New York lawmakers often can’t agree on the time of day, so it was both remarkable and encouraging when they unanimously passed a bill in June to require the state, finally, to pick up more of the cost of legal services for people who can’t afford them.



Unfortunately, a last-minute veto by Gov. Andrew Cuomo on New Year’s Eve means that lower-income New Yorkers will continue to wait for equal justice. In a statement accompanying his veto, Mr. Cuomo accused legislators of tacking on more than $600 million in legal-aid costs unrelated to criminal defense. He said he would sign a bill focused on the constitutional obligation to ensure proper legal counsel in criminal cases, providing about $150 million a year. The Legislature should hold him to that worthy pledge and pass a new bill immediately.

The obligation to provide lawyers for indigent defendants is enshrined in the Sixth Amendment, and it makes sense that the state should pay for it. But a 1965 New York law pawned off that responsibility on the 62 county governments, where local budget shortfalls and mismanagement have led to predictably disastrous results. Poor defendants in some counties sit behind bars for months before even meeting a lawyer; some public defenders are juggling as many as 700 cases at once — nearly double the maximum recommended by legal experts.

The crisis has been brewing for a long time; a 2006 report commissioned by the former chief judge of New York called the arrangement, under which the counties now spend about $400 million per year, “severely dysfunctional.” A partial solution was reached in 2014, when the state agreed to pay for several important reforms in settling a long-running class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of indigent defendants in five upstate counties. The reforms included lower caseload limits and better training for overworked lawyers in those counties; and the assurance that every defendant is represented by a lawyer at his or her first court appearance, where the judge takes a plea and sets bail.