According to the Virginia Fair Trial Project (formerly the Virginia Indigent Defense Coalition), Virginia provides the lowest compensation for court-appointed attorneys in the country.
A court appointed attorney in Circuit Court is paid a maximum of $158 for a misdemeanor punishable by confinement, $1,235 for a felony punishable by more than 20 years confinement, and $445 for all other felonies. In General District Court and juvenile cases, attorneys receive up to a maximum fee of $120 per charge.
One such effort to increase compensation is SB1168, sponsored by Ken Stolle (R-8). This bill provides a process for requesting higher compensation.
While this bill isn’t perfect, it is a step in the right direction. Ours should not be a system of “how much justice can you afford.”
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
I have been taking court appointed cases for almost 20 years and cannot tell you how irritating it is to have to pay full price for most CLE courses while my Commonwealth Attorney opponents, many of whom make over $100,000 per year, get reduced rates because they’re “public servants”. I and my colleagues have done lengthy jury trials for single felonies. The vast majority of cases have sentences of 20 years or less so the opportunities to make more with a case in which a life sentence is possible are few and far between. The money hardly compensates for the enormous stress of being responsible for conducting a defense of a case in which a client may spend the rest of his life in prison.
Court appointed attorneys are expected to provide a full panoply of services for their single fee. When the client’s arrested you’re supposed to put on a bond motion. When a case is filed against him the commonwealth has the police department and offices like the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners and the staff and all the money necessary to prepare and prosecute the case. The case is prosecuted when the commonwealth is ready, whereas once it is underway the defense attorney is under the gun to complete the case to avoid violation of the Speedy Trial Act. Try asking a judge to allow you to have an independent expert to assess the scientific evidence in a case. Try filing and arguing a motion to suppress, a motion to discover evidence to which the commonwealth believes you are not entitled. Try interviewing all the witnesses, let alone find out who they are when their names are blacked out by the CAs from discovery for “protection” of the witness, even in cases not involving violence. We have no investigators and lose money preparing for complex trials. There is absolutely no excuse for the disparity in the system which stacks virtually everything in the commonwealth’s favor and conspires so strongly to disincentivize the one person standing between the defendant and conviction.
Don’t get me wrong. Oddly enough, for reasons of pride and a sense of dedication to the concept of representation for all defendants often receive superb representation from their long-neglected and much put-upon attorneys. Nothing creates a warm glow better than handing your opponent’s case back to her/him with a not guilty verdict. But the lack of adequate compensation is criminal and no doubt drives out those who would otherwise stay and creates a conflict in the ones who do remain. It is sheer sacrifice to be a court-appointed attorney in Virginia.
I’ve seen this bill — my general reaction is BFD. It’s a timid piece of legislation which will have little effect on the vast majority of cases and leaves everything in the hands of judges who may be worried about the drain on limited resources. It doesn’t get rid of the whole concept of a stringent cap on attorney fees, and it does not necessarily fund the change, either. There are jurisdictions in which I practice in which one or more of the courts has failed to increase the cap on attorney pay because their budgets don’t allow for the increase. Thus, there are attorneys still being paid at the rate from two or three years ago. There are other jurisdictions where the judges arbitrarily reduce the amounts allowed attorneys, allegedly because they believe the case could have been concluded in less time, but mostly because that’s where the money can be saved in the budget.
It’s time to acknowledge the extreme unfairness of the current system and do something for attorney pay. Stop throwing crumbs and go for real change instead of this nonsense calculated to save money on the sweat of hard-working attorneys whose job it is to provide the representation to which all defendants are supposed to be legally entitled.