Forster, a 25-year veteran of the state agency and its leader for the past five years, said in an interview last week that helping clients rebuild their lives so that they don't commit new crimes "fits in with the agency's core mission."
"I view this type of assistance as plainly necessary to achieve the policy of the state," she said. The public defender statute spells out that the agency is charged with "cooperating with professional groups ... to rehabilitate and correct individuals charged and convicted of crime."
But a majority of the three-member Office of the Public Defender Board of Trustees, which is appointed by the governor, disagreed. Two members of the board decided Forster had led public defenders too far afield of their constitutional duty to represent poor people who have been arrested.
"The effort to rehabilitate and life-assist individuals charged and convicted with crimes is not a duty or responsibility" of public defenders, board Chairman T. Wray McCurdy wrote in a letter sent to Forster in July.
Forster was terminated Aug. 21 because she would not comply with the oversight board's demands to streamline the agency by disbanding units like Finegar's. The board also wanted to dissolve a capital defense unit and a juvenile services watchdog group. Forster was also told to "justify which, if any, social workers are necessary."
In an e-mail to her staff the day she was fired, Forster wrote that such changes would "destroy all progress made by the agency over the past 10 years."
As the trustees search for Forster's replacement, public defenders wonder how drastically their jobs will change in the months to come. The interim chief, Elizabeth Julian, who led the Baltimore division of the agency, took the job under the condition she not have to implement the board's demands.
Created by the state legislature in 1971, the public defender's office has had only three leaders. Forster's predecessor, Stephen E. Harris, held the top job from 1990 to 2004. He and many other academics are convinced Forster had the right approach.
"I really think this is the beginning of the end of a wonderful, top-ranked office," Harris, now director of the litigation skills center at the University of Baltimore law school, said in an interview last week. "It's the people we represent who are going to suffer."
