Nearly every county in Pennsylvania is short on public defenders, according to a new report

Pennsylvania has an insufficient number of public defenders in nearly every county, according to a new report from a University of Pennsylvania law professor, hampering the state’s ability to fulfill its constitutional obligation to provide adequate representation for criminal defendants who can’t afford a lawyer.

Paul Heaton, the report’s author, analyzed nearly one million criminal court dockets covering a six-year period and concluded that there should be about 1,200 public defenders employed in county courthouses across the state. But there are only about 850 public defenders currently working, Heaton found — a shortfall of about 30%. And some form of deficit exists nearly everywhere, Heaton found, with just six of the state’s 66 public defenders’ offices employing enough lawyers to adequately cover a typical annual caseload.

Montgomery, Bucks, and Delaware Counties are among those with notable staffing shortages, the report said, although many of the most disproportionately under-resourced counties are in central and northern Pennsylvania.

“I expected in general there to be a shortfall,” Heaton said in an interview. “One of the big questions I had, though, is whether we’d find that basically everywhere.”

The report’s release this week came as budget discussions are underway in legislative halls across Pennsylvania, and as agencies — including defenders’ offices — seek to lobby officials for funding.

Last year, state lawmakers for the first time allocated $7.5 million for indigent defense rather than leaving counties to cover the costs — making Pennsylvania the 49th state to provide some form of statewide money to public defenders. Gov. Josh Shapiro called the longstanding lack of state dollars a “shameful distinction,” and he has said that he will seek to raise the allocation to $10 million in the budget for the next fiscal year.

Still, advocates have long contended that such an investment is not enough. The Defender Association of Philadelphia — the largest indigent defense organization in the state, with about 230 attorneys — has a budget of more than $60 million, about 90% of which is provided by City Council.

Keisha Hudson, the city’s chief defender, said Philadelphia received about $144,000 from the state’s new funding pool, which the office is looking into using for attorney training. She said she’s unaware of any chief defender in the state saying they received enough money to hire additional attorneys, and she plans to ask City Council for an additional $15 million for her office’s budget in the next fiscal year.

“We have a need here for increased attorney staffing,” she said.

Heaton, a professor at Penn’s Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice, began his research by reviewing about 1 million dockets from adult criminal courts in Pennsylvania between 2016 to 2022. About half of those cases were assigned to public defenders, he said.

He then sought to determine how much time — and, ultimately, how many attorneys — it would take to adequately represent clients in those 500,000 cases. His analysis relied on estimates included in a national study released last year that sought to quantify how long it should take attorneys to complete various types of cases. A first-time DUI, for example, was estimated to require 19 hours of attorney time, while a murder case with a potential life sentence was estimated to require 286 hours of work.

Heaton calculated an ideal staffing level for each county based on its caseloads and case types from the dockets, then compared those figures to the real number of attorneys in each office.

“Only two counties appear clearly within acceptable workload levels,” he wrote, while five others “appear within the range of normal workloads.” Philadelphia and Chester County were among those that met the acceptable standards.

By contrast, more than 50 counties had expected workloads that exceeded 3,000 hours per lawyer per year — “a level far beyond the billable hours expected at even the most demanding law firms,” Heaton wrote.

Even after adjusting some underlying assumptions, he wrote, “we can have a high degree of confidence that current public defender staffing levels are constitutionally inadequate” in three-quarters of the state’s public defender offices.

The report had some limitations, which it acknowledges. When calculating its ideal staffing levels, for example, it did not include juvenile cases, and couldn’t fully account for lawyers who spent significant portions of their time working as supervisors or on other matters outside the daily churn of criminal court. Hudson, of Philadelphia, said her office handles around 4,000 juvenile cases, 13,000 probation matters, and has 10 attorneys dedicated solely to litigating appeals.

The report also does not dive deeply into potential solutions, though it mentions increasing resources and funding for indigent defense. Still, Heaton said his findings were weightier than simply identifying where attorneys are most overworked.

Failing to provide adequate representation is an abdication of a core Constitutional principle, he noted. And, perhaps more concretely, lawyers who are spread too thin can make mistakes that compromise the quality of their work and impact their clients’ cases — sometimes leading to wrongful convictions.

The system relies on two parties advocating effectively against one another to reach a just resolution, Heaton said, and “If one side is so underequipped that it can’t do its job, I think that raises real questions about whether the truth-finding can operate as intended.”