After firing the public defense commissioners, new members were appointed

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — The day after Oregon Supreme Court Chief Justice Martha Walters fired the nine members of the state commission that oversees public defense, she said Tuesday she would appoint four new commissioners and would reappoint five commissioners from the previous group.

Walters had fired the members of the commission out of frustration that hundreds of criminal defendants who cannot afford an attorney have been unable to obtain public defenders to represent them.

“This leadership change happened quickly and our work will begin just as quickly,” Walters wrote in a letter Tuesday to the new commission. “These issues are too important to delay.”

Last week, during a public hearing, Walters urged the commission to fire Steve Singer, the relatively new executive director of the Office of Public Defense Services.

Walters, a nonvoting member of the commission, has described Singer as unreliable, unnecessarily combative and slow to address the state’s public defense crisis. Others have defended Singer for reforming a long-broken system, though they acknowledge he can be abrasive.

Despite calls for Walters’ removal last week, the commission deadlocked in a 4-4 decision, with one member absent.

Minutes after Walters publicly named the new commission on Tuesday, the Public Defense Services Commission announced that it would hold an executive session on Wednesday to meet with its attorneys and “review and evaluate the job performance of the OPDS Executive Director.”

Walters has refused interview requests from OPB.

“I think it was precisely because the commission refused to fire Steve Singer that the commission was fired,” now-former commissioner Mark Hardin, a retired attorney who voted against firing Singer, told OPB on Monday. It’s just a jump.

The four commissioners who voted to fire Singer were re-elected, along with one member, Alton Harvey Jr., who voted to keep Singer at the helm of the Office of Public Defense Services. All commissioners are volunteers.

Oregon’s public defender system is the only one in the county that relies entirely on contractors: large nonprofit defense firms, smaller groups of cooperating private defense attorneys who hire cases, and independent attorneys who can take cases at will.

But some firms and private attorneys periodically decline to take new cases due to workload. Low payment rates and late payments from the state are also a disincentive. The American Bar Association found that Oregon has only 31% of the public defenders it needs.

Oregon’s unique public defender system has been under so much pressure that it is on the verge of bankruptcy. Criminal defendants in Oregon who have been left without legal representation due to a shortage of public defenders filed a lawsuit in May alleging the state is violating his constitutional right to an attorney and a speedy trial.

Walters said “systemic change” is required and that the commission must collaborate with the executive and legislative branches of Oregon and the public defense community “to create a better system for public defense providers.”

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