St. Lawrence County is receiving more than half a million dollars to provide faster legal representation for poor people charged with crimes.

The county has been selected for a $587,000 grant from a $12 million state “Counsel-at-First-Appearance” program, to be shared between 25 counties.

"This grant will go a long way in making sure that many people who have been arrested may remain free and treated as innocent until proven guilty,” said County Public Defender Stephen D. Button, who prepared the grant.

William Leahy, head of the state Office of Indigent Legal Services, estimates that the counties participating in the program account for more than 50 percent of the arraignments held annually in the state outside of New York City. The total number of defendants unrepresented during first court appearances, usually arraignments, is not known, public defender’s office staffers said.

The grant is historic because “it is the very first time that the state of New York has provided funding to counties to provide counsel at a defendant's first court appearance; and also because it is the first flow of additional state funding to localities under the auspices of the Office of Indigent Legal Services, above and beyond the level of state assistance that had been provided before the creation of the Office and the Indigent Legal Services Board," said Leahy.

The grant should also help relieve pressure on the county jail “by reducing housing expenses, transportation costs of the incarcerated for the sheriff's road patrol and strain due to increased paperwork on the court system," said Button.

“We are delighted at this announcement and proud of our indigent defense team for looking for new ways to fund a service that has increasingly become a major cost to our taxpayers,” said County Administrator Karen St. Hilaire.

These grants are designed for the challenges small, rural counties face in upholding an obligation to provide counsel to criminal defendants, according to Jonathan Gradess, director of the state Defender’s Association.

Criminal defendants are constitutionally guaranteed a lawyer, according to the unanimous Supreme Court ruling in Gideon v. Wainwright.

“St. Lawrence is a large county with an understaffed, overworked, under-resourced public defender office,” said Gradess.