A comprehensive review of the Alaska Public Defender’s Office staffing, caseloads, and budget is finished, and it shows that the burdens on the agency are within professional standards of others around the country, of about 145-154 cases per attorney. The report was made public on the Department of Administration’s website last week.
In contradiction to what was claimed by the previous Public Defender, the agency is fulfilling its ethical and constitutional obligations, said the Department of Administration’s report, which noted that the attorneys worked an average of 40 hours per week, and the estimated time to complete a case is 13 hours. The 40-hours-per-week assessment was done before the agency was fully staffed.
Alaska’s former Public Defender, Quinlan Steiner, warned for two years that his legal staff was overburdened and needed vastly more resources, but that is not what the official report found. It has shown that resources had not been used efficiently in the agency.
Steiner stopped traveling to Juneau to testify before the Legislature and lobby for a bigger budget, notifying Rep. Matt Claman that his travel had been cut by the Dunleavy Administration and he could only testify by phone.
Claman, himself a lawyer who was House Judiciary Chairman at the time, said that phone testimony was not good enough. He would put similar restrictions on other members of the Dunleavy Administration. If Steiner could only testify by phone before his committee, then all the other Dunleavy appointees could only testify before his committee by phone, too. It was Claman and Steiner against the Dunleavy Administration.
The standoff took a budget-trimming decision by the Dunleavy Administration into a deeply political spat with Steiner stuck in the middle. Ultimately, Steiner abruptly left the administration.
Commissioner of Administration Kelly Tshibaka started a deep dive into the complaints that Steiner had made about the budget being too small for the mission.
The Public Defender is a judicial-council-appointed position and oversees an agency whose mission is to provide constitutionally mandated legal representation to indigent clients appointed by the court.
“We found it difficult to accurately determine the PDA’s attorneys’ caseloads because of numerous inconsistent reports from the PDA. However, we found the range of 145-154 weighted cases between FYs18-19 to be the most accurate,” the Department of Administration concluded. “These weighted caseload numbers are within professional standards and those of other states across the nation. The PDA, therefore, is fulfilling its ethical and constitutional obligations within prevailing professional standards.”
The report also said there was an increase of cases being assigned to the Public Defender, but then being referred by that agency to another agency — the Office of Public Advocacy.
Much of that referral issue arose due to two homicide cases involving juveniles — the murder of 19-year-old Cynthia Hoffman in June of 2019 at Thunderbird Falls in Eklutna, a case in which there are six mostly underage suspects; and the November, 2016 murder of 16-year-old David Grunwald in Palmer, where four teen assailants were involved.
The Office of Public Advocacy represents 9 of the 10 defendants in those cases.
The Department of Administration’s investigation said the number of cases sent to the Office of Public Advocacy from the Public Defender went from 2,813 to 4,224 between 2017 and 2019.
The transfers were due to conflicts that Public Defender lawyers had within their case loads, not because they had too many cases. The cases were not being assigned to attorneys in such a way that conflicts with other cases could be avoided.
“If the PDA cannot find ways to substantially reduce the conflict rate, it risks undermining its core mission of being the primary agency providing constitutionally mandated, court-appointed legal representation for indigent clients,” the Department’s report stated.
Between the two agencies, the reporting and logging of cases is handled differently, which makes it difficult to tell if the Public Defender is over counting its workload. It takes 25 percent credit for passing a file over to the Office of Public Advocacy.
“We found the PDA counts cases differently than OPA or the Alaska Court System. For example, the PDA counted more than 16,080 petitions to revoke probation and parole violations as new cases from FYs17-19, but OPA does not count these as cases,” the report said.
“It is difficult to use the PDA’s workload numbers in a way that’s effective for budgeting purposes,” the Department of Administration said.
The report concluded that the Public Defender has been budgeted for an appropriate number of attorneys for its caseloads under prevailing professional standards, but faces problems recruiting and retaining legal professionals.
“The PDA has experienced higher caseloads in offices where it has had staffing difficulties, particularly in regions outside of Anchorage.
“However, the PDA has been intentionally holding open 4-7 vacancies for several years, drawing from its personal services funds to pay for other expenses, like contractor services. This has intensified its staffing challenges, particularly in regional offices,” the report continued.
In the past 2 fiscal years, the Public Defender Agency has received nearly $2 million in additional appropriations, including 18 positions, most of which were funded in the Dunleavy Administration. The agency has a consistent rate of vacancies in its offices of over 8 percent, which is extra resource capacity that the report says the agency could use to handle cases in regional offices or provide more support staff for the attorneys.
State expenditures totaled approximately $27 million for the Public Defender Agency and $28 million for the Office of Public Advocacy.
For comparison, the Public Defender office in Vermont’s 2018 budget was about $18 million. Wyoming’s 2021 Public Defender budget is $27 million, even though its population is much smaller than Vermont’s. The comparisons are not purely an “apples to apples” situation since agencies and their missions are structured differently.
“The PDA has been resourced with more budget and staff positions than it is using effectively,” according to the report, which made 17 recommendations for ways the Public Defender Agency could increase efficiencies and use its budget more wisely.
Meanwhile, the new public defender-appointee has not yet been confirmed by the Legislature, which left Juneau last year without fulfilling its duty of confirming appointments. The Legislative Council is now suing the governor because he will not fire the appointees, such as Public Defender-designee Samantha Cherot.
Read the entire report at this link.
