By Anat Rubin, CalMatters
Illustration by Adriana Heldiz, CalMatters
This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
For three years, the fate of poor people accused of crimes in San Benito County lay in the hands of attorneys who barely spoke with their clients and seldom filed legal motions on their behalf.
While defendants asked them to contest the prosecution’s evidence, to interview witnesses, to do anything, really, to challenge law enforcement’s narrative of the crime, they ushered almost all of them to plea deals instead, averaging just one jury trial for every 1,500 cases.
The attorneys worked for Fitzgerald, Alvarez and Ciummo, the firm that San Benito paid to provide public defense. According to a 2024 state evaluation, they were not doing a good job. Two of the attorneys had inappropriate relationships with clients, another struggled with addiction.
The situation had deteriorated so dramatically that the San Benito district attorney, Joel Buckingham, found himself worrying about the people his office was trying to send to prison. Their attorneys didn’t contest the evidence Buckingham’s prosecutors presented, no matter how it was obtained. Each year, they filed an average of just 10 motions to suppress evidence based on violations of constitutional rights — including unjustified stops and searches, illegal interrogations, and arrests without probable cause.
“Police officers must make mistakes sometimes,” Buckingham told a researcher conducting the evaluation.
The sheriff, Eric Taylor, was also alarmed. If his deputies were never challenged in court, how would they know when they had crossed a line? What would stop them from doing it again?
In Taylor’s previous job, in Santa Cruz County, the courthouse was often packed with law enforcement officers who had been called to defend their actions.
“If we’re doing our job correctly, then we prevail on those motions,” he told San Benito county supervisors last year. “And if we’ve made a mistake, and we’re doing our job incorrectly, we’re held accountable for that.”
Sheriff Eric Taylor stands next to his awards and mementos at the San Benito County Sheriff’s Office in Hollister on Dec. 2, 2025. Photo by Estefany Gonzalez for CalMatters
Nearly half of California counties pay private lawyers and firms to represent poor people in criminal cases, and most of them, like San Benito, do it through what’s known as a “flat-fee” contract, meaning they pay a fixed amount, regardless of how many cases the attorneys handle or how much time they spend on each case.
It’s a far cheaper alternative — at least in the short run — to operating a public defender office with government lawyers, and it’s created a second-tier justice system in rural stretches of the state: Seven of the eight counties with the state’s highest jail and prison incarceration rates have flat-fee contracts.
These arrangements so clearly disincentivize investigating and litigating cases that they’ve been banned in other parts of the country. But they have flourished in California, which provides no funding or oversight of county-level public defense.
Fitzgerald, Alvarez and Ciummo, commonly known as the Ciummo firm, has become the face of this model. Old iterations of the firm’s website asked local politicians what they might do with all the money they could save on public defense: “Better schools? Better fire protection? More police? Improved roads? More parks?” The message was clear: Don’t waste county money helping people accused of crimes. Spend it on the things your constituents actually care about.
Over the past 30 years, the Ciummo firm has provided public defender services in nine California counties. Both its size and tactics have earned it a reputation as the Wal-Mart of public defense. “This is a high-volume, low-profit business for me,” Richard Ciummo told a reporter in 2007. “It’s more like a grocery store.”
The firm left San Benito last year, but it is still the primary public defender in Madera, Amador and Calaveras counties, and it handles cases in Fresno and Merced counties when the public defender’s office has a conflict.
CalMatters reviewed documents detailing the firm’s work in these counties and found that its lawyers were less likely than other defense attorneys to investigate their cases, challenge the prosecutors’ evidence in legal motions and push their cases to trial.
In Madera, the percentage of felonies the firm took to a jury trial between 2019 and 2024 was half the statewide average. During three of those years, the firm reported caseloads that were more than double even the most permissive standards for how many cases one attorney should be allowed to handle. Those numbers do not account for the fact that some of the firm’s attorneys simultaneously represent private clients.
The front entrance of the Fitzgerald, Alvarez & Ciummo law firm in Madera on Oct. 20, 2025. Photo by Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local
Michael Fitzgerald, the firm’s senior partner, said his firm provides a more affordable, though no less effective, alternative to an institutional public defender’s office.
“Could we use more funding? Certainly,” he said. “But I think we do as good as anybody. I think we do better than public defenders’ offices.”
