A Gainesville attorney who serves on a state indigent defense council has fired back at a critical report from a legislative oversight committee and called on the committee’s chairman to resign.

Wyc Orr this week sent a blistering open letter of rebuttal to a report issued by state Sen. Preston Smith, R-Rome.

The report from Smith’s Georgia Public Defender Standards Council Legislative Oversight Committee said the system of providing attorneys for poor criminal defendants had been “knee-capped by ... crusaders who have the purist ideological zest of an ivory-tower professor without any understanding of practical realities required to actually manage a system with scarce resources.”

The report goes on to say a Fulton County judge “usurp(ed) the authority of the legislature” when he last month ordered the state to come up with money to pay attorneys handling criminal appeals that pose conflicts of interest to public defenders.

“Our courts and the state bar have decided that people who commit crimes in Georgia are deserving of special treatment, regardless of the cost to other critical needs of the taxpayers,” Smith’s report said.

Smith suggests in the report that the costs of paying for conflict cases be handled by the counties, not the state. Currently the state funds about 40 percent of indigent defense, using money collected from court fees and other court-related add-ons. Georgia’s counties still use tax dollars to pay about 60 percent of the costs of providing lawyers for poor people accused of crimes.

Orr, who is serving his second term on the 15-member Georgia Public Defender Standards Council, called the report a “political tract, a wide-ranging rant and diatribe, and a slur against our state’s courts and the State Bar of Georgia for simply performing the roles they are assigned by our judicial and constitutional systems.”

“There are three governmental branches in Georgia, not one or two,” Orr wrote.

The state collects about $43 million annually in court fees and add-ons for indigent defense, but the money goes back into Georgia’s general fund.

Orr said some $23 million collected from those fees over the past four years have not been spent on indigent defense.

“Your ‘report’ attempts to divert attention from this fact by once again pleading a ‘historic revenue shortfall,’ and again closed-mindedly protesting that ‘often judges tend to be concerned with fair trials without adequate regard to cost consideration,’ ” Orr wrote.

Orr said Smith should resign from the committee and if he does not, Orr will ask Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle, R-Chestnut Mountain, to remove him.

“The views and prejudices which so thoroughly dominate this ‘report’ disqualify you from serving on the Legislative Oversight Committee, much less chairing it,” Orr wrote.

Smith did not return two phone messages left at his Senate office and an e-mail seeking comment Thursday.

Orr said Thursday he was “not holding his breath,” that Smith would resign. He said he had not heard back from the senator, who received the letter Wednesday. The Georgia Public Defender Standards Council has a regular meeting today in Atlanta.

“My letter is an effort to counter some politically based charges that are very adverse to the best interests of indigent defense,” Orr said.

Orr said he felt the legislature was moving back toward the system used prior to 2003, when counties funded all of the indigent defense budget and some did a poor job of providing public defenders.

“They are slowly dismantling the system, and they are pretty far along with it,” Orr said.