An increase in crime in some counties and nearly two years of the global pandemic have contributed to a strain on Oregon’s criminal justice system. The larger issue, public defenders argue, is a public defense system that has long been under-staffed, overworked and inefficient. “We do not have a sufficient number of attorneys willing to do public defense work to handle the number of cases that we have in Oregon,” said Steven Singer, who last month started as executive director of Oregon Public Defense Commission, the state agency responsible for public defense.
The Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution affords all defendants the right to effective counsel. Last fall, courts across the state began seeing an uptick in the number of defendants who didn’t have legal representation: their constitutional guarantee. In December, there were more than 60 people charged with crimes who didn’t have a defense attorney.
The Office of Public Defense Services’ current two-year budget is $440 million. The agency relies on independent providers, nonprofit public defense organizations and groups of attorneys, known as consortiums, to provide services.
Tristen Edwards, a public defender at Metropolitan Public Defender, said attorneys can’t effectively do the work they’ve signed up to do. “I know so many people from my law school who are in law school now, other attorneys that I know in the community, who would love to do this work, who want to become public defenders,” Edwards said. “It is just not a sustainable and feasible profession.”
Oregon attorneys say the current lack of public defenders is concerning because it comes at the beginning of a new contracting cycle, when there would typically be enough defense attorneys to take indigent clients. A full time public defense attorney was limited to 460 misdemeanor or 168 felonies, per year. Several executive directors that run defense nonprofits around Oregon still described those case numbers as being extremely high. A study by the American Bar Association that’s expected to be released later this month is likely to recommend far lower case numbers.
