New Mexico Chief Public Defender Bennett Baur told a panel of state lawmakers Monday that his understaffed office could hit a point at which public defenders cannot take on new criminal cases.
Across the state, the Law Offices of the Public Defender has 190 staff attorneys and a vacancy rate of more than 21%. Speaking before the interim Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee in downtown Albuquerque, Baur referred back to a landmark 2022 report which found that the state needed more than 600 additional public defenders to ensure his office meets its minimum constitutional requirements.
In many rural areas, Baur does not even have public defenders on staff. His agency’s office in Gallup, for example, has a single staff attorney. In those areas, Baur often turns to contract attorneys, but can only offer pennies on the dollar compared to what prosecutors earn — working as a contract defender in a first-degree murder case only carries a base payment of $6,500, Baur said.
“This says to us the State of New Mexico does not value the work of lawyers who represent indigent people,” Baur told lawmakers.
Public defenders in more populous counties, such as Bernalillo, Santa Fe and Doña Ana, will often pick up extra cases in areas like Gallup, but that presents its own challenges.
“You don’t know the judge, you don’t know the DA, you have to drive,” Baur told Source NM.
Baur sounded the alarm on this issue a decade ago, when he told his attorneys in Lea County to stop accepting new cases. A district court judge later found Baur to be in contempt of court, and he later unsuccessfully asked the state Supreme Court to weigh in.
Stephen Hanlon, a nationally recognized attorney who’s worked on high-profile civil rights cases, supported Baur’s arguments before the state interim committee Monday.
“Benn’s lawyers have less than half the number of lawyers that they need in order to provide ethical representation for all of their clients. That situation, a systemically unethical criminal legal system, simply cannot continue unabated and unaddressed,” he said. “It is unethical to represent more people than you can competently represent. It’s against the law.”
Hanlon and Malia Brink, the policy director for the Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law, cited a recent example in which Oregon dismissed some 1,400 criminal cases because of the state’s extreme public defender shortage.
Both Republican and Democrat lawmakers at Monday’s hearing said the pay disparity between prosecutors and public defenders and the excessive caseloads were concerning.
“This is an access to justice question and we should all be concerned if there’s a system in place that disadvantages the defendant,” Rep. Christine Chandler (D-Los Alamos), who chairs the committee, said during the hearing. “The system is premised on generally equal access to the courts and when you have attorneys who are so overworked…you know very well that’s not happening. That undermines all our confidence in our justice system.”
