Newly back in town, I’ve been making the rounds visiting people, finding out what’s going on and who is working on what.

Today brought me to an hour long visit with St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce.

Lots of interesting stuff about connecting with kids, consumer fraud against the elderly, citizen follow up to incidents of crime and community attitudes toward prosecutors and police. More on that later.

Ms. Joyce commented on today’s editorial about legislation that’s moving quickly through the Legislature that would prop up the public defender system by putting clients on waiting lists and rendering judges powerless to appoint defenders to represent prisoners seeking post conviction relief.

As president of the Missouri Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, she noted that there is a broad consensus — especially in rural communities — that resources could be put to better use by limiting public defenders role in post-conviction matters. These, after all, are proceedings brought after the criminal case and all appeals are exhausted. Public defenders could limit their representations to the potentially meritorious cases without undermining the office’s core mission of providing good and adequate representation in criminal cases.

That’s a fair point, one managers in public defender system make themselves. The shortcoming of the law is not so much that it seeks tailor the public defenders mission in such matters, it’s that it ignores the reality that these petitions still need to be handled and screened for potential merit — and that takes resources too.

Even more interesting was Ms. Joyce’s thoughts on how to reach consensus on potential remedies to the problems confronting the public defender system.

She believes in performance audits as a means of clearing the clutter and making incisive judgments about how well government offices function and how to make them function more efficiently and effectively — not just the public defender system, but all public agencies, including her own.