Outrageous Fortune

The lawyers are scurrying inside the Juvenile Court building in Mesa on a recent morning like shoppers on a last-minute run.

Small groups are milling outside the eight courtrooms, waiting for the start of delinquency and dependency hearings to which they're connected, most often as participants.

The delinquency hearings concern children under age 18 who are accused of breaking the law (though kids charged with serious crimes can be transferred under Arizona law to adult court).

Dependency court focuses on children reportedly abused or neglected by their parents or guardians to the extent that state child-protection officials or others have recommended legal intervention.

Those cases typically involve parents who run the gamut of the simply pathetic (druggies who don't know up from down) to the malevolent, and children badly in need of a fresh start, with or without their birth parents.

One of the lawyers, a middle-aged woman in a flowing purple dress, bellows the name of her client.

"That's me," says a diminutive woman with stringy blond hair, rising from her hard, plastic chair to shake her new attorney's hand.

"Hi," the lawyer says. "I didn't know if you were going to make it. I've been trying to call you. Good. Let's go talk somewhere real quick."

Minutes later, a bailiff enters the hall from a courtroom and calls the next case.

The attorney in the purple dress and her scruffy client step into court, soon followed by another attorney and a glaring, heavily tattooed man who removes a ball cap that says, perhaps ironically, "World's Greatest Dad."

Had their hearing concerned a juvenile delinquent, anyone from the public could have observed the proceedings.

But this is a dependency case, an entirely different animal in Arizona courthouses when it comes to openness.

As in Las Vegas, what goes on inside those courtrooms usually stays there.

Seventeen states in the past decade opened their dependency hearings to the public, shining a light on an important process that long has operated in a shroud of secrecy.

But dependency cases in Arizona are closed to the public unless the parents, guardians or the sitting judge elect to open them. Dependency courts in Arizona remain a secret society that exists amid one of our most traditionally wide-open institutions — the county courthouse.

The man and the woman reappear in the lobby about 10 minutes after they had entered the Mesa courtroom. Neither looks pleased.

The woman huddles with her new lawyer. The tattooed man sticks his ball cap back on his head and quickly heads to the elevator.

The two lawyers who represented their respective clients at the short hearing each will bill Maricopa County's Office of Contract Counsel $1,000 for their services.

Almost without exception, these and the other attorneys who work dependency cases under contract with the county will get paid in full, whether they do the bare minimum of work or go the extra yard for their clients — children or parents.

That is the going rate for private attorneys during the first year of a dependency court case. In many instances, a judge also will appoint another attorney as guardian ad litem (GAL) to provide additional support to one of the parties, usually the child.

That's another $1,000 for the first year of work.

Attorneys usually have to appear in court every 60 days during that first year, for status hearings that rarely last more than a few minutes.

During the second year and every year after, attorneys for the parents and the GAL may bill $250 annually (the child's attorney gets to bill $400) if a case continues, which it usually does for at least a few years.

For a child, becoming a ward of the state means a trip into the netherworld of foster care, reunification with and separation from their parents, adoption, and variations on those themes.

At first blush, the money — $1,000 here, $250 there — may not sound like much.

But a New Times examination of financial reports and other public records shows that juvenile dependencies are the source of the county's most lucrative public-law franchise for a small group of private attorneys.

These days, most of the public discussion about Maricopa County's legal world has concerned the death penalty, and how an overwhelmed criminal-justice system is threatening to collapse under the weight of 149 pending capital cases.

County Attorney Andrew Thomas and others have suggested that the criminal-defense bar has been making the big bucks on the backs of county taxpayers, all the while stalling the death penalty proceedings as long as possible.

Remarkably, though, the highest-paid dependency lawyers, with rare exception, have been making more money than peers in private practice who litigate death-penalty cases under their county contracts.

The undisputed champion of dependency lawyers for calendar year 2006 was Chandler attorney Patricia O'Connor, who collected $385,305 for handling hundreds of juvenile dependency and delinquency cases.

O'Connor collected more from Maricopa County last year than Bob Storrs, Dan Raynak and Herman Alcantar, three private defense lawyers who work death-penalty cases for the county, earned among them in 2006.