BATON ROUGE — A class-action lawsuit filed against Louisiana’s public-defense department this week alleges officials continue to systematically deny indigent citizens proper access to public defenders, according to a news release.

The state’s most at-risk communities are incapacitated in the criminal-justice system, civil-rights organizations allege, as officials fail to establish a practical statewide public-defense system. Gov. John Bel Edwards, Louisiana Public Defender Board members and Louisiana’s chief public defender, Jay Dixon, are listed as primary defendants in the case, which was filed in the 19th Judicial District Court in East Baton Rouge Parish, according to the news release on LawyersCommittee.org.

More than a dozen plaintiffs, who are represented by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and law firms Jones Walker of New Orleans and Davis, Polk and Wardwell of New York, allege they are incarcerated with limited access to an attorney or speedy trial.

Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee, told the Louisiana Record the lawsuit is a response to decades of statewide mishandling of criminal cases involving the poor, as well as Louisiana’s notoriously high incarceration rate. Eighty-five percent of people accused of a crime in Louisiana are those living below the poverty line, she said. The lawsuit would require the state to institute an effective public-defense system, expediting fair trials and alleviating the burden on underprivileged families affected by mass incarceration and plodding bureaucracy.

“Louisiana stands as the incarceration capital of the world,” Clarke told the Louisiana Record. “They incarcerate more people than any other state and virtually more than any other country across the globe. Remarkably, they fail to live up to their constitutional obligation to provide counsel to the poor. What we have found is a broken public-defender system and a system primarily financed by fines and fees imposed on the backs of the poor. Right to trial matters at every stage of the criminal-justice system.”

Louisiana’s incarceration rate is indeed the highest in the world, imprisoning nearly five times more people than Iran and 13 times more people than China in 2012, according to a report by the Times-Picayune.

A major pitfall of the system, Clarke said, is the offices’ unconstitutional reliance on fees. Rather than the state adequately funding public defenders to those who can’t afford it, Louisiana is the only state in the country that primarily relies on court fees and fines to fund public-defense services, according to another Times-Picayune report. The funding is insufficient, and, most recently, required 33 of 42 public-defender offices to stop accepting cases or place incarcerated clients on waiting lists.

“This crisis stands in stark contrast to most district attorney offices in Louisiana, which routinely receive three times more financial support than their defender counterparts,” the news release issued by representatives of the plaintiffs stated. “In Lafourche Parish, …the district attorney reported a budget surplus of $500,000 at the end of the year. The public defender’s office, by comparison, was several thousand dollars in debt at year’s end.”

One of the plaintiffs, Michael Carter, 27, of Baton Rouge, remains jailed on weapons charges for while awaiting trial. Clarke said Carter has been in jail for more than a year and a half, and has not received any contact from his attorney.

“Michael is incarcerated at a jail that is three hours from his home and family in Baton Rouge,” she said. “So he is in a very dire situation, but one that sadly reflects so many poor people across the state of Louisiana.”

Clarke said the issue is one of race as well as socioeconomic status.

“Mass incarceration remains a great problem in Louisiana, and a disproportionate number are African-American,” she said. “African-Americans make up approximately 33 percent of the state’s population but nearly 70 percent are those in jail. This is a racial-justice problem. The racial disparities that affect the criminal-justice system across Louisiana are deep-seated, and because they fail to maintain a system that is adequately financed, what we find is a system that violated both the federal and state constitution. ”

In the state, The Louisiana Public Defender Act already entitles indigent individuals accused of a crime the right to appointed counsel. This lawsuit would require the state to maintain a system that ensures affordable and fast legal services to those who apply, and employ fair, educated, communicative attorneys to represent clients.