Fitzgerald said criticism of the contract system stems from longstanding bias and a romanticization of ardent public defenders — the true believers, he calls them — who push back against individual and systemic injustices.
The scenes playing out in criminal courts across the country have seldom resembled that ideal. Many institutional public defender offices are so severely outgunned that their lawyers are unable to put up a real fight.
In 2015, the American Civil Liberties Union settled a lawsuit with Fresno County over its failure to adequately fund its institutional office, where government lawyers carried caseloads three times the recommended limit. In Merced, the institutional public defender’s office has 15 staff attorneys and no full-time investigators — the worst ratio in the state, according to the most recent data from the California Department of Justice.
But the shortcomings that sometimes plague government offices are all but guaranteed in a for-profit, flat-fee system.
“For it to be worthwhile for this firm to do this, its partners and shareholders have to be taking in enough money to make it profitable for them,” said Eve Primus, a University of Michigan law professor. “And the only way to do that is to cut back on expenses that are required for effective representation. I just don’t know how the math works out otherwise.”
The nation’s first public defender office opened its doors in Los Angeles in 1913, the result of a decades-long advocacy effort led by Clara Shortridge Foltz, the first woman to be admitted to the bar in California. By the time the U.S. Supreme Court established a right to an attorney in state court criminal proceedings in 1963, more than a dozen California counties were operating their own public defender systems.
But as other states funneled money to government-run public defender offices, California left its system in the hands of the counties. Elected officials in many of those counties would eventually opt for the cheapest path — a flat-fee contract.
In 1984, only nine of California’s 58 counties relied on contractors for their primary public defense systems, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report published that year. Today, that number is 25.
If Foltz were to return, “she would find a criminal justice system that has broken faith with one of its fundamental underlying premises: the presumption of innocence,” wrote Larry Benner, a California Western School of Law professor, in a 2010 report examining the state’s public defender offices.
She would be alarmed to discover, Benner wrote, that across California, “justice is now up for sale to the lowest bidder.”
***
The Ciummo firm wasn’t built by people who saw themselves as protectors of the accused, but by people who had wanted to be on the other side of the courtroom, with the prosecutors.
The firm’s founder, John Barker, began his career in law enforcement. He was one of a dozen sheriff’s deputies indicted on charges of using excessive force during the 1969 People’s Park protests in Berkeley, and later served as police chief for the small town of Huron in Fresno County. He went to law school to become a prosecutor. Instead, he began working with a lawyer who had a contract with Madera County to provide public defense.
During an unsuccessful campaign for judge in 1986, he told a Fresno Bee reporter, “I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the criminals.”
Two years later, in 1988, he submitted the winning bid for Madera’s public defense contract. He hired Ciummo, who had recently been fired from the Fresno County District Attorney’s Office for practicing law after losing his license, and together they represented poor people accused of crimes in the county.
Barker was the face of the firm in those early years. He wore a cowboy hat and boots. He was the kind of guy you wanted to have a drink with, said Manuel Nieto, who was hired by the firm in 1994.
“He could charm the socks off anybody,” Nieto said. “But he wasn’t an advocate.”
California had just passed one of the nation’s first three-strikes laws, which ratcheted up punishments for repeat offenders. Suddenly, defendants were facing long prison sentences for crimes that would previously have landed them in jail or on probation.
Nieto said the firm didn’t have the capability — or the drive — to push back against these punitive measures. New attorneys didn’t get any training, he said. They had too many cases and too few resources. Investigations were rare. Nieto doesn’t remember ever using an expert.
“That was my first job out of law school and I was like, ‘Holy shit, this is not good,’” he said. He left after six months to join the Fresno public defender’s office.
Over the next two decades, the Ciummo firm expanded into other parts of the state, growing its business by underbidding the competition. In 1994, it offered to take over public defense services in Placer County for around half of what the existing contractor proposed.
County supervisors seemed eager to make the switch, but Placer’s judges objected.
A dozen years later, the county put the contract out for bid again. The local firm asked for $28 million over four years. The Ciummo firm offered to do the job for $15 million, and it won the contract.
In each new county, the firm encountered opposition. Local attorneys and community members wrote letters to elected officials, spoke at public hearings and talked to newspaper reporters to express their belief that the firm’s low-cost model would diminish the quality of legal services.
