“We are broken:” A COVID-19 court backlog has pushed Oregon’s public defense system to the brink. Criminal cases are being dismissed and defendants are going without attorneys. States from Maine to New Mexico have similar problems.
“We’re overwhelmed. The pandemic is exposing all the problems that we have, the under-resourcing and the underfunding, and it just hit a breaking point,” said Carl Macpherson, executive director of Metropolitan Public Defender, a large nonprofit public defender firm in Portland that temporarily stopped taking new cases when its attorneys couldn’t keep up.
“If you do not have a lawyer, then your constitutional rights are being violated from the very beginning,” he said. “But if there’s no attorney to appoint, what do you expect them to do?”The crisis in Oregon, while extreme, reflects a nationwide reckoning on indigent defense, as courts seek to absorb a pandemic backlog of criminal cases with public defender systems that have long been underfunded and understaffed.
“This is America’s dirty little secret: Thousands of people in courtrooms all across the country go to jail every single day without having talked to a lawyer,” said Jon Mosher, deputy director of the Sixth Amendment Center, which studies state public defender systems,“We see it all over the place. It happens in upstate New York, it happens in Mississippi. It’s everywhere.”released in January found the state has 31% of the public defenders it needs.
Prosecutors can get an indictment from a grand jury when cases are dismissed for lack of a public defender and police will re-arrest the alleged perpetrator, but that’s small consolation to victims. A working group of all three branches of state government will convene this month to begin tackling deeper reforms.
“We’re working really hard,” she said. “We very much appreciate the attention and the help that all the branches of government want to provide, because we haven’t always gotten that.” “This is the scariest thing they have going on in their life,” he said. “It’s hard when those people, you can tell, don’t think you’re giving their case the time and attention it deserves — and I feel that way too, sometimes.”
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