'A breaking point': Public defenders call on state and city for equal funding
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Tina Luongo, center, the chief attorney of the Criminal Defense Practice at the Legal Aid Society, is calling on the state and city to up funding for public defenders in this year’s budgets. File photo via LAS/YouTube
By Jacob Kaye
The city’s largest public defender group is lobbying state and city officials to up their funding as the state’s budget season approaches its final weeks and the city’s negotiations begin to kick off.
The Legal Aid Society is requesting $132 million from the state, a funding amount that would bring them closer in line with proposed funding allocated to district attorneys’ offices throughout the state. Governor Kathy Hochul’s executive budget earmarks a little more than $7 million for public defenders and around $100 million for prosecutors. Those funds were higher in the State Senate and Assembly’s budgets, which earmarks $87 million and $140 million to public defenders respectively.
Top attorneys with the Legal Aid Society say that many of the same troubles experienced in recent years by district attorneys’ offices, including mounting caseloads, high attrition rates and burdensome discovery work, are experienced by public defenders across New York. But while the governor has promised to pour additional funds into prosecutors’ offices, she has refrained from giving public defenders the funds they need to keep pace, the attorneys say.
“We’re at a breaking point right now,” said Tina Luongo, the chief attorney of the Criminal Defense Practice at the Legal Aid Society.
“Our rate of attrition, the workload and staff are stretched really thin to the point where some are really struggling to continue to do the work that they love and others have had to give it up,” Luongo added.
The Legal Aid Society and other public defense firms like them have seen their attrition rates skyrocket in recent years, as their wages have remained relatively stagnant and as their workload has increased.
The Legal Aid Society, which currently employees around 2,000 people, has around 300 open positions and an attrition rate of around 17 percent. At some points during the year, the public defense firm was losing around 10 employees per month.
Serving as a major contributor to the attorneys’ increase in workload is discovery reform.
The reforms, which were passed in 2019 in order to prevent prosecutors from holding onto evidence against a public defender’s client until the final moments before trial, have placed administrative burdens on both assistant district attorneys and public defenders, who have to review each of the documents sent by prosecutors.
Hochul’s executive budget proposes sending an additional $40 million to prosecutors’ offices to meet the demands of discovery, but does not include any additional funds to support discovery work undertaken by public defenders.
“The increase in workload that discovery brought us – rightfully so, a law that had to change, but one in which no infrastructure and no funding for infrastructure was given significantly enough, for both DAs and defenders to make the reviewing of discovery, the analyzing of discovery, the sharing of discovery with our clients to prepare for trial or to take a plea,” Luongo said. “The workload has skyrocketed.”
In total, the governor’s budget proposes sending $359 million for indigent legal services, $50 million for 18-B assigned counsel program attorneys, $94 million to the Attorney for Child Representation Program and $7.6 million for aid to defense.
The budget also details a $40 million allocation to 57 DA’s offices outside of NYC. The funding is meant to directly aid DAs’ discovery obligations, allowing them to hire staff, purchase technology and equipment.
It also includes $52 million in Aid to Prosecution funding for all of the state’s district attorneys’ offices. The funding is specifically to be used for hiring new prosecutors to replace those who have resigned or retired.
"Governor Hochul's Executive Budget makes transformative investments to make New York more affordable, more livable and safer, and she looks forward to working with the legislature on a final budget that meets the needs of all New Yorkers,” a spokesperson for the governor’s office told the Eagle in a statement.
Luongo said that they welcome the additional funding to prosecutors’ offices, but only ask that it be matched on the defense side. Both sides need to be fully funded in order to avoid as many miscarriages of justices as possible, Luongo said.
“When you don't have the technology and the staff and your workload as an attorney is such that you're triaging – and on the DA’s side, it’s the same thing,” Luongo said. “They're concerned about wrongful convictions, as well.”
“And so what you have is a recipe for disaster,” Luongo added.
The state legislature has proposed larger funding totals for public defenders.
The State Senate proposed $87 million in funds for purchasing technology to better help them parse through discovery, and the Assembly proposed $100 million for public defenders’ activities related to discovery and an additional $40 million in Aid to Defense.
“We laud Senate and Assembly lawmakers for including essential funding in their respective one-house budgets for our organizations to assist with discovery obligations as well as to address staffing and other operational needs that plague public defender offices statewide,” the Legal Aid Society said in a statement.
Then there’s funding from the city.
The nonprofit’s contract with the city is flat-funded, and has not increased in years.
Luongo said that the contract structure quickly becomes untenable. Each year, the Legal Aid Society's contract with their attorneys’ union increases by around 3 percent, while their funding from the city remains the same – current contract negotiations with the union are ongoing.
“That actually is not flat – every year we lose 3 percent,” Luongo said. “And that hurts our ability to resource the clients in the way that we should.”
“The city can change that,” Luongo added. “They should do something similar to what they do with the DAs’ offices or court counsel or any of their other agencies, they should be including those automatically in our contracts every year so that we can stabilize the money we have to hire staff, so it does not harm the clients.”
Leaders at the public defense firm will appear before the City Council this week to advocate for changes to their contract with the city and for additional funding requests.
