Aug. 24—LA GRANDE — The commission of the Oregon Public Defense Services met last week to vote on the fate of director, Steve Singer. Hundreds of miles away, Jared Boyd, a local attorney, kept tabs on the hearing. Boyd was in agreement with the final verdict — to fire Singer.
And although these hearings occurred in the state’s capital, Singer’s directorial decisions and work conduct made waves in the halls of the Union County Courthouse — and brought Oregon’s crippling public defense service shortage into the limelight.
“We were already dealing with the crisis,” Boyd said. “We are now having a problem where, rather than increasing attorneys, we have gone backwards here locally.”
According to a two-year American Bar Association study released in January, Oregon Public Defense Services is deficient 1,296 full-time equivalent attorneys for its adult criminal and juvenile caseloads. The study estimated that the 592 attorneys would have to take on 26.6-hour work days each week to meet counsel assistance needs.
Oregon is the only state that uses a contracting system to provide nearly all of its public defense work. OPDS relies on more than 100 public defender offices, law firms, consortia, nonprofit organizations and individual attorneys to provide services for clients who cannot afford private counsel.
Oregon’s public defense system has less than one-third of the attorneys it needs to sufficiently represent the state’s criminal defendants.
Contract challenges
There are two delivery systems for public defense services in Oregon — the state either contracts attorneys from nonprofit law firms or private attorneys. There are some nonprofit public defense offices in rural areas, but most rural judicial districts use private attorneys under contract with OPDS.
Boyd — a private, for-profit attorney — and other attorneys in Wallowa County and Union County, have contracts with the state to handle public defense cases.
Eastern Oregon Public Defenders — a consortium that Boyd was a part of until a month ago — was the only stable of attorneys from which Union County Circuit Court has drawn its public defenders for over 30 years.
When Boyd and other attorneys within the consortium received their yearly contract from OPDS, they hoped to negotiate some of the terms, but were unsuccessful. They agreed to sign the contract but Singer, the director of the OPDS, refused, claiming they missed the deadline — despite active negotiation continuing between OPDS and several other nonprofit and private organizations, according to Boyd.
“It did not improve public defense in Union County at all,” he said. “In fact, it made our system less efficient.”
Without prior discussion, the consortium members learned that it would be under new administration and was effectively dissolved. Three of the members received contracts under the new administration.
Boyd, after what he cited as an unsuccessful attempt to find a new lawyer to replace him, received an individual contract on the evening of the last day of the contract window.
“There was no benefit to public defense on this deal,” Boyd asserted. “It was entirely to control us.”
Rob Harris, director of the Washington County consortium, and president of the Oregon Defense Consortium Association, communicated with Singer and urged the commission to sign the contract so the attorneys in the consortium could get back to work. His recommendation was not heeded.
Harris said he heard from other consortiums around the state expressing concern about the contracts — specifically in regards to travel expectations, apparent pushes for full-time defense work, and a new reporting system for retained work. Yet he said that Boyd’s group got caught in a bigger picture change that Singer wanted to make.
“Frankly, this was the most difficult contracting process I’ve been through in 30 years,” Harris said. “It was very disruptive and very difficult.”
Local implications
After OPDS dissolved the consortium, the county was left without an established, state-contracted consortium to draw from. While the contracts under the new administration were being finalized, the county did not have a single public defense lawyer in its judicial district under contract with OPDS.
“I’d never seen anything like that,” said Union County Circuit Court Judge Thomas Powers. “That was bad for the community, it was bad for the families and defendants, and it was bad for this court’s ability to efficiently run the court system.”
During the first two weeks of July, Boyd and the dissolved consortium’s attorneys volunteered to accept appointments directly from the court, and Powers began assigning them cases on a noncontract basis. Despite OPDS’s inability to provide contracted attorneys, Powers noted that the court was able to cover all the cases they needed to over the course of several weeks. But the consequences could have been dire, he said.
“We would’ve had families perhaps, parents in those dependency hearings, parents whose parental rights were at stake who didn’t have lawyers,” Powers said. “That’s like a mini constitutional crisis.”
Powers said the contract issues that arose from the changes Singer instituted diverted local attorneys away from their clients and cases. Still, he credited the attorneys and the court staff for their continued efforts.
