The Maine Commission on Public Defense Services is slowly staffing up a growing network of public defenders offices.
The commission is hopeful that the added defense attorneys will help put a dent in the backlog of more than 800 criminal cases, in which defendants currently lack counsel.
The new public defender's office in Caribou is fully staffed with attorneys, who will start at the end of this month.
Hiring is underway for the public defenders office in Lewiston, which is expected to open after Labor Day. Recruitment has been more challenging for the new office in Bangor, said Jim Billings, the commission's executive director.
The commission is actively recruiting at Maine and Massachusetts law schools for interns and line attorneys. Interns worked for the state's first public defenders office in Augusta this summer, Billings added.
"What we really need to come out of this is for law students and private attorneys to hear the message from the state government that this public defender system is not going away, that we're going to expand it, that there's going to continue to be jobs coming online in a predictable, orderly fashion, and that this is a valid career choice," he told state lawmakers this week.
Billings said the commission will ask the Legislature to authorize and fund the creation of additional public defenders offices in Cumberland and York counties and in the midcoast region.
Since Maine increased the hourly pay rate for indigent legal defense work last year, the number of people applying to take on cases through the state's Commission on Public Defense Services has nearly doubled.
But it's still not enough to replace the number of attorneys who are retiring — or are simply too busy to take on new cases, Billings said.
"The number of attorneys that we have in this state seem to be at a personal capacity limit that do our work," he said. "And so there is not a well of other attorneys who do our work that is untapped."
Billings said that some attorneys who worked for the state's rural defender unit will be transferred to a new parents counsel division, which will take on a backlog of nearly 100 pending child protective custody cases that are waiting for lawyers.
