The right to a fair trial is fundamental to the American system of justice. But Oregon is failing in its obligation to fulfill that right.

The fundamental problem with Oregon’s Public Defense system is that we simply do not have enough public defenders. A study this year by the American Bar Association puts our current staff at 31% of what we’d need for them to adequately serve their clients. That’s a shortage of just under 1,300 public defenders.

We’ve got roughly 1,300 people in various parts of the criminal justice system with no representation at all, including more than a dozen in custody facing serious felony charges. That’s on top of the delays people see throughout the system in moving their cases along. This is an unacceptable failure of our system.

The state has tried a number of band-aid fixes this year to keep the system limping along. Allocating $12M through the end of 2023 is a good start, but a small fraction of what’s needed. And shuffling already overburdened public defenders to neighboring counties will have negative consequences for the system as a whole.

Fair Shot Oregon is doing some strong advocacy on this issue. You might consider getting involved in their In Defense of Humanity effort, in addition to advocating with your lawmakers directly.

OPB has done a lot of reporting on this crisis. Two examples are this story from March on Oregon’s largest public defense firm no longer taking clients from Washington County and this February piece on the $12M band-aid to keep the system going at all.

KGW reported in October on the current state of our broken public defender system, including calling out the roughly 1,300 people in the system now without representation.