That process played out most recently in Merced in 2017, when prosecutors joined members of the local chapter of the NAACP in urging county officials to reject the firm’s proposal. At a hearing on the issue, a defense investigator who had worked for the previous contractor warned the supervisors that “you get what you pay for.”
Ciummo, seemingly accustomed to this kind of rhetoric, walked up to the podium to address the board.
“I am Mr. Ciummo,” he said. “I don’t have horns and a tail.”
***
On a hot, dry morning in late August, William Martinez was in the lobby of the Madera County Probation Department, waiting for someone to call his name. He had just been released from the local jail after posting bond, and his assault case was pending.
Martinez’s next court date was a few weeks away, and he would be represented by a Ciummo attorney. The firm had represented Martinez on a previous charge, in 2023, and he didn’t have high hopes for how his latest case would turn out.
“They go through the motions as though you’re being represented, but you’re not,” he said. “They’re representing Madera County.”
Madera County Superior Courthouse in Madera on Oct. 20, 2025. Photo by Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local
It’s a sentiment defendants repeated in San Benito County, where the Office of the State Public Defender surveyed the firm’s clients and their families as part of an audit it released in 2024.
Two-thirds of respondents who had been convicted of a felony said they spoke with their attorney for less than five minutes over the course of their case. Researchers found that the Ciummo lawyers working in the county had failed to add themselves to a list at the local jail that would allow them to have confidential calls with their clients.
“My brother feels like he’s going to lose his case because the public defender won’t answer his calls, won’t visit, won’t do any work for him,” one family member said.
Another said his brother’s attorney didn’t chase down evidence or interview witnesses. “They wouldn’t help him,” he said. “I had to go and be an investigator and get a statement.”
Many of the defendants felt they were being pushed to accept a guilty plea, and that the person who was supposed to be their voice in court was not interested in putting up a fight.
Shortly before the San Benito evaluation was published, Fitzgerald decided to pull his firm out of the county. He dismissed the report as biased.
“It was the typical, almost boilerplate report that the Office for the State Public Defender does, saying how contract public defenders are no good, and they should do away with them,” Fitzgerald said.
The Office of the State Public Defender, once tasked solely with death penalty appeals, expanded its work in response to the ACLU’s lawsuit in Fresno. It now provides training and support for county-based public defenders and periodically evaluates local systems. Its recommendations are not binding.
The San Benito contract, Fitzgerald said, had been problematic from the start. He said he had lowered his bid at the county’s insistence, agreeing to fewer lawyers than he needed.
“It was not a lucky county for us. So we got out of there,” he said. “San Benito had problems, but they weren’t created by us.”
***
This year, the California Legislature considered a bill that would ban flat-fee contracts, requiring counties to compensate lawyers and firms based on the demands of their cases.
In a committee hearing, senators heard from Rudy Castillo, who had been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole in 2008 for his participation in a robbery that ended in murder.
Castillo had been represented by the Ciummo firm. He said his first attorney excused himself from his case because Castillo refused to accept a plea deal. “It was apparent that he didn’t want to waste his time trying to defend me,” he said.
The second attorney was unprepared for trial and seemed to lack “any motivation to argue my case,” Castillo said.
“This attorney never hired an investigator. He never submitted any motions to protect my constitutional rights and challenge the Miranda violations of my case, or hired any experts to challenge the DA’s arguments.”
When a change in the felony murder law gave Castillo an opportunity to petition the court, his family hired a private attorney to help him. He was released in 2021.
By the time Castillo addressed the committee, the California Association of Counties had already registered its opposition to the measure, calling it an unfunded mandate. California is one of just two states that don’t contribute any funding to trial-level public defense, and the bill’s requirements would force counties with contract systems to significantly increase their public defense budgets.
Josh Schwartz, a researcher with the Wren Collective, a nonprofit organization advocating for criminal justice reform and a supporter of the proposed legislation, said an increase in spending on public defense could save the counties money in the long run. The flat-fee model, he said, “creates needless incarceration. People are in jail longer pre-trial, they are convicted at higher rates, and sentenced to longer sentences.”
“Most counties spend between four and seven times their indigent defense budget on incarceration,” he said. Investing more funding in public defenders “can yield much bigger savings down the line.”
