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In the 1960s, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a series
of decisions that provided indigent defendants the means to appeal. In
Illinois, the financial responsibility for these appeals (providing legal
counsel and a free copy of the original trial transcript) fell to each
county’s board. In 1970, a team of 15 idealistic young lawyers funded
by a federal grant took over the job of handling appeals. One of them was
Daniel Yuhas.
“We were all hippies, all counterculture types,
but very dedicated, very left-wing, very committed to constitutional
principles,” Yuhas says. “We were very professional, because we
understood that throwing bombs was not the way to get relief for your
client.”
When their grant was due to run out, someone
came up with the idea of turning this roving defense team into a state
agency. The notion attracted support from unexpected allies — those
county boards, eager to have someone else pick up the appeals tabs. Thus
the Office of the State Appellate Defender, or OSAD, was born. A few years later, county prosecutors suddenly awash
in legitimate, well-written appeals began lobbying the Legislature to
create a parallel state agency to handle the task of defending all those
appeals. That’s when the Office of the State’s Attorneys
Appellate Prosecutors, or SAAP, was established. Handling appeals is what the agency still spends most
of its resources doing. SAAP has five offices across the state, each with
about a dozen attorneys who specialize in researching and writing reply
briefs. As members of the American Federation of State, County and
Municipal Employees union, appellate attorneys earn starting salaries of
about $42,000. The top ones get double that, according to Patrick Delfino,
assistant director of the SAAP. OSAD attorneys start at about $47,000 and
receive incremental raises laid out in a management plan, says Yuhas, now
deputy state appellate defender. There are other mechanical differences between the
two agencies: The OSAD is bigger, with about 100 attorneys in its Cook
County office alone and another 100 or so scattered throughout the
downstate area. The SAAP doesn’t have a Cook County office, because
Cook County has its own appellate division. But the SAAP also provides
other services, like training seminars, labor-dispute management, and
hands-on assistance and immediate legal advice for state’s attorneys
across the state. Delfino helped draft the legislation that created
both agencies. So why did he curse his agency with the acronym SAAP? “It actually was the Illinois State’s
Attorneys Association’s Comprehensive Project,” he says,
“which evolved into the Illinois State’s Attorneys Appellate
Service Commission, which then became . . . well, the answer is: We just
lost that battle.”
Contact Dusty Rhodes at drhodes@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Jul 10-16, 2008.
