California’s public defender system is in a severe, state-wide crisis driven by extreme understaffing, and unsustainable caseloads that threaten the Sixth Amendment constitutional right to counsel. Offices from the Bay Area to Los Angeles face high attorney turnover, burnout, and limited resources, forcing some to decline new cases, or seek pay raises to manage crushing workloads.
The crisis has led to actions like strikes, and refusal of cases, as public defenders argue that overwhelming workloads prevent them from providing effective representation.
Today, California lawmakers and public defenders called on the state to approve a $15 million annual budget request to fund indigent criminal defense, and warned that the state’s constitutional promise of legal representation is at a breaking point.
“California is facing an escalating recruitment and retention crisis in public defense,” Assemblymember Ash Kalra (D-San Jose) stated at today’s news conference. “As a former deputy public defender, I spent over a decade representing indigent clients ensuring their due process rights were honored and they were given quality, zealous representation.”
Kalra is the sponsor of Assembly Bill 159, which affirms the fundamental importance of public defense to due process and equal justice, recognizing the chronic underfunding of public defender offices. To that end, “Unequal Scales: California’s Investment Disparity Between Prosecution and Public Defense,” a recent report from California’s Office of the State Public Defender, counties in California fund the prosecution at much higher levels than they do public defense. In fiscal year 2022-23, California counties allocated almost $2.2 billion in total funding to local district attorney offices and nearly one billion dollars less in funding for public defense offices.
In an act of silent protest against what they consider crushing caseloads and chronic underfunding, members of the San Francisco public defender’s office all showed up to work on Thursday last week wearing black clothing. Similar protests took place across the country this week, as public defenders in Wisconsin, Tennessee, New York, and other states wore black to draw attention to what San Francisco Public Defender Mano Raju called “a systemic, statewide, and nationwide issue.”
“Our clients are immigrants,” Raju told The San Francisco Standard. “People who speak English as a second language, predominantly people of color. Poor. Suffering from mental health issues. This is not a group with a lot of political power, and that’s why it’s really important that public defenders stand up for these vulnerable members of our society and try to give them a fair shot in court.”
You can read interviews about the crisis facing San Francisco’s Public Defenders office in “For SF’s public defenders, resistance is the new black” at the San Francisco Standard website.
