Maine's first official public defender's office opened last month in Augusta as part of a multi-year plan to help address a "crisis" in Maine's indigent legal system.
The Capital Region Public Defender's Office began accepting new cases on November 27th and will serve low-income criminal defendants who can't afford to hire a lawyer. According to the Maine Commission on Indigent Legal Services, four attorneys have been hired — including District Defender Frayla Tarpinian — and two more positions are being filled.
"MCILS is diligently working to address the Constitutional crisis of indigent defendants who are without council with the resources allocated by the Legislature and Governor," the commission said in a press release on Tuesday.
For many years, Maine relied entirely on private attorneys willing to work with the commission to represent low-income defendants. But the number of participating attorneys plummeted even as a backlog of criminal cases grew during the COVID pandemic.
The ACLU of Maine filed a class-action lawsuit against the commission last year, alleging the state was violating the constitutional rights of indigent defendants by failing to provide them with adequate legal counsel. The two sides recent agreed to a series of reforms and other actions — including the commission advocating in the Legislature for additional public defender positions — but that settlement agreement must be approved by a Superior Court judge who had rejected an earlier proposal.
Lawmakers have responded to the growing crisis by creating more than a dozen public defender positions in recent budgets. And the commission recently voted to ask lawmakers for $9 million to open six more physical offices for additional public defenders in the next several years.
Executive director Jim Billings told the commission's board in October that about $3.2 million would go toward opening offices in Bangor and Aroostook County next year as well as to cover other personnel. The proposal also calls for requesting an additional $5.7 million in fiscal year 2025 to open four additional office and hire staff in Cumberland/York counties, Hancock/Washington counties, Androscoggin/Franklin/Oxford counties and in the Midcoast region.
"We could have been more aggressive but we wanted to be realistic about the timeframe and the ask,” Billings said at the time. "And a hybrid system where we are doing roughly a third of the work in-house, to me, makes sense."
