It’s not often you hear a public figure speak as plainly or as vulnerably as Justin Andrus did last week.

People wait outside the Biddeford District Court to make their initial court appearances. Earlier this year, lawmakers agreed to allocate $966,000 to employ Maine’s first five full-time public defenders. But because the Maine Commission on Indigent Legal Services and the Bureau of Human Resources can’t come to an agreement on how much the five should be paid, hiring has yet to begin. Photo by Gabe Souza

“I’m hopeful that as we have finally arrived at the point of failure,” said the executive director of the Maine Commission on Indigent Legal Services, “the Legislature will recognize what it needs to do.”

What does the point of failure look like? Criminal defendants who are constitutionally entitled to legal counsel at Maine’s expense are stranded without lawyers – our courts cannot find any to represent them. A basic social safety net has fallen apart in our state.

Such a disgraceful result, stunning as it is, comes as no surprise. Andrus, his colleagues and others – including the ACLU of Maine, which brought a lawsuit against the commission last spring – have been sounding the alarm for a long time.

Last week, the commission voted to recommend a $62.1 million budget for 2023, more than double the current budget of $28.1 million. The budget proposal identifies bold structural and financial reforms designed to dig the system out of the hole it finds itself in and draw back the hundreds of lawyers it has been hemorrhaging.

In his letter of resignation from the Commission on Indigent Legal Services last March, former commissioner Robert Cummins said he believed the resourcing crisis came down to an attitude of “I just don’t give a damn.”

An us-and-them mentality allows citizens to minimize the profound significance of indigent defense. To be an indigent defendant, you do not need to be penniless, homeless or even earn less than a living wage. To reap the lasting benefits that this constitutional guarantee should confer on a judicial system and on a state at large, you need only live in that state.

Maine is still the only state in the nation to employ no public defenders, an arrangement that has impaired our justice system as long as it’s been in place. Earlier this year, lawmakers agreed to allocate $966,000 to employ Maine’s first five full-time public defenders. A step forward – in theory. Because the commission and the Bureau of Human Resources can’t come to an agreement on how much the five should be paid, hiring has yet to begin.

During a podcast on the topic last January, Andrus noted that Maine had paid contract attorneys $60 an hour before moving to $80 an hour. “To a lot of people, $80 an hour sounds like a great wage. And $80 an hour, as a wage, is a great wage. But that’s not how it works. Our attorneys have to provide their office, their staff, their insurances, their benefits,” he explained. “When you start to look at that, you start to see that those numbers aren’t as grand as they might seem, at first.”

The commission’s budget proposal seeks a wage increase to $150 an hour for court-appointed lawyers, a loan mitigation program in the name of attorney retention and the creation of four new public defender offices, two devoted to trial services, one to appeals and one to post-conviction review.

Repair of systemic economic injustice must begin with staffing, appropriately and competitively funded and supported. We should be uniformly scandalized by the ongoing denial of a fundamental constitutional right in Maine. With every passing week, the damage caused becomes more expensive and more difficult to come back from.

Nothing less than what the commission is asking for will do.