SALEM - Area lawyers, frustrated by the Legislature's failure to restore funding for legal services to the poor, are refusing to take new cases in protest.

Their concern: What's left in the budget for the Committee for Public Counsel Services won't be enough to pay their bills by the time the cases are resolved, a process that usually takes about six months. That's what happened last spring.

Gov. Mitt Romney cut $13 million from the budget this year, and the Legislature failed to restore it.

That has left judges in local courts scrambling to find lawyers willing to represent indigent defendants facing arraignment and bail hearings. An unknown number of those defendants could be without any representation for the foreseeable future.

In Salem District Court yesterday, just one local lawyer was willing to accept an appointment to represent an indigent man arrested and being held on bail, but only for the bail hearing. In Lynn District Court, lawyer David Hallinan, who runs the local bar advocate program, and Lawrence McGuire, who runs the public defenders office in Essex County, were left to deal alone with the day's cases.

A similar situation exists in Lawrence District Court, where the two lawyers were on their own Wednesday.

"I can't tell you how many courts I've been in," said Hallinan, who also spent time in the Lynn and Salem juvenile courts this week.

Legislators had until midnight yesterday to override Romney's budget cut. When they didn't, lawyers in Essex County started calling Hallinan, telling him they will not accept new cases, given the uncertainty over whether they'll be paid for their work.

The governor argues there's not enough money to fully fund the program.

Rates at issue

Representation for people deemed too poor to afford a lawyer - generally someone earning less than 150 percent of the poverty level - is provided in two ways in Massachusetts.

The state's Committee for Public Counsel Services maintains a public defender program, with staff attorneys who work directly for the agency and handle serious felonies, such as armed robberies and drug-trafficking cases. In Essex County, those staff attorneys are handling, on average, 40 to 50 cases at any given time.

The state also contracts with a number of smaller "bar advocate" programs, which provide private lawyers to work in local courts, where they are available to represent defendants facing jail time.

The salaries paid to public defenders, and the hourly rates paid by the state to private lawyers, have been a long-standing source of contention for lawyers, who have been lobbying for higher rates for several years.

CPCS attorney Anthony Benedetti said his agency has been staggering under the increased demands for representation, coupled with budget cuts and a 10 percent reduction in the number of staff attorneys over the past three years.

Meanwhile, there is also an increasing need for lawyers to represent people already convicted of crimes but facing sex offender classification hearings or commitments as sexually dangerous persons.

And a third of the agency's resources go toward representing people who are not charged with a crime, but who are mentally ill and facing a court-ordered commitment, who might have children removed from homes by the Department of Social Service, or who are facing a Child in Need of Services petition.

"This is a public safety issue," said Benedetti, who believes judges might be inclined to release people who have been held in jail without the ability to talk to a lawyer, a violation of the Constitution.

Third-lowest in U.S.

Public defender salaries start at $35,000 a year. Rates paid to private lawyers who take on indigent clients have remained at $30 an hour for district court cases and $39 for superior court cases for more than a decade. While those hourly rates may sound high, they're a fraction of the $100 to $200 an hour most lawyers in Essex County charge, and barely enough to cover a salary plus the cost of maintaining an office and paying for malpractice insurance.

In fact, they're the third-lowest rates in the nation, Benedetti said.

The low rates and salaries are forcing lawyers to leave the program, he said.

The public defender's office has urged higher hourly rates of $60 for district court cases, $90 for superior court cases and $120 for murder cases. The governor's office has pitched a flat-rate program that would give lawyers a set amount for a certain number of cases.

Randall Bethune, a Danvers lawyer who signed up for the Essex County Bar Advocates program just two months ago, had been scheduled to work as a bar advocate yesterday in Salem District Court. But when he learned of the state budget situation and the protest by other lawyers, he decided not to accept new cases yesterday.

"It's awful," said Bethune. "It's very disheartening."