Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon in 2014 (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post) 
 
 Fed up with what they say is “reprehensible” underfunding, Missouri public defenders are calling out their governor by forcing the man they blame for a lack of resources to take a case of his own. 
 
 The state’s top public defender laid out his grievances in a letter to Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon: A vetoed bill that would have lightened public defenders’ caseloads. Repeated budget cuts. Unfairly withholding money allotted to the office. 
 
 Using a power granted to him in a single line of state law, Missouri’s top public defender appointed Nixon as attorney for a central Missouri man charged with assault. But the decision has little to do with the man’s case — it’s an attention-grabbing cry for help in a state where public defenders have long said they are overworked and underfunded. 
 
 “Given the extraordinary circumstances that compel me to entertain any and all avenues for relief, it strikes me that I should begin with the one attorney in the state who not only created this problem, but is in a unique position to address it,” Michael Barrett, director of the Missouri State Public Defender System, wrote in a letter to the governor. 
 
 Missouri law allows the director of the public defender’s office to appoint a member of the state bar — any member — to represent someone who can’t afford a private lawyer. In theory, Barrett said, the law was created so that people’s constitutional right to a defense could be fulfilled even during hard times. 
 
 For the public defender’s office, he said, that hard time is happening right now. 
 
 “When you’re in dire straits, you have to use all the tools available to you,” he told the Post. 
 
 [[I’m a public defender. It’s impossible for me to do a good job representing my clients.]] 
 
 As far as Barrett knows, it’s the first time anyone has called upon a governor to serve as a public defender. It may seem extreme, he said, but it’s necessary to bring attention to what he calls a “reprehensible” lack of funding. 
 
 Despite a $4.5 million budget increase granted by the Missouri legislature in June — much less than the $23.1 million requested by the public defender’s office — the office doesn’t have enough money to meet costs, Barrett said. Certainly not enough to hire the 270 additional attorneys the state needs, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 
 
 Barrett hadn’t heard from Nixon by late Wednesday night, and the governor did not respond to requests for comment from The Post or any other media outlet. 
 
 In Missouri, public defenders often juggle more than a hundred cases at a time, Barrett said. And when a colleague leaves (the office has a 15 percent turnover rate) their caseload is distributed to those who remain. In the past year, the office’s 376 attorneys handled upward of 82,000 cases — an increase of almost 12 percent over 2014, Barrett said. 
 
 The workload causes them to spend far less time on each case than is recommended by the American Bar Association. For example, the association recommends attorneys spend about 12 hours on each misdemeanor case. On average, Missouri public defenders spend two. 
 
 But at the center of all the funding and policy arguments are tens of thousands of low-income people who are shorted on their constitutional right to legal counsel, Barrett said. 
 
 “The only thing that binds us as Americans is what is afforded us under the Bill of Rights,” Barrett said. “People may not have good schools, good jobs or basic necessities. But they are afforded liberty. It’s my job to make sure that before that liberty is taken away they are afforded a competent defense.” 
 
 Low-income people charged with crimes — who are disproportionately people of color — bear the brunt of the problem when public defenders are forced to do more with less, according to a study by the Justice Policy Institute. When court-appointed lawyers don’t have enough time to spend on with cases, those who can’t afford a private lawyer wait longer for trial and get longer prison sentences and harsher plea deals. 
 
 It’s what some advocates call “assembly-line justice:” handling each case in the most cost- and time-effective manner at the expense of pursuing what is best for the accused. 
 
 It’s unknown how (or whether) Nixon will handle the case. 
 
 And the man whom the governor is expected to represent? 
 
 “I need to track the guy down and let him know what’s coming,” Barrett said. ||||| A young woman accused a classmate of sexual assault, and that is when she says her family came under attack. It got so bad, the family says they were forced to move from their Missouri town. 
 
 A young woman accused a classmate of sexual assault, and that is when she says her family came under attack. It got so bad, the family says they were forced to move from their Missouri town. 
 
 The Missouri Attorney General's office has no power to reopen a Maryville rape case, a spokeswoman said Tuesday, despite the pleas of a mother who says justice was denied when prosecutors dropped charges against teenage boys her 14-year-old daughter said sexually assaulted her and a 13-year-old friend. 
 
 The Missouri Attorney General's office has no power to reopen a northwest Missouri rape case, a spokeswoman said Tuesday, despite the pleas of a mother who says justice was denied when prosecutors dropped 
 
 Nodaway County Prosecutor Robert Rice asked a judge to appoint a special prosecutor to looking into the alleged sexual assault case that put Maryville, MO, in the national spotlight. 
 
 Rice defended his previous actions but said, because the victim appeared on CNN saying she would testify, the time is right to appoint a special prosecutor to re-examine the case. 
 
