If you are broke and in trouble with the law, your future may more than likely depend on one of three defense attorneys who can be found most Monday and Tuesday mornings at the Mariposa County Courthouse.
The three attorneys — Ric Squaglia, Eugene Action and Neal Douglass — are independent contractors. They get paid an annual flat fee of $170,000 to provide indigent defense.
They handle more than 600 cases a year. But there is no limit on how many clients they’re assigned. They may also have an outside caseload as a private defense attorney.
As many as nine out of 10 defendants who walk into the courthouse qualify for indigent defense.
Now, the Mariposa County Board of Supervisors is considering getting rid of its contract system and establishing a formal Office of Public De- fender.
The county is being lured by a $700,000 grant the Office of the State Public Defender (OSPD) has already earmarked for Mariposa County.
The board may also consider a hybrid arrangement — a Regional Public Defenders Office — in which services would be shared with Stanislaus County and its panel of public defenders.
But the board needs to make a decision by Oct. 15 when a grant application is due.
“It’s tough to make a decision on what we don’t understand,” said Supervisor Miles Menetrey last week.
County Administrator Joe Lynch mentioned grant money the county has missed out on before, like for mental health diversion and child protection, because it didn’t adequately read the tea leaves from the state of California.
“When we miss a pilot (project), we are struggling to catch up,” he said.
The grant money is especially hard to resist when the state may make you do it anyway.
California General Assembly Bill AB 690, known as the Fair Representation Act, would ban flat-fee and per-case contracts for indigent defense and would require county’s to pay an hourly rate. It would also encourage counties to upgrade and transition to formal public defender offices.
Menetrey called it, “Another California mandate that disproportionately effects our rural counties.”
‘Army vs. Soldier’
Unlike other states, California leaves the funding of indigent defense to its 58 counties.
Thirty-four counties in California have county-run public defender offices. The other 24 counties — like Mariposa County — contract with individual attorneys to offer indigent defense services.
The board heard last week from Mono County officials who established a public defender office last year.
“The DA office is an army,” said Jeremy Ibrahim, the new head of Mono County’s Office of Public Defender. “The public defender contract model has a soldier.”
No one seems to argue that Mariposa County’s contract attorneys, no matter their skill, are outmatched, and certainly outspent, by the legal machinery of the state: The District Attorney, the sheriff’s office and probation department.
The Mariposa County DA’s budget is $1.6 million and includes a staff of 13: Four attorneys, three investigators, four legal secretaries, an office assistant and legal executive assistant.
Last year indigent defense cost Mariposa County $1 million, about twice what it cost five years ago.
Driving that budget is the cost of conflict attorneys — who are paid as much as $150 an hour. Conflict attorneys and investigators cost $497,000.
That’s a problem that may be inherent in a county with a population of 17,000, where it seems like everyone know everyone else.
The degree of separation is even more narrow at the Mariposa County Courthouse, where today’s suspect may be tomorrow’s victim.
Squaglia, one of the three contract attorneys, told the board those conflicts don’t go away simply because the county has established a formal public defenders office, with a supervisor, and a regular stable of investigators.
“I cringe at the idea that you have a contract mental health expert,” said Squaglia, who said he would want to hire his own expert witnesses.
“I’ve never felt I had to beg for money from the courts. I’ve hired top experts from around the country,” he said.
‘Incentivizing justice’
A March 2025, an OSPD report on Mariposa County Indigent Defense raised serious concerns about the contract system.
“Mariposa’s current system does not support or incentivize the ‘meaningful adversarial testing’ necessary to protect the Sixth Amendment right to counsel or ensure a fair system for all involved,” the report said.
After looking at 3,456 misdemeanor and felony cases over a five year period, from 2018 through 2023, the report found:
• Only an average of 0.2 percent of the criminal felony cases proceeded to jury trial. The statewide average is 2 percent.
• Ninety-six percent of criminal cases were not investigated by the defense. No juvenile delinquency cases were investigated.
• Ninety-eight percent of criminal cases were handled without the input or assistance of defense experts.
The report said it was limited in its quantitative analysis because much of the data its authors were seeking, such as the number of and kind of motions filed, were not tracked.
The report warns that an underfunded defense increases the risk of wrongful convictions, incarceration, bloated caseloads, burnout for attorneys on both sides and a liability exposure from wrongful prosecutions and costly appeals.
OSPD argues the central problem is a flat=fee rate structure that means attorneys are not motivated to take action, file motions and litigate aggressively, because the extra work carries no financial motivation, and it means they can maximize their time with paying clients, the report surmises.
Legal Housekeeping
But the OSPD report misses the more mundane machinations of a courthouse, especially a small one.
It’s not always, “adversarial testing,” more often its a kind of legal housekeeping of arraignments, probation violations, check-ins and scheduling, where defendants are often diverted to treatment or probation, usually with the soft landing of a plea deal.
That kind of bureaucracy of justice may not show up in statistics, but it is frequently how business gets done in any courthouse.
That doesn’t mean defense attorneys are rolling over for the DA.
If anything, in recent weeks the three contract attorney’s have bristled at plea offers from the DA’s office.
As one attorney recently said in court about a plea deal, “If I was drinking coffee, I would have spit it out.”
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