Justice

Go into a courtroom in Deschutes County on a Tuesday morning and you can see firsthand the problem with Oregon’s Public Defense Commission.

Defendants entitled to public defenders have no public defenders.

The state is not meeting an obligation under the U.S. Constitution, justice for alleged victims can be delayed and defendants can be held in jail for days with no attorney.

It’s not just a problem in Deschutes County. It’s happening across Oregon. As of Friday morning there were 3,101 unrepresented defendants in Oregon. More than 50 of the unrepresented defendants were charged with felonies.

The problem will take time to fix. The Oregon Legislature has invested millions into hiring more public defenders and overhauling how public defenders are paid and overseen.

Legislators are going to be briefed on the progress next week, before an interim subcommittee on public safety and a joint meeting of the House and Senate Interim Committees on Judiciary. The House judiciary committee is chaired by state Rep. Jason Kropf, D-Bend.

Some documents that will be the basis of those meetings were available on Friday morning. They weren’t swimming in compliments.

On top of trying to ensure defendants have public defenders, the commission is moving into the state’s executive branch from the judicial branch. It is also upgrading its technology and how it tracks cases and the performance of public defenders. The progress received criticism from the Legislative Fiscal Office.

There are sentences like these: “The Quality Management Plan does not outline specific indicators for measuring and improving the quality-of-service delivery in public defense.” And an independent quality management services vendor “categorizes the overall project health as having a “Medium” risk profile (“Yellow”); however, the schedule is categorized as “high risk” (“Red”) because no project schedule is in place.”

We don’t know if you remember, but years ago in 2013 when Oregon was setting up its own website for a healthcare marketplace, the state also had independent analysts in place. The analyst reports had “yellow” and “red” risk indicators, too. The director of the state marketplace discounted the risk warnings. The state website failed to launch properly. Millions were spent on a system that didn’t work.

It doesn’t mean that the public defense commission’s effort is marching to the same fate. It’s a warning that there’s more to worry about in public defense in Oregon than a lack of public defenders.