The legislation stalled in the Senate Appropriations Committee, where the chair, Sen. Anna Caballero, said she would “have a hard time supporting the bill.” Rural counties, she said, “just don’t have the money.” Caballero’s district includes parts of Madera, Fresno and Merced — three counties where the Ciummo firm has contracts. The bill was put on hold until next year.
***
Fitzgerald is soft-spoken and smiles often. Before becoming a lawyer, he was a police officer in New Jersey. Like Barker and Ciummo, he had gone to law school to become a prosecutor. He interviewed with six or seven district attorneys’ offices, he said, before giving up on that dream and responding to a job posting from the Ciummo firm in 1991.
He said the firm’s critics often fail to differentiate it from flat-fee systems in which individual private attorneys each contract directly with the county. These lawyers get to keep every dollar they don’t spend on investigations and experts. The Ciummo firm’s attorneys earn annual salaries and have access to staff investigators. When they hire forensic experts and other specialists, the county covers the cost from a separate fund.
Fitzgerald said the firm’s low trial rate in Madera is the result of prosecutors offering reduced punishments in plea deals, and not an indication that defense attorneys are avoiding taking cases to a jury.
“The attorneys in Madera, they’re aggressive,” he said. “They’re not afraid to do trials.”
Their high caseloads, he said, do not prevent them from advocating for their clients. “Is it perfect? No. But our attorneys work very hard to make sure every client is adequately represented, no matter what the caseloads are.”
In his office in Madera, Fitzgerald keeps a framed illustration of all the characters from “The Godfather.” His favorite line from the movie belongs to Mafia boss Michael Corleone: “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.”
It’s what he pointed to when I asked him about the firm’s political contributions. For decades, it has donated to tough-on-crime candidates whose platforms seem at odds with the interests of the people the Ciummo lawyers represent in court.
Michael Fitzgerald at his law firm, Fitzgerald, Alvarez & Ciummo, in Madera on Oct. 20, 2025. Photos by Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local
The firm backed Frank Bigelow, a former Madera County supervisor, in his successful run for State Assembly and through several reelection campaigns. Bigelow co-authored a bill to increase punishments for petty theft and drug possession.
It also contributed to Anne Marie Schubert’s 2022 campaign for state attorney general, which was focused on repealing propositions 47 and 57, cornerstones of the criminal justice reform movement that reclassified certain drug and property crimes from felonies to misdemeanors and made it harder for prosecutors to charge juveniles in adult court. Schubert had previously pushed to expedite the time between conviction and execution in death penalty cases.
Fitzgerald called the donations “business decisions.”
“We donate mainly so if we make a phone call and we want to be heard about something, they’ll take our phone call,” he said. “Frank Bigelow was very good to us when he was on the Board of Supervisors here. He always voted for us, always supported our contracts.”
The firm has also donated to the campaigns of several area district attorneys.
“I think you should strive to get along with the opposition,” Fitzgerald said. “But when it gets between the lines, you fight tooth and nail for your client. I don’t think it compromises you at all because you get along with the DAs.”
Fitzgerald met Lisa Smittcamp, the Fresno district attorney, when she was a young prosecutor in Madera. The two had worked opposite each other and are still friends. He has donated to her campaigns and attends her fundraisers.
Smittcamp said she sees no difference in the quality of representation between Fresno’s institutional public defender’s office and the Ciummo firm.
“I have never heard somebody say that the Ciummo attorneys give cases away, or they’re not zealous advocates,” she said.
One of the firm’s partners, Antonio Alvarez, is widely praised as an effective attorney. A former client, John Diaz, said Alvarez frequently visited him in jail, investigated his case, and reached out to him years after he was convicted to let him know that a change in the law allowed him to petition the court for resentencing.
“He humanized me,” Diaz said.
Diaz had been assigned several other Ciummo attorneys before Alvarez, but said they “were just going through the motions.” He was in jail for years awaiting trial.
“If you got money here, you’re good. If you don’t have money, you’re flipping a coin,” he said.
***
Much of the effort to ban flat-fee contracts has focused on the ways in which the model discourages investigations, one of the most critical components of criminal defense.
Defense investigators review police reports, visit crime scenes, chase down video surveillance footage and interview witnesses — work that most attorneys are not trained to do. They often find evidence that challenges the prosecution’s case and affects the outcome of a trial or the terms of a plea deal.
A recent CalMatters investigation found that poor people accused of crimes in California are routinely sent to prison without anyone investigating the charges against them, significantly increasing the likelihood of wrongful convictions.