 "Until that time, the witnesses never told me that they were willing to cooperate and testify after they invoked their 5th Amendment right in a deposition under oath," he said. "They understood that when they at that time invoked their 5th Amendment right, that by doing so was going to force the dismissal of the case, they understood that." 
 
 The case is sealed so KCTV5 can't independently check the records, but the prosecutor says he did everything by the book. 
 
 "It's important to me that the public confidence in our criminal justice system be upheld," Rice said. 
 
 
 
 Following his 5 p.m. press conference, Greg McDaniel, the city manager for Maryville, said officials with the city support Rice's decision to seek a special prosecutor to review evidence in the case. McDaniel said that, although the case fell under county jurisdiction, the city has received a great deal of negative attention about the charges being dropped. 
 
 "Every day that goes by without further judicial action or explanation is detrimental to the lives and livelihood of the citizens of Maryville," McDaniel read from a pre-prepared statement. "This was an unfortunate incident that cast a shadow over our community." 
 
 The city and the prosecutor all said that they hope an independent review of the facts will allow high emotions by people throughout the country to subside as well as healing for all people involved. 
 
 After the prosecutor spoke, the mother of one of the accused teens stepped up to the podium, calling for an end to the harassment of people from Maryville. She said the backlash that Maryville residents are getting from all the attention has got to stop. 
 
 "It's not fair to those people that have no relationship to the case but, because they're from a small town, they're being threatened and that needs to stop," she said before abruptly walking away. 
 
 Earlier in the day, state Sen. Kurt Schaefer suggested Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster could open an investigation into the alleged sexual assault in northwest Missouri. 
 
 Schaefer said that an independent review of the evidence is needed after the Nodaway County prosecutor dropped charges against teenagers accused in a sexual assault of two younger girls. 
 
 One boy was accused of sexually assaulting 14-year-old Daisy Coleman, a freshman at Maryville High School at the time, during a January 2012 party, and another was accused of recording it on his phone. 
 
 According to police records, she snuck out of her house with a 13-year-old friend and went to hang out with the older boys from school. Daisy says she was handed alcohol and that's the last thing she remembers. Her mother said she found her lying on the family's front lawn the next morning in below-freezing temperatures. 
 
 Prosecutors say the accusers refused to cooperate; Coleman's family disagreed. 
 
 The attorney for the accused 17-year-old released a statement on his behalf. In it, it he says there were inconsistencies in Daisy's testimony and that her mother admitted her daughter does not always tell the truth, which is why the misdemeanor charge of child endangerment was dismissed. 
 
 Click here to read the entire statement from the attorney. 
 
 
 
 Schaefer is a Republican running for attorney general. Koster is a Democrat who plans to run for governor in 2016. 
 
 Koster's office has said it cannot intervene unless a local prosecutor or court asks him to do so. 
 
 Schaefer cited a Missouri law allowing subpoenas for witnesses or information to be provided to the attorney general regarding sexual offenses. That law only applies when the venue of the crime is in question. 
 
 The website for Nodaway County has been taken down because of security concerns. 
 
 The online activist group Anonymous on Monday released a statement criticizing the decision not to prosecute the two 17-year-old boys. 
 
 Nodaway County Clerk Beth Walker says the county's site was taken down Monday for safety. 
 
 The web hosting company, Midwest Data Center in Rock Port, said in a statement there were concerns the server would be overused and a risk the website would be defaced. 
 
 The Associated Press does not generally name victims of sexual assault, but is naming Daisy because she and her mother have been granting public interviews about the case. The AP is not naming the boys because there is no longer an active criminal case against them. 
 
 Copyright 2013 KCTV (Meredith Corp.) and The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
– Missouri's top public defender says his office is so overworked that he has had to assign a case to a lawyer who can do something about the problem: Gov. Jay Nixon. Michael Barrett says he assigned the assault case to the Democratic governor under a rule that allows him to assign cases to "any member of the state bar of Missouri" in extraordinary circumstances, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. "It strikes me that I should begin with the one attorney in the state who not only created this problem, but is in a unique position to address it," says Barrett, who complains that Missouri ranks 49 out of 50 states for public defender funding and that the system's lawyers now have to sometimes deal with more than 200 cases at a time. Barrett says that a recent $1 million funding increase was nowhere near enough to hire the hundreds of extra attorneys the system needs, and the case overload is depriving low-income defendants of their rights. "The only thing that binds us as Americans is what is afforded us under the Bill of Rights," he tells the Washington Post. "People may not have good schools, good jobs, or basic necessities. But they are afforded liberty," he says. "It's my job to make sure that before that liberty is taken away they are afforded a competent defense." The governor plans to fight the appointment: A spokesman says it is "well established" that the public defender doesn't have the authority to appoint private counsel, especially when the counsel does not consent, the Post-Dispatch reports.