23 May 2024, 18:00

Oh my God.

Okay.

So, the whole country is I guess in a public defender shortage right now but I am only really aware of it in so far as it impacts me personally, which is a lot. I work indigent defense as a contractor in a rural county. There are only two of us left because everyone else either quit or retired. I work a lot! I work more than I used to. I never think I work enough, but all my colleagues say I work too much.

I won’t go into the details too much here, but basically, I’m at capacity. They can’t give me any more work. Somehow every time I close a case, I agree to take on another one which somehow becomes 2 or 3. Anytime a client that I have an active case with commits another crime (excuse me, is alleged to have committed another crime) I get their new one too. They recently added a third attorney so there will be 3 of us instead of 2, and they’ve hired some “overflow” contractors to help get us out of this mess to take on a limited number of clients (at a substantially higher rate of pay than I am contracted for, which… is … going to come up when we renegotiate these contracts later this year but never mind).

This post is not about how broken this is.

This post is because a thing just happened to me that I was so mad about that one discord rant about it was not enough.

This lady contacted me via 3 text messages and a voicemail over the past two days, asking me to represent her son who is incarcerated. She explained that he was really upset by something that the overflow attorney working his case said to him, so could I represent him instead. I explained that I am at capacity right now so it would be pretty unfair for me to take on paid cases. She basically explained that she hadn’t intended to pay me, she just wanted her precious baby to get to pick his public defender off the fucking department store rack.

If I ever meet this lady in person, I am going to punch her in the throat.