The WalMart of public defense: How justice gets sold to the lowest bidder in rural California

Flat-fee contracts have been banned in other parts of the country. But, as the story of one law firm shows, they have flourished in the Golden State.

(Side note. Mariposa County just made a budget transfer to increase the county’s available funds for contracted legal defense services.)

BY ANAT RUBIN 17

For three years, the fate of poor people accused of crimes in San Benito County lay in the hands of attorneys who barely spoke with their clients and seldom filed legal motions on their behalf.

While defendants asked them to contest the prosecution’s evidence, to interview witnesses, to do anything, really, to challenge law enforcement’s narrative of the crime, they ushered almost all of them to plea deals instead, averaging just one jury trial for every 1,500 cases.

The attorneys worked for Fitzgerald, Alvarez and Ciummo, the firm that San Benito paid to provide public defense. According to a 2024 state evaluation, they were not doing a good job. Two of the attorneys had inappropriate relationships with clients, another struggled with addiction.

The situation had deteriorated so dramatically that the San Benito district attorney, Joel Buckingham, found himself worrying about the people his office was trying to send to prison. Their attorneys didn’t contest the evidence Buckingham’s prosecutors presented, no matter how it was obtained. Each year, they filed an average of just 10 motions to suppress evidence based on violations of constitutional rights — including unjustified stops and searches, illegal interrogations, and arrests without probable cause.

“Police officers must make mistakes sometimes,” Buckingham told a researcher conducting the evaluation.

The sheriff, Eric Taylor, was also alarmed. If his deputies were never challenged in court, how would they know when they had crossed a line? What would stop them from doing it again?

In Taylor’s previous job, in Santa Cruz County, the courthouse was often packed with law enforcement officers who had been called to defend their actions.

“If we’re doing our job correctly, then we prevail on those motions,” he told San Benito county supervisors last year.  “And if we’ve made a mistake, and we’re doing our job incorrectly, we’re held accountable for that.”

Nearly half of California counties pay private lawyers and firms to represent poor people in criminal cases, and most of them, like San Benito, do it through what’s known as a “flat-fee” contract, meaning they pay a fixed amount, regardless of how many cases the attorneys handle or how much time they spend on each case.

It’s a far cheaper alternative — at least in the short run — to operating a public defender office with government lawyers, and it’s created a second-tier justice system in rural stretches of the state: Seven of the eight counties with the state’s highest jail and prison incarceration rates have flat-fee contracts.

These arrangements so clearly disincentivize investigating and litigating cases that they’ve been banned in other parts of the country. But they have flourished in California, which provides no funding or oversight of county-level public defense.

Fitzgerald, Alvarez and Ciummo, commonly known as the Ciummo firm, has become the face of this model. Old iterations of the firm’s website asked local politicians what they might do with all the money they could save on public defense: “Better schools? Better fire protection? More police? Improved roads? More parks?” The message was clear: Don’t waste county money helping people accused of crimes. Spend it on the things your constituents actually care about.

Over the past 30 years, the Ciummo firm has provided public defender services in nine California counties. Both its size and tactics have earned it a reputation as the Wal-Mart of public defense. “This is a high-volume, low-profit business for me,” Richard Ciummo told a reporter in 2007. “It’s more like a grocery store.”

The firm left San Benito last year, but it is still the primary public defender in Madera, Amador and Calaveras counties, and it handles cases in Fresno and Merced counties when the public defender’s office has a conflict.

CalMatters reviewed documents detailing the firm’s work in these counties and found that its lawyers were less likely than other defense attorneys to investigate their cases, challenge the prosecutors’ evidence in legal motions and push their cases to trial.

In Madera, the percentage of felonies the firm took to a jury trial between 2019 and 2024 was half the statewide average. During three of those years, the firm reported caseloads that were more than double even the most permissive standards for how many cases one attorney should be allowed to handle. Those numbers do not account for the fact that some of the firm’s attorneys simultaneously represent private clients.

Michael Fitzgerald, the firm’s senior partner, said his firm provides a more affordable, though no less effective, alternative to an institutional public defender’s office.

“Could we use more funding? Certainly,” he said. “But I think we do as good as anybody. I think we do better than public defenders’ offices.”

Fitzgerald said criticism of the contract system stems from longstanding bias and a romanticization of ardent public defenders — the true believers, he calls them — who push back against individual and systemic injustices.

The scenes playing out in criminal courts across the country have seldom resembled that ideal. Many institutional public defender offices are so severely outgunned that their lawyers are unable to put up a real fight.

In 2015, the American Civil Liberties Union settled a lawsuit with Fresno County over its failure to adequately fund its institutional office, where government lawyers carried caseloads three times the recommended limit. In Merced, the institutional public defender’s office has 15 staff attorneys and no full-time investigators — the worst ratio in the state, according to the most recent data from the California Department of Justice.

But the shortcomings that sometimes plague government offices are all but guaranteed in a for-profit, flat-fee system.

“For it to be worthwhile for this firm to do this, its partners and shareholders have to be taking in enough money to make it profitable for them,” said Eve Primus, a University of Michigan law professor. “And the only way to do that is to cut back on expenses that are required for effective representation. I just don’t know how the math works out otherwise.”

The nation’s first public defender office opened its doors in Los Angeles in 1913, the result of a decades-long advocacy effort led by Clara Shortridge Foltz, the first woman to be admitted to the bar in California. By the time the U.S. Supreme Court established a right to an attorney in state court criminal proceedings in 1963, more than a dozen California counties were operating their own public defender systems.

But as other states funneled money to government-run public defender offices, California left its system in the hands of the counties. Elected officials in many of those counties would eventually opt for the cheapest path — a flat-fee contract.

In 1984, only nine of California’s 58 counties relied on contractors for their primary public defense systems, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report published that year. Today, that number is 25.

If Foltz were to return, “she would find a criminal justice system that has broken faith with one of its fundamental underlying premises: the presumption of innocence,” wrote Larry Benner, a California Western School of Law professor, in a 2010 report examining the state’s public defender offices.

She would be alarmed to discover, Benner wrote, that across California, “justice is now up for sale to the lowest bidder.”

(Read the rest of the story here: https://calmatters.org/investigation/2025/12/the-walmart-of-public-defense/

(Republished from CalMatters in 2025)