Oregon's public defender system has shown cracks for years, but a post-pandemic glut of delayed cases is exposing shocking constitutional landmines
Carl Macpherson, executive director at Metropolitan Public Defender, examines the file in a double murder case that was recently pushed back for trial in his office in Portland, Ore., on May 5, 2022. Macpherson says his firm of 90 public defenders recently stopped taking certain types of new criminal cases for a month in two local courts because they had so many cases that the attorneys were violating their ethical obligations to clients.
“It just became abundantly clear that we are broken. You cannot do your job when you have 130 open felony cases per attorney,” Macpherson said. 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. From New England to New Mexico to Wisconsin, states are struggling to keep public defender services running amid an onslaught of cases and attorney departures.
"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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