State attorney, public defender need Florida Legislature’s support to keep you safe | Opinion
As Miami-Dade state attorney, I am committed to keeping our community safe and protecting victims. My team and I work closely with 37 different police agencies and other partners to investigate and prosecute local crimes. Together, we have reduced the crime rate almost 70% during my tenure, but we still have work to do.
Our office is facing a staffing crisis that can undermine our ability to protect the community if not immediately addressed. We are down more than 100 prosecutors and 250 staff, trending to a 30% vacancy rate and being crushed by a backlog of COVID cases. The public defender’s office faces a similar crisis.
Our inability to hire and retain prosecutors and public defenders, and their needed support staff, is contributing to case delays. Victims and their families must deal with a constant rotation of lawyers on their cases and are forced to repeatedly relive the trauma they endured, often giving up and causing cases to be dropped.
Miami now is the most expensive housing market in the United States. Its median apartment rent is around $3,000 a month. Prosecutors in Florida start at $60,000, ranking 48th lowest in the nation. Support staffers start at around $31,000. These salaries make it extremely difficult for us to attract the number of qualified individuals we need to protect you and your families, particularly since many of them must overcome often crippling student loans.
We do not expect to compete with private law firms who often start young attorneys at $145,000; we simply are trying to secure salaries that allow our attorneys and staff to survive and serve our community without leaving for a more-affordable community.
To address the problem, I asked the Legislature to: provide an 8.3% cost-of-living increase for all staff to help offset inflation; increase prosecutor salaries by an additional $15,000; provide funding for a locality pay differential for Miami-Dade County.
The Legislature already recognizes Florida’s cost of living differs among counties, sometimes dramatically, and provides an extra $5,000 pay differential for Florida Highway Patrol troopers and Florida Department of Law Enforcement agents in high-cost areas such as Miami-Dade.
If we cannot retain the highly trained and motivated attorneys and support staff who keep our criminal justice system working, our community will be the victims. We cannot allow that to happen.
HOA, COA protections
More than 50% of Florida’s 22.5 million residents — 12.65 million — live in homeowners association communities or condominium units.
Unfortunately, our weak laws do not protect them from fraud and theft committed by their governing boards.
For years, I have pushed to strengthen the laws. In 2016, I asked the grand jury to investigate the many problems facing Florida’s condo owners and the lack of proper oversight. The grand jury issued a report with recommendations that is available on our website. In the spring of 2017, I proposed several changes to strengthen the laws based on the report, but many of my proposals died during the legislative session. Undeterred, I worked with lawmakers on the “Lock Them Up” bill in 2019, which would have created criminal penalties for election fraud, kickbacks and records violations. Unfortunately, these proposals died as well.
Following the 2021 collapse of Champlain Towers South in Surfside, I again worked with the grand jury, which issued a report making a number of recommendations to protect condo owners, including giving new powers to the Florida Ombudsman. As before, these proposals died during the legislative session.
After we criminally charged the leadership of South Florida’s largest HOA (The Hammocks HOA) for their involvement in a multimillion-dollar looting of the Homeowners Association in 2022, I worked with state Rep. Juan Carlos Porras and state Sen. Ana Maria Rodriguez on a bill creating a Community Association Bill of Rights that offers protections to condominium owners and owners of homes in HOAs.
While the amended bill does not offer all the protections I proposed, it does criminalize kickbacks and various forms of election fraud, making it a positive step forward.
CHILD WITNESS PROTECTION
Too many children and youth are victimized by sexual assault, abuse, human trafficking, domestic violence and other violent acts.
Florida is one of only three states that allow defense attorneys to take depositions as a matter of right in criminal cases, regardless of age or type of crime. These legal examinations can be very confrontational and adversarial. They place undue stress on victims as well as witnesses, who often are re-traumatized as they talk about their experiences. Depositions are particularly harmful to young child victims of sexual assaults and human trafficking.
To better protect them, I have asked the Florida Legislature to prohibit depositions of victims or witnesses under the age of 18, people with intellectual disabilities and sexual-offense victims without court permission and a showing of good cause.
This would apply in cases of incest, rape, human trafficking, cyberstalking, child abuse, computer pornography and other such crimes. By requiring court permission, the court can evaluate the potential harm to the victim in deciding to allow the deposition or not. We can eliminate unnecessary questioning and retraumatization.
All of these proposals are important to our community and victims. Call your lawmakers in the state House and Senate and tell the to support these important proposals.
Katherine Fernandez Rundle is the Miami-Dade State Attorney.
