In addition, some of the lawyers have inflated their bills and charged county taxpayers for work they did not do.

Dade's top court officials said the findings took them completely by surprise.

Within two weeks, Rivkind changed the system again: Judges were ordered to peruse itemized bills more carefully. Certain bills would be audited. All bills had to be submitted within 30 days after cases concluded.

Three times in three years, Dade's top judicial officials changed the system. But one thing never changed: Court-appointed lawyers continue to make taxpayer money largely on the honor system.

Despite ample evidence of abuse, the system prevails for several key reasons:

* Judges refuse to hold lawyers accountable for their work -- despite the fact that they are earning public money.

* Judges still depend on getting campaign contributions from private court-appointed lawyers who appear in their courtrooms.

* County officials, reluctant to impose their will on the judges, have not initiated proper safeguards for the public money they pay to the lawyers.

* State officials, constrained by tight budgets, have failed to finance Dade's public defender's office adequately. That has resulted in massive case overloads with only the court- appointed lawyers available to pick up the slack.

Ironically, it was a landmark Florida case, Gideon vs. Wainwright, that forced governments to provide lawyers for the poor.

Clarence Earl Gideon was charged with breaking into a billiards hall. He argued that he could not afford to hire a lawyer, and he asked the state to provide him with one. The state refused, and he was convicted by a jury.

In 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Gideon's conviction and ruled that state governments must provide legal representation for anyone accused of a crime who cannot afford a lawyer. His story was chronicled by Anthony Lewis in the famous book, Gideon's Trumpet.

In response, state governments created public defender's offices -- relatively low-paid lawyers assigned to represent indigent defendants.

Private court-appointed lawyers came into being when the public defender's office had to drop out -- or, in courthouse lingo, "conflict out" -- of its cases for a variety of reasons.

For example, when two or more people are charged with the same crime, their interests and defense strategies conflict. When that occurs, a public defender would represent one defendant and a court-appointed lawyer would defend the other.

COURTHOUSE PATRONAGE
Judges decided who got what

As the number of criminal cases surged in Dade County in the 1980s, the number of conflicts surged as well.

Public defenders were not required to identify the conflict. A reason can be that the public defender's office is just too busy to handle the case. "An underfunding conflict, " Dade Public Defender Bennett Brummer called it.

The funding that did not go to the public defender's office went instead to the private lawyers.

The judges decided which private lawyers got the money. That assured a kinship between judges and lawyers, particularly in the clubby, politically charged atmosphere of an urban courthouse.

In Dade, those who benefited the most from the system were the products of it: former judges, former prosecutors, former assistant public defenders. With court appointments, the former members of the public sector would still earn public money -- but the checks would be much bigger.