Unbalanced
Following the trail of money in Oregon’s public defense crisis
Oregon’s Office of Public Defense Services (OPDS) is a big state agency that provides criminal defense attorneys for poor defendants. The agency has been operating in crisis mode for years now, whether or not the public always knew about it.
Unfortunately for everyone — defendants, attorneys, and taxpayers alike — the system is a black hole into which money is poured, with the wishes and dreams that a constitutional requirement will be met, but with zero financial accountability to ensure that it is.
And that’s a system that is ripe for waste, fraud, and abuse, especially given that the agency’s budget was recently nearly doubled.
Let’s look at some numbers.
Comparing to other similarly sized states
Oregon’s public defenders are 100% funded by state dollars, as they should be, given that the agency exists to ensure that the state is fulfilling its constitutional duty to poor defendants.
Here’s a chart comparing four other states of similar size, which also fund defense services at effectively 100% state dollars.
You’ll note that Oregon’s defense budget is more than twice the average of the other states. The closest comparable is Kentucky, which has a few hundred thousand more citizens, and still manages to spend half of what Oregon does.
And unlike Oregon, Kentucky has never been called out by the 6th Amendment Center — the national watchdog that works to ensure fairness and equal access to justice.
A broken system
Oregon is the only state that provides public defense chiefly through a contracting system, instead of employing attorneys as full-time staff.
As contractors, they must pay for their own office space, overhead, insurance, etc., rather than simply being allocated a room in a courthouse or municipal building.
Multiply that times 36 counties times all the various attorneys contracting in those jurisdictions, and that is a lot of money paid out to landlords.
Further, these contractors are permitted to take paying clients while the state pays them to rent office space.
And to quote the American Bar Association report on Oregon — which set off all the alarms in 2022 — OPDS “does not require contractors to report information on [their] private practice caseload or other legal work,” nor can the agency “verify the accuracy” of the work that the contractors are reporting.
A recent meeting agenda shows that OPDS is slowly moving towards better internal auditing capabilities (eta Winter 2024!) and expects to be a third less reliant on contractors by 2035(!!).
Amply funded
The 2023–25 budget for the agency is an increase of 170% over the 2021–23 budget — more than half a billion dollars for two years.
That’s throwing money at the immediate attorney shortage problem while working long-term to restructure the failed system.
As a comparison, if Kentucky gets a modest but realistic 5% increase in its budget for that same time frame, Oregon will be paying more than three times what Kentucky does for its defense services.
You get a free lawyer, and YOU get a free lawyer, and…
You’d think that one of the things that OPDS would do with all that money, is make sure that only poor people get the state-paid defender. But no.
A short list of people who have somehow qualified for free attorneys: foreign exchange students whose bail was directly paid by the Saudi Arabian government; Oregon’s chief administrative law judge who made $143,810 at his job before he was arrested and convicted for child porn; and Lori Deveny, an attorney who stole over $4 million from her brain-injured clients and the IRS.
Apparently Deveny didn’t invest that stolen money very well!
Little oversight
At bare minimum, other pocketbooks that OPDS should be minding are those of contractors whose spouses were recently convicted of RICO predicate offenses (like wire fraud and identity theft) while sharing a business banking account.
Granted, this is probably a very small group of contractors…
But it should be of tremendous concern that Linn County public defense attorney Erik Moeller shared a bank account with his wife — now-disgraced former attorney Megan Moeller — while she was embezzling funds from their law firm. That was at a time when OPDS funds were certainly being deposited into that same account.
The United States Attorney definitely seemed to think it was a problem, even if OPDS didn’t, and mentioned Erik Moeller several times in his wife’s sentencing memorandum, and even included images of her embezzlement checks in their uploaded exhibits. It sounds pretty serious to me.
None of this is to suggest that public defense services are anything other than absolutely necessary and important and 100% the right thing to do, and not just because of the whole constitution thing.
Oregon cannot simply spend its way out of this problem. It was already vastly outspending similar-sized states, rather than simply tackling the badly broken underlying system. Things were allowed to deteriorate during several years of negligent (or worse) oversight, particularly under the management of Nancy Cozine¹ and under the oversight of former Supreme Court Chief Justice Martha Walters.
¹ Cozine is now, terrifyingly enough, the State Court Administrator, an equally important position.
