Thursday, Democratic Speaker of the House Dan Rayfield said they would be bringing legislation to make that system work.
he鈥檚 hopeful the parties will be able to craft bipartisan legislation on housing, homelessness and public safety 鈥渇rom defense attorneys to district attorneys, to our rank and file law enforcement, because they all need to be supported.
Carl Macpherson, who runs the nonprofit Metropolitan Public Defense, says the shortage of public defenders is a crisis. He told 鈥淭hink Out Loud鈥� that an this year by the American Bar Association, which showed the , only confirmed previous findings that the situation is unconstitutional and unethical.
Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt is among the many DAs that are seeing the downstream effects of the shortage. He , and recently began because there simply was no one to represent the defendants, preventing the criminal cases from legally proceeding.
鈥淭his is not a public defender crisis,鈥� Macpherson said. 鈥漈his is a total public safety system failure.鈥�
Part of the problem, he said, is an increasing number of people who are entering the system because of a lack of other services, like mental health and substance abuse treatment. Also, the case loads are so high and the pay so low that more and more public defenders are quitting this specialty area of law altogether.
鈥淲e have the greatest disparity in the United States that I have found between public defense pay and prosecutor pay in Multnomah County and Washington County where the prosecutors are making two to three times what the attorneys make at our office,鈥� Macpherson said.
Attracting new lawyers to replace the ones they lose is hard, he says. And those that do choose to begin their career in public defense have to be trained and only slowly develop the capacity to take on the increasing numbers of caseloads.
Schmidt acknowledges the gap in pay between defense and prosecuting attorneys and says it鈥檚 among the areas that needs to be addressed to make a meaningful difference.
The lack of public defenders means that too often he has to tell alleged victims and their families that their case has been dismissed.
鈥淚t鈥檚 one of the hardest conversations that we鈥檙e having almost on a daily basis between our victims advocates and our attorneys,鈥� Schmidt said.
And it鈥檚 begun to affect the way they approach prosecuting cases, especially in the last couple of years.
鈥淚f the case is dismissed, we can still bring it back, but that means we have to go through the grand jury again,鈥� Schmidt said. 鈥淲e have to call victims and witnesses and police officers to testify again, and then a warrant will go out for an individual鈥檚 arrest, effectively making the police officers arrest the same person twice for the crime.鈥�
Schmidt says he sometimes decides to hold some cases back temporarily while they try to spread them out through the system.
鈥淚t鈥檚 not apparent to me that help is on the way,鈥� Schmidt said. 鈥淎nd I think the only thing that I can do at this point is to raise awareness in the community that this is a true threat to public safety.鈥�
Schmidt and Macpherson agree that on some level it鈥檚 a very simple problem: There are more cases than attorneys.
Schmidt says there are only two remedies.
鈥淵ou either have less cases or you have more attorneys that are able to do the work. We already have done as much as we can to resolve as many cases as we can. There aren鈥檛 any other ways for us to reduce the number of cases coming into the system,鈥� Schmidt said.
鈥淪o at this point, the only way that we can do this is to get more people to do the work, which means more attorneys who are able to take on defense cases. That鈥檚 the kind of help that we need immediately 鈥� and it means more money, more taxpayer money going to public defense.鈥�
Metropolitan Public Defender executive director Carl Macpherson says clearly the system as it currently stands isn鈥檛 working for anyone. He鈥檚 been the victim of a number of crimes himself, from property crimes to having a gun pulled on him.
鈥淲hat victims want to know is really two things,鈥� said Macpherson. 鈥淥ne: 鈥榃hy me?鈥� And number two: 鈥楬ow can this be prevented from happening to somebody else?鈥� And what I know is that the criminal legal system doesn鈥檛 answer either of those questions, and does nothing for the person that causes the harm to actually help them.鈥�
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