Nearly half of NC counties are ‘legal deserts.’ Public defender leader seeks change.

Nearly half of North Carolina’s counties are “legal deserts,” or places where there is less than one attorney for 1,000 residents, says N.C. Indigent Defense Services Executive Director Mary Pollard.

That has serious consequences, she told members of the Governor’s Crime Commission at a recent meeting.

“Lack of resources weaken public trust in the judicial system,” she said. “That’s something we’re all very concerned about.”

Other problems include overly long waits for trials, crowded jails, innocent defendants pleading guilty to crimes and even wrongful convictions.

“This has been and continues to be a big problem in the state,” UNC School of Government Professor Phil Dixon told The Charlotte Observer in an email. Dixon specializes in indigent defense education and works with IDS.

“We have far more counties than public defender offices, and many of the counties without a PD office simply do not have enough attorneys, or they don’t have enough attorneys qualified to handle more serious cases,” he wrote.

Change may be on the way with more funding for public defense in proposed state budgets and a six-year plan from Indigent Defense Services, Pollard said.

Lawyers drawn to urban NC

Public defenders are lawyers who represent defendants unable to afford their own attorney. But the supply of lawyers is lopsided in this state.

North Carolina’s biggest urban counties, Wake and Mecklenburg, are home to nearly half its active lawyers, according to data that Pollard presented. Despite making up 21.5% of the state’s population, they have 46.7% of its attorneys, said Pollard, whose office oversees public defenders across the state.

The shortage is often more noticeable in smaller, more rural counties, according to Pollard’s data. Caldwell, Bertie, Hoke, Stokes and Graham Counties are among those with the largest deficit — somewhere between .19 and .69 attorneys per resident.

In counties where there is no office with full-time public defenders, courts rely on other lawyers willing to take on contract work. Younger lawyers are increasingly uninterested in public defense, Pollard said.

“The lawyers who historically have done work for IDS, appointed work… are getting older, and they’re not being replaced by younger lawyers,” she said. “The younger lawyers aren’t moving to these counties and smaller towns and smaller cities.”

If they were present and interested in the work, they’d be paid less today than they were in 2008, according to Dixon.

When he worked as a lawyer in 2008, base pay for appointed work was $75 an hour, he said. In 2023 it is $65 an hour for misdemeanor work “but has yet to be restored to pre-cut levels,” he wrote.

“By way of contrast, attorneys representing indigent clients in the federal system receive an hourly rate of more than double our state rate,” he wrote.

Expanding public defender offices?

A 2017 report from the North Carolina Commission on the Administration of Law and Justice had already laid out the problems and made good recommendations to fix them, Pollard said.

The report was blunt.

“While stakeholders agree that IDS has improved the State’s delivery of indigent defense services, they also agree that in some respects the system is in crisis,” part of it reads.

Among its recommendations: Establish more public defender offices across the state and provide “reasonable compensation for all counsel providing indigent defense services.”

Pollard’s agency wants to expand public defense statewide in three waves, every other year, over the next six years.

Each wave would include larger and smaller districts to help “control costs and to equalize efforts between places that will be easier and places that will be tougher to set up an office,” a plan document says.

The first wave would cost $10 million. It recommends 19 counties across several districts that could get full-time, dedicated public defense staff.

At the Governor’s Crime Commission, she referenced the state House and Senate budgets — yet to be reconciled — which would fund IDS to expand into six or four districts, respectively, she said.

“It’s a start,” she said of the Senate budget proposal. “It’s not 10, right? But it’s six.”