“We’re fortunate that our local providers stepped in to prevent that from happening, and our court staff was flexible and adaptive and made sure that we were able to get coverage,” said Powers. “But we dodged a crisis.”
Boyd said it will be important to focus on how public defense is structured and funded if the state hopes to address the crisis. He asserted that Singer’s handling of the contract negotiations only exacerbated Oregon’s attorney shortage.
A troubled system
For Boyd, it wasn’t simply Singer’s overhaul of the contract system that made things challenging — it was also how Singer handled the situation. And Boyd’s sentiments seem to be echoed by many. Singer spent almost eight months as the director and garnered a slew of mixed reviews from commissioners, employees and Oregon Supreme Court Chief Justice Martha Walters.
According to Oregon Public Broadcast articles, many public defenders admired Singer’s “urgency, vision and willingness to butt heads.” Although not everyone shared this sentiment.
Per Ramfjord, the chair of the Oregon Public Defense Commission, recently filed a 27-page complaint about Singer’s conduct. In the memo, Ramfjord cited the director’s “difficult and unprofessional” conversation style and providing examples of email and message correspondence that left him “disturbed” by both their tone and content.
According to Ramfjord, he had to cut one meeting in April short because Singer became hostile to Walters in a call.
“In my 38 years of legal practice, I have never seen a lawyer engage in such a sustained, outrageous and unfounded outburst against any other lawyer, much less a judge,” Ramfjord wrote of the encounter.
He concluded the memo by emphasizing that his own experiences had been corroborated by other OPDS employees, legislators and stakeholders, and that he did not believe Singer could effectively perform his job.
Ramfjord’s sentiment, and the echoes of others, contributed to the culminating events of last week. On Aug. 10, commissioners met to vote on Singer’s position at the Office of Public Defense Services. The vote was deadlocked at 4-4. Last week, citing her desire to “provide the right leadership” Chief Justice Marth Walters fired the entire commission.
“I never anticipated exercising this authority, but this issue is too important, and the need for change is too urgent, to delay,” she wrote in an article to the commission Aug. 15.
The next day, she announced four new commissioners and reappointed five previous members. All but one of the reappointed members has previously voted to fire Singer, according to Oregon Public Broadcasting.
With a new commission in place, the nine members elected to remove Singer from his position in a 6-2 vote with one member absent.
Reverberations in the Union County courthouse
In the wake of Singer’s firing, Powers said he agreed with what unfolded, and is confident that the PDSC will find a new director who will be the right fit and will bring things back on track.
“I’m very much supportive of the chief justice’s decision to reconstitute the public defense services commission that oversees all of this,” said Powers.
Powers noted that Singer’s approach to public defense contracts disrupted local services more than the county had previously experienced, but the issues it faced weren’t unique.
Counties around the state are struggling to provide defendants their constitutionally ensured right. According to a class action lawsuit filed against the state May 16 by plaintiffs claiming that the state failed to provide them with court-appointed attorneys, around 500 indigent defendants across Oregon are without counsel, despite having been arraigned in criminal court.
“Mr. Singer came into a very challenging environment and it just became apparent that either between his experience or temperament, was not the right fit for the job.”
Boyd asserted that if nothing changes systemically, the understaffing that resulted from Singer’s behavior will likely continue to cause issues for Union and Wallowa counties. He estimated that local attorneys are likely to hit case caps before the end of the current year-long contract, which ends June 30, 2023. If this does occur, there will be no public defense attorneys who can accept cases by spring of next year, as long as case numbers follow projections.
“For the last two months since the beginning of this contract our case counts are higher than projections meaning that may be even worse if current case number trends continue,” he said.
With the recent contract changes and the dissolving of Eastern Oregon Public Defenders consortium, Boyd posits that the plight of underrepresented defendants will likely become a real local issue within the next year. He suggests that this is a direct result of how OPDS, under Singer’s direction, handled public defense contracts in Union and Wallowa County.
Still, Boyd is hopeful Singer’s firing will allow for positive changes in the state.
“I am cautiously optimistic that everyone can start focusing on moving forward and dealing with the crisis and improving public defense statewide,” Boyd said.
Shannon Golden is a reporter for The Observer. Contact her at 541-624-6015 sgolden@lagrandeobserver.com.