What a shameful way that we, as a country, treat the most vulnerable among us. Yes, they are accused of crimes in this context. But accused is not supposed to equal convicted. They are supposed to go through a fair and impartial process which clearly does not happen in the vast majority of these cases. One would also think that as successful as the defender's office was in Aurora, attention would turn to reforming the police who are abusing the public which they supposedly serve.
Radley, is there a way to donate to public defender's offices? Something like a national organization devoted solely to helping provide competent defense to people who actually need it. I tend to like the Institue for Justice and the Pacific Legal Foundation, although they have their own areas of interest. I am wondering if there is a similar organization dedicated to public defense.
I strongly recommend that you research the past and present state of Oregon's broken public defense system. I hesitate even to call it a system, so poorly is it organized and operated. Right now individuals who have been charged with crimes are routinely being released for lack of a public defender to represent them.
Yet the best the now-retired Chief Justice of the Supreme Court could think of to do was ask the membership of the Oregon State Bar to pitch in. She had a dire conflict of interest when it came to seeking funding from the cheapskates in the legislature for indigent defense because that spending request competed with her requests to the same body to fund the courts. When the no-nonsense director of the state's public defense function refused to go along with the institutionalized incompetence he inherited when he took the job (at one point, a local judge ordered lawyers on his staff, whose jobs did not include serving as defense counsel and who were competent in that area of practice, to represent criminal defendants), the Chief Justice engineered his defenestration. He has since sued for wrongful termination. I hope he takes the state to the cleaners.
As it is, indigent defense is provided through a patchwork of defenders' offices and grossly underpaid and underemployed contract attorneys. The core of the problem is that the legislature has never been willing to fund indigent defense at the necessary levels. It is said that lawmakers from rural areas are unwilling to approve hourly fees for contract attorneys that are sufficient to cover the lawyers' substantial overhead and leave enough left over for them to earn an income comparable to that received by prosecutors and commensurate with their training, expertise and experience. That's because they and the rural yahoos they represent don't understand that the public defenders who work on contract won't be pocketing the full multi-hundred hourly rate. They're afraid they'll be voted out of office if they approve, say, an hourly fee of $250 or $300.
I also suspect that the senior attorneys (Boomers?) who control the local defender offices are obstructing reforms because they would lose the very lucrative arrangements they've engineered for themselves over the years.
In 2023 the legislature took a haphazard stab at reforms that did not get at the heart of the problem and so far have not brought about any relief in the public defender crisis.
For what it's worth, I was a member of the Oregon State Bar for 40 years. Thank heavens, I never had to do indigent defense. I retired from a job as house counsel almost 20 years ago.
Commenting late, but while I am impressed with Radley's reporting and certainly am convinced that the current system isn't working as intended, I'm not sure what I think the solution should be.
I confess that I'm skeptical that the answer is simply to put more resources into public defenders offices, which I think is implicitly what Radley is suggesting. While I believe that doing so would help some innocents folks, I also think it will make it harder to prosecute a lot of guilty folks, and I'm not sure that the result would end up being a net positive for the country. To use an (obviously extreme) example, I'm doubtful that the community was well served by O.J. getting the best defense that money could buy.
Meanwhile, the paragraph that most struck me from this piece was this one:
"The municipal public defender’s office takes a holistic approach to indigent defense, helping clients navigate not just criminal charges, but the secondary harm from an arrest, such eviction, custody problems, or losing a job. If we truly want to help people rehabilitate and get back on their feet, a holistic approach makes sense even for guilty people. But it’s even more important in a city where a lot of people seem to be charged with crimes on very little evidence."
I'm certainly supportive of an approach like this one and would be willing to put money into it. But I would also want to put money into making sure that the police have the resources to actually gather sufficient evidence to charge the right folks.
I'd like to see us move to a system where people who commit crimes are far more likely to get caught (including for "less serious" crimes like shoplifting) and the guilty are far more likely to suffer meaningful consequences for committing these crimes, while also being a system that is far more focused on restorative justice and rehabilitation than simple punishment.
I'd be much inclined to put resources into a holistic solution like that versus one that simply better funds public defenders.
