PUBLIC DEFENDER
A former Towaliga Circuit public defender has won over $100,000 and an order reinstating him to his post according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
A public defender who was fired after lodging complaints about his Forsyth, Middle Georgia office has reached a financial settlement that also allows him to be reinstated as a defender.Kight served in the Towaliga District that covers Butts, Lamar, and Monroe Counties.
Jim Kight filed a whistle-blower lawsuit against the state indigent defense system in June, contending he was retaliated against for complaining he had to carry crushing caseloads and work in a dilapidated office with unsanitary conditions.
The settlement, reached last week, calls for the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council to pay $100,000 to Kight and his lawyers, refund more than $7,400 in lost retirement benefits and reinstate him as a public defender as he is now in the Brunswick Judicial Circuit.
Before he was fired in October 2013, Kight worked eight years as a public defender in the Towaliga Judicial Circuit, which handles indigent defense cases in offices of Barnesville, Forsyth, and Jackson.
Conditions in the Towaliga office in Forsyth became unbearable last year, Kight’s lawsuit said. The building’s roof leaked, its plumbing system routinely backed up, mold covered the walls, the front-door steps collapsed and windows fell out of the walls because of rotten wood.
Moreover, the suit said, Kight carried 350 to 400 cases a year in Monroe County and was asked to pick up cases in Butts County as well. Because positions were left unfilled, Kight confronted his supervisor about it and then took his complaints to the state defender agency.
Kight would be fired and rehired on two occasions before finally being let go the final time on Oct. 9, 2013, according to the suit.
Stephen Bright, a senior lawyer with the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, said Kight had been an “outstanding” public defender during his eight years in the Towaliga circuit. Even though Kight repeatedly brought to the attention of the state public defender agency the problems at the office, the agency did nothing, Bright said.
“He should have been celebrated as a champion of the right to counsel,” Bright added. “Instead, he was fired three times. The settlement is vindication of his courageous, heroic stand for the right to counsel.”