It is difficult to read the news in Oregon today without stumbling on yet another article about the purported "crisis" in public defender services in Oregon. These poorly researched articles uniformly regurgitate unverified assertions presented by public defense activists — that indigent defense services are starved for money to the point they must decline to fulfill their state contracts for services.
That position is nothing more than a tactical fraud, perpetrated by indigent defense providers, and designed to extort more and more taxpayer money for what is currently an extraordinarily well-funded and bloated bureaucracy that is doing less actual work than it has in decades.
Here are the facts:
First, Oregon's public defenders are facing the lowest number of charged cases in at least 20 years, and more likely the least number of cases in 50 or more years. According to the Office of the Oregon State Trial Court Administrator, 20 years ago in 2001, 104,266 criminal cases were filed in Oregon's circuit court justice system, cases requiring the services of defense attorneys. By 2017, that number had fallen to 80,838. Last year, only 59,073 cases were filed, a reduction of 43% over 20 years. It's difficult to comprehend how this bureaucracy can claim to be overworked while enjoying a 43% reduction in its workload.
The argument seems to be that pandemic court delays temporarily increased caseloads. This is completely false, according to the numbers provided by the state trial court administrator. Since the pandemic began, active criminal caseloads in Oregon have actually been reduced by 10%, from 28,297 active cases at the end of 2019 to 25,484 as of today. And tellingly, the exact same number of cases are being handled by prosecutors across the state, whose numbers are far smaller than public defenders, but who seem to be able to handle them without demanding the legislature hand over more money to them forever.
Second, and perhaps most importantly, indigent defense services in Oregon are funded at, or close to, the highest per capita rate in the nation. The two most recent comprehensive state-by-state studies of indigent defense services were published by the American Bar Association in 2010 and by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2012. The ABA study demonstrates that Oregon had the fourth highest per capita spending on indigent defense in the nation, behind only Alaska, Nevada, and Massachusetts. The BJS study duplicated that result for the over thirty states that, like Oregon, fund their public defense services through centralized state funding.
Yes, these studies are a decade old, but since that time Oregon has increased its annual indigent defense expenditures by approximately 150%, so Oregonians can rest assured that we still have one of the most generously funded programs in the nation, if not the absolute most generous program.
It’s time that Oregonians stop simply accepting at face value the propaganda disseminated by the indigent defense lobby. Oregon has bent over backwards to provide the best funded indigent defense services in the nation. But it's never enough to satisfy some people.
Norm Frink is a former Chief Deputy Multnomah County District Attorney.
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