What a shameful way that we, as a country, treat the most vulnerable among us. Yes, they are accused of crimes in this context. But accused is not supposed to equal convicted. They are supposed to go through a fair and impartial process which clearly does not happen in the vast majority of these cases. One would also think that as successful as the defender's office was in Aurora, attention would turn to reforming the police who are abusing the public which they supposedly serve.
Radley, is there a way to donate to public defender's offices? Something like a national organization devoted solely to helping provide competent defense to people who actually need it. I tend to like the Institue for Justice and the Pacific Legal Foundation, although they have their own areas of interest. I am wondering if there is a similar organization dedicated to public defense.
I strongly recommend that you research the past and present state of Oregon's broken public defense system. I hesitate even to call it a system, so poorly is it organized and operated. Right now individuals who have been charged with crimes are routinely being released for lack of a public defender to represent them.
Yet the best the now-retired Chief Justice of the Supreme Court could think of to do was ask the membership of the Oregon State Bar to pitch in. She had a dire conflict of interest when it came to seeking funding from the cheapskates in the legislature for indigent defense because that spending request competed with her requests to the same body to fund the courts. When the no-nonsense director of the state's public defense function refused to go along with the institutionalized incompetence he inherited when he took the job (at one point, a local judge ordered lawyers on his staff, whose jobs did not include serving as defense counsel and who were competent in that area of practice, to represent criminal defendants), the Chief Justice engineered his defenestration. He has since sued for wrongful termination. I hope he takes the state to the cleaners.
As it is, indigent defense is provided through a patchwork of defenders' offices and grossly underpaid and underemployed contract attorneys. The core of the problem is that the legislature has never been willing to fund indigent defense at the necessary levels. It is said that lawmakers from rural areas are unwilling to approve hourly fees for contract attorneys that are sufficient to cover the lawyers' substantial overhead and leave enough left over for them to earn an income comparable to that received by prosecutors and commensurate with their training, expertise and experience. That's because they and the rural yahoos they represent don't understand that the public defenders who work on contract won't be pocketing the full multi-hundred hourly rate. They're afraid they'll be voted out of office if they approve, say, an hourly fee of $250 or $300.
I also suspect that the senior attorneys (Boomers?) who control the local defender offices are obstructing reforms because they would lose the very lucrative arrangements they've engineered for themselves over the years.
In 2023 the legislature took a haphazard stab at reforms that did not get at the heart of the problem and so far have not brought about any relief in the public defender crisis.
For what it's worth, I was a member of the Oregon State Bar for 40 years. Thank heavens, I never had to do indigent defense. I retired from a job as house counsel almost 20 years ago.
Commenting late, but while I am impressed with Radley's reporting and certainly am convinced that the current system isn't working as intended, I'm not sure what I think the solution should be.
I confess that I'm skeptical that the answer is simply to put more resources into public defenders offices, which I think is implicitly what Radley is suggesting. While I believe that doing so would help some innocents folks, I also think it will make it harder to prosecute a lot of guilty folks, and I'm not sure that the result would end up being a net positive for the country. To use an (obviously extreme) example, I'm doubtful that the community was well served by O.J. getting the best defense that money could buy.
Meanwhile, the paragraph that most struck me from this piece was this one:
"The municipal public defender’s office takes a holistic approach to indigent defense, helping clients navigate not just criminal charges, but the secondary harm from an arrest, such eviction, custody problems, or losing a job. If we truly want to help people rehabilitate and get back on their feet, a holistic approach makes sense even for guilty people. But it’s even more important in a city where a lot of people seem to be charged with crimes on very little evidence."
I'm certainly supportive of an approach like this one and would be willing to put money into it. But I would also want to put money into making sure that the police have the resources to actually gather sufficient evidence to charge the right folks.
I'd like to see us move to a system where people who commit crimes are far more likely to get caught (including for "less serious" crimes like shoplifting) and the guilty are far more likely to suffer meaningful consequences for committing these crimes, while also being a system that is far more focused on restorative justice and rehabilitation than simple punishment.
I'd be much inclined to put resources into a holistic solution like that versus one that simply better funds public defenders.