PORTLAND, Ore. — Oregon Supreme Court Chief Justice Martha Walters in an unusual public request is asking members of the State Bar to take on clients in need of public defense.
Oregon Public Broadcasting reports in a letter Thursday, Walters asked members of the State Bar to “help in representing those who are accused of a crime and cannot afford counsel, calling it a very basic and fundamental right that Oregon is struggling to accommodate.”
The Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution affords people charged with crimes an attorney provided by the state if they cannot afford their own.
This comes as a recent report by the American Bar Association shows Oregon's public defense system is severely understaffed and overworked.
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The report studied whether Oregon's system has too many or too few full-time attorneys. Currently in Oregon, there are 592 full-time attorneys contracted by Oregon's public defense system. To provide effective counsel for the current caseload, each attorney would need to work 26.6 hours a day. The report suggests that to meet demand, Oregon would need to hire 1,296 more full-time public defenders.
Christine Breton is a public defender for Multnomah Defenders, Inc. in Portland. She said her days are filled with cases and her mornings before the office opens and well after it closes start and end with handling various work on her cases.
"As you pick up more and more cases, it becomes harder and harder to resolve any cases because the more clients you have, the harder it is spend a lot of time on any one case," Breton said. "It becomes a lot of time trying to manage so many cases that it slows down all of your cases from resolving and you're picking up more cases as it's happens and it just kind of keeps on continuing."
KGW Reporter Devon Haskins contributed to this report.
