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08-05-2022, 01:04 PM
By GILLIAN FLACCUS
54 minutes ago
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An acute shortage of public defenders means that at any given time at least several hundred low-income criminal defendants don’t have legal representation, sometimes in serious felony cases that could put them away for years.
Judges have ...... threatened to hold the state public defenders office in contempt of court for failing to provide attorneys.
......
“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.
“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.
Public defenders warned that the system was on the brink of collapse before the pandemic. In 2019, some attorneys even picketed outside the state Capitol for higher pay and reduced caseloads. But lawmakers didn’t act and months later, COVID-19 shut down the courts. Now, the system is “buckling before our eyes,” said Kelly Simon, legal director for the Oregon American Civil Liberties Union
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“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
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“We see it all over the place. It happens in upstate New York, it happens in Mississippi. It’s everywhere.”
......
“It’s horrifying. I don’t I don’t want to mince words about this. I am not going to make excuses for this. It’s awful. I think it’s unconstitutional and I think it’s incredibly problematic,” said state Sen. Elizabeth Steiner Hayward, who co-chairs the state Legislature’s Ways and Means committee. ”That being said, we can’t manufacture attorneys out of thin air.”
Much better to read long report at: https://apnews.com/article/covid-health-...9808c46d8c
54 minutes ago
......
An acute shortage of public defenders means that at any given time at least several hundred low-income criminal defendants don’t have legal representation, sometimes in serious felony cases that could put them away for years.
Judges have ...... threatened to hold the state public defenders office in contempt of court for failing to provide attorneys.
......
“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.
“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.
Public defenders warned that the system was on the brink of collapse before the pandemic. In 2019, some attorneys even picketed outside the state Capitol for higher pay and reduced caseloads. But lawmakers didn’t act and months later, COVID-19 shut down the courts. Now, the system is “buckling before our eyes,” said Kelly Simon, legal director for the Oregon American Civil Liberties Union
......
“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
......
“We see it all over the place. It happens in upstate New York, it happens in Mississippi. It’s everywhere.”
......
“It’s horrifying. I don’t I don’t want to mince words about this. I am not going to make excuses for this. It’s awful. I think it’s unconstitutional and I think it’s incredibly problematic,” said state Sen. Elizabeth Steiner Hayward, who co-chairs the state Legislature’s Ways and Means committee. ”That being said, we can’t manufacture attorneys out of thin air.”
Much better to read long report at: https://apnews.com/article/covid-health-...9808c46d8c
