Assemblyman William Horne, D-Las Vegas, testifies before a committee hearing at the Legislature in Carson City. Horne, who is also a contract defender, was appointed to a complex sexual assault case last year. He passed the Nevada Bar Exam on his fifth try in October 2004. Photo by Cathleen Allison/Review-Journal.

In 2004, Clark County paid dearly for flaws in its system of defending the poor when it reached a $5 million settlement with former death row inmate Roberto Miranda.

Miranda, who spent 14 years in prison for murder before he was found to be innocent in 1996, alleged in his lawsuit that an inexperienced lawyer with the county public defender's office was largely to blame for his wrongful conviction.

Two years after the lawsuit was settled, the county is still struggling with the lessons of Miranda.

This time however, it is the Clark County judiciary, not the public defender's office, that is assigning unseasoned contract defenders to cases of murder, sexual assault, and other serious felonies.

"You would have thought the Miranda case would have been a wake-up call for Clark County," said David Carroll, the principal author of a 2003 report highly critical of the county public defender's office. "There's no telling how many more of this kind of cases are coming down the road."

Carroll's organization, the National Legal Aid and Defender Association, has recommended that court systems create minimal experience requirements for lawyers seeking assignments to indigent cases.

Many court systems around the country have done so, but Nevada remains among the states with qualification standards only for attorneys handling death penalty cases.

A special public defender's office was opened in 1997 to help defend capital cases.

After the Miranda ruling, the public defender's office enacted in-house policies to help avoid future problems, said Clark County Public Defender Phil Kohn. For example, new staff attorneys are limited to misdemeanor and low-level felony cases in their first year, and attorneys on the office's murder and sexual assault teams must have at least four years of criminal defense experience.

Kohn said the Miranda ruling "talked about the county's obligations to train its lawyers," an admonition that has gone unheeded in the contract defender system.

"All of that is applicable to contract attorneys, but none of it is being enforced," Kohn said. "There are no standards, no reviews, no training requirements."

By unwritten understanding, attorneys who handle unlimited numbers of felony and misdemeanor cases for only $3,000 per month as contract defenders also are assigned hourly paid cases. Cases pay hourly when defendants face life in prison or the death penalty, and most judges assign those cases on a rotating basis to their contract defenders.

The county is legally responsible for the performance of contract defenders, some of whom are assigned serious felony cases despite having little trial experience.

"Our liability would be the same as if it was an employee public defender," said Deputy District Attorney Mary-Anne Miller, the county's legal counsel.

A 2000 report by the Spangenberg Group, a research organization that studies legal matters, concluded that "attorney eligibility standards protect the rights of the accused to receive competent and experienced attorneys, regardless of the level of charges he or she is facing."

When contract defender William Horne's turn came in Justice of the Peace Karen Bennett-Haron's courtroom last year, she appointed him to a complex sexual assault case.

Horne, a three-term state assemblyman who embarked on a legal career after 15 years as a flight attendant, passed the Nevada Bar Exam on his fifth try in October 2004.

Just over a year later, Bennett-Haron appointed him to the case of Anthony Childers, who was accused of raping a call girl at his Las Vegas home.

In an interview, Bennett-Haron said she did not know she could appoint anybody other than one of her three contract defenders, Horne and veteran attorneys Michael Villani and Dayvid Figler.

She chose Horne, who had done only one trial up until that point, because he was the contract defender next in line for an hourly appointment.

"Of course I think about skill level, but quite frankly, if an attorney is on the contract list, they've already gone through an application process," Bennett-Haron said.

In theory, yes. In practice, no.

District Court Administrator Chuck Short admitted that contract defenders have not been properly vetted by the county.

A request by the Review-Journal to view the applications and résumés of contract defenders could not be granted, because court administration has not made sure they were being submitted. Some such records may have been collected in the past but disappeared during the move to the new Regional Justice Center in October 2005, Short said.

After a five-day trial in January, Childers was convicted of 10 counts of sexual assault and one count of kidnapping. He is awaiting sentencing.

Horne's co-counsel at Childers' trial was Alina Kilpatrick, who at the time had been a lawyer for only a month.

The trial had to be stopped several times so that District Judge Michelle Leavitt could consult with Horne and Kilpatrick about matters including whether they wanted to reveal to the jury that Childers was in custody at the time of the trial.

Such admissions have been grounds for mistrial in other cases.

Leavitt declined to comment about Horne's performance at trial.

Horne defended his appointment to the case.

"I don't think it necessarily holds true that the veteran attorney is always the best attorney," Horne said in an interview. "The judges are there to determine whether an attorney can do this job."

With Horne at the Legislature until June, he has handed off his contract duties to Kilpatrick.

In the absence of set rules about who can be appointed to serious felony cases, judges often trust their instincts over a proven record of courtroom experience.

Cynthia Dustin, a former law clerk for District Judge Jackie Glass, had been an attorney for 2 1/2 years, but had never served as counsel or even co-counsel on a murder trial, when she was appointed to defend Lorenzo Sierra, who is accused of fatally shooting a man in May 2006. Sierra's case is still pending.

District Judge Sally Loehrer, who is presiding over the case, said she felt comfortable with the appointment because Dustin had done solid work in a robbery case that went to trial last year.

"She is better than many far more experienced attorneys," Loehrer said.

Some appointments show that experience as a lawyer does not always equate with good performance.

Kenneth Frizzell had done primarily civil work when he became a contract defender in 2004. That year, Frizzell, whose law firm also specializes in traffic cases, was assigned a first-degree kidnapping case by Justice of the Peace William Jansen, and took the case to trial.

The defendant, Teneca Wilson, was acquitted of that but convicted on a robbery charge.

Frizzell advised her against appealing the conviction on the grounds that she could be convicted of the kidnapping charge at a new trial.

Wilson later found out about the legal concept of "double jeopardy," which prevents a defendant from being tried twice for the same crime.

The Clark County district attorney's office acknowledged at a court hearing that Frizzell had given Wilson bad advice.

Wilson has filed a complaint against Frizzell with the Nevada Bar Association.

"It's a no-brainer that double jeopardy would apply to that situation," said Christopher Blakesley, a criminal law professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "A criminal defense attorney should have known that."