rhodes said.
