This screenshot shows a joint meeting of the Legislature's Senate and House committees on Judiciary on Thursday.

The public defense crisis in Oregon is like a messy policy pie, bubbling over with messy policy filling, and there’s almost no way to get at it without things getting more policy messy.

The first problem: It doesn’t feel like a crisis for most people. That may not seem like the worst problem. It may not be the most important problem. It makes it harder to spend millions to solve the problem.

The second problem: It will take those millions to fix.

The third problem: It will take time to fix.

And the fourth problem: It undermines justice. It can have serious consequences for justice for defendants, crime victims and the public.

It is a crisis for defendants who are denied their legal right to an attorney.

“When people are charged with a crime but not provided with an attorney, it can cause extreme disruption in their lives: from the loss of housing, jobs, and relationships, to the inability to travel or maintain ‘normal ‘ routines, and the inevitable stress of having a serious, potentially life-altering, matter hanging over their heads,” a report for legislators says.

It is also a crisis for crime victims who can face delays in seeking justice.

“Without a way to have the case move forward, their lives are also frozen in time, and often they sometimes are faced with the unavoidable result of a case dismissal because an attorney cannot be found within a reasonable period of time. This is a particularly dangerous outcome when the charges stem from an act of violence,” the same report for legislators says.

It can also be a crisis for community members if a potentially dangerous defendant is released from custody because no attorney can be found.

In Oregon, the crisis is not getting better. In fact, it recently got worse.

The number of defendants the state failed to fulfill its obligation to provide an attorney to had been in decline from December 2023 to May 2024. But that trend has recently reversed. As of Aug. 23 there were 5,005 unrepresented defendants and of those, 1,534 had warrants issued. It was the highest number since the state started tracking in 2022.

Legislators will be discussing unrepresented defendants next week during committee meetings.

They do have options to get at the problem.

Add attorneys.

Add capacity to current attorneys.

Reduce number of defendants charged with crimes that require public defenders.

Speed up how fast cases get through the courts.

All of those have costs and trade-offs. Millions more will surely be spent. And it is going to take years, by all estimates, to get it under control. But if legislators don’t dive deep into the policy mess and make investments in long-term solutions, the crisis will continue to undermine Oregon justice.