In Madera, where the Ciummo firm reported handling more than 6,000 cases last year, attorneys shared two full-time investigators. They were up against prosecutors who have 13 full-time investigators, in addition to the investigative powers of the Madera sheriff and two municipal police departments.
“A big part of the job of the public defender is to probe our investigation,” said Madera District Attorney Sally Moreno.
In April 2024, Moreno charged a 60-year-old man with the murder of his ex-girlfriend. After the man hired a private defense attorney from a neighboring county, the Madera prosecutors were overwhelmed by a barrage of legal motions.
“My lawyers were flabbergasted,” Moreno said. They were accustomed to dealing with the Ciummo attorneys.
“This is what defense lawyers do!” she told them.
The case confirmed Moreno’s suspicion that her younger lawyers were unprepared to handle an aggressive defense attorney. She said she had previously spoken to county officials about creating an institutional public defender office in Madera.
The defense investigator eventually found evidence that complicated the prosecution’s case, and Moreno dropped the charges. She said that’s how the system is supposed to work.
“Steel sharpens steel,” she said.
In Amador County, lawyers with the firm resolved more than 2,000 cases in 2023 and 2024. They used an investigator in nine of those cases, according to the firm’s case reports. That means the overwhelming majority of people convicted in Amador during that time never had an investigator test the evidence against them.
Defendants in those 2,000 cases frequently tried to fire their Ciummo attorneys by filing what’s known as a Marsden motion, arguing that their attorney was doing a bad job or had a conflict of interest. Most of these requests were denied, but their frequency is almost four times that of neighboring Tulare County, which has an institutional public defender office.
After CalMatters inquired about the apparent lack of investigations in Amador, Fitzgerald said the firm would hire an additional investigator to cover the area. But he also insisted the case reports were inaccurate, and that his attorneys had neglected to record the work of an investigator who currently splits her time between Amador and Calaveras counties.
“Any case that needs to be investigated is going to be investigated,” he said.
Early last year, Kristen Reid, a defense attorney and investigator, began working on the case of a Placer man who was convicted in 2009 of murdering his wife. Reid believed a new state law allowing people to contest convictions based on misleading or discredited forensic evidence could give him a second chance to prove his innocence.
When she opened the case files, she expected to find thousands of pages of police reports, witness testimonies and forensic records. But the defense attorneys in the case hadn’t asked for much of this evidence. As she made her way through the documents, she thought, “We have a much bigger problem with this case than junk science.”
It seemed to Reid that the two Ciummo attorneys representing the man “had been working for the DA, not the Public Defender,” she later wrote in a complaint to the California State Bar.
Court transcripts show that, in the months leading up to the trial, the judge repeatedly berated the lead attorney for failing to move forward with his investigation. He hadn’t interviewed key witnesses, filed basic motions or sent evidence for forensic testing.
The front entrance of the Fitzgerald, Alvarez & Ciummo law firm in Madera on Oct. 20, 2025. Photo by Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local
More than a year after the Ciummo firm got the case, the lead attorney asked the court to postpone the trial. He said his investigator had a heavy workload and hadn’t been able to devote much time to the case. The judge refused. He had already pushed back the date multiple times at the urging of the defense attorneys, and they had failed to make much progress.
“This case should have been a priority for the public defender’s office,” he said.
The attorney told the judge he would show up to court but wouldn’t participate. “I will (in) no way respond or argue or offer evidence or any such thing,” he said, according to the court transcript.
During the trial, the defense attorneys missed multiple opportunities to discredit law enforcement’s theory of the crime, Reid said. She obtained records through discovery showing that, weeks before the jury found the man guilty, the prosecution’s key forensic witness emailed one of the Ciummo attorneys to thank him for “taking it easy on me” during cross-examination. “I owe you,” he wrote.
That lawyer has since been disbarred. The other, Reid discovered, had been charged with domestic violence just two weeks before the trial and had multiple DUI cases on his record.
Reid has received help from several different Innocence Projects in her efforts to overturn the man’s conviction, but the odds are stacked against her. The U.S. Supreme Court has made it almost impossible for appellate courts to overturn convictions because a defense lawyer didn’t do their job.
“Once the bad thing happens,” Reid said, “there’s just no way out of it.”
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
