Oregon Public Defense Commission tells subcommittee budget must fund more lawyers, tech to tackle backlog of unrepresented defendants

The Oregon Public Defense Commission told the Public Safety Subcommittee on March 18 that state funding and new systems will be necessary to address large numbers of open and unrepresented criminal cases and to stabilize the public defense workforce.

"The Oregon Public Defense Commission is a very different agency today than it was 2 years ago," Executive Director Jessica Kampey said as she opened an informational hearing on House Bill 5031. Kampey outlined the commission's governor-recommended budget and described several policy packages intended to add lawyers, support staff and technology.

The nut of the presentation: the governor's budget would add a mix of state-employed trial attorneys and hourly capacity, invest in a bonded financial and case management system, and seek rate adjustments for investigators and hourly attorneys. Kampey said the governor's plan would add the equivalent of 82 new lawyers statewide — 42 in state trial offices and roughly 40 attorney-equivalents in hourly programs — and nearly 55 non‑attorney support staff for trial offices.

Kampey described how the commission prepares forecasts with the Department of Administrative Services' Office of Economic Analysis and warned that the forecast for new-case filings does not include existing open cases or the population of charged but unrepresented defendants. "It does not include the 30,000 open cases that we expect contractors will have on their desks when the biennium started," she said, adding that cases charged in the current biennium but not…