It is true that increased fees are sometimes needed in tough financial times. The health care industry, for example, has imposed copays on patients seeking clinical care and prescriptions. But respected research has clearly established that when copays are established or increased significantly, it is the poor who are most affected. The Rand Health Insurance Experiment found that increased copays reduced low-income children's use of clinically effective health care by 44 percent.

The new public defender copays are much more substantial than medical ones, and will have even more of that same "chilling" effect. The poorest of the poor will be most affected. Nothing could be worse than that. Governments spend vast sums of money to establish machinery to try people accused of crimes. Prosecuting attorneys are deemed essential to protect the public's interest in law and order. The government hires lawyers to prosecute, and people who have money hire private lawyers, providing proof that lawyers in criminal cases -- on both sides -- are necessities, not luxuries. It is only through a system that provides competent court-appointed counsel that there can be any assurance of fair trials in which every defendant stands equal under the law. As the Supreme Court said in Gideon, "This noble ideal cannot be realized if the poor man charged with a crime has to face his accusers without a lawyer to assist him."

We think this flies in the face of the now 40 year old Supreme Court decision, Gideon v. Wainwright, in which the Court, ruling that lawyers must be provided to defendants too poor to hire their own, said:

"The right of one charged with crime to counsel may not be deemed fundamental and essential to fair trials in some countries, but it is in ours."