Not My Best Interest
What the record shows about public defense in Deschutes County
A reported account, with a disclosure: I went through the system this piece examines.
I found the proof myself. It took an afternoon. It was sitting in the record of the initial ex parte hearing the entire time, where it had always been, available to anyone who went looking. The people the state had assigned to defend me never went looking. Finding it would have taken one of them ten minutes and cost them nothing.
I had filed grievances by then, documenting that the petitioner who brought the case carried a pattern of dishonesty the prosecution would not acknowledge. I had told my own attorneys, more than once, about the abuse underneath the allegations against me. They did not investigate it. They did not pursue the inconsistencies that were already in the file. When I look back at what my defense actually did, it behaved less like an adversary of the prosecution than an extension of it, and along the way my own lawyers made representations that the record flatly contradicts.
I am not writing this as a neutral observer, and I will not pretend to be one. I founded the organization that publishes State Created, and I was processed through the system it reports on. Both of those things are true, and stating them plainly is the point. What follows is not a feeling about how I was treated. It is a documented account of how Oregon built its public defense system, what its own investigators found, and why the experience I just described was not the failure of one bad lawyer. It was the predictable output of a structure the state was warned about, in writing, years before my case was ever filed.
A system designed around volume
In 2019 the Sixth Amendment Center, a national nonprofit that studies the right to counsel, delivered a statewide evaluation of Oregon's indigent defense system that the legislature had requested. Its conclusion was blunt. The state had constructed a complicated bureaucracy that, underneath, was a flat-fee contract system with high caseloads, thin supervision, and almost no accountability. The investigators found that Oregon could not even say which attorneys were handling which cases in which counties.
The financial design was the core of the problem. Oregon paid its contracted defenders a fixed amount per case regardless of how many hours the case actually required. In one county, contractors earned roughly $913 for each Class B felony credit, and out of that sum they first had to cover their own overhead before anyone was paid for the actual defense. The report found one Portland-area attorney who handled 1,265 misdemeanor cases in a single year, a load that national standards say should have been divided among four lawyers.
Pay a lawyer the same flat amount to arrange a quick plea as to fight a case to trial, and you have told that lawyer exactly what to do. The Sixth Amendment Center said the structure created a financial incentive to take on as many cases as possible and to resolve them as fast as possible, which in practice means pleas over trials and corners cut on everything in between. The investigators concluded the arrangement pitted appointed lawyers' financial self-interest against their clients' due process rights, and that Oregon was failing its obligations under the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments. Idaho, Michigan, Nevada, and Washington had already banned fixed-fee contracting for exactly this conflict.
This is the structural answer to anyone who says their defender was not on their side. In a system built this way, the defender's paycheck was arranged to reward moving the case, not winning it, and an investigation that does not generate revenue is an investigation that does not get done. That is not a story about lawyers being lazy or corrupt. It is a story about a payment scheme that made thorough defense a financial loss.
How Deschutes County is wired
Deschutes County does not run a single public defender office. Representation for people who cannot afford a lawyer is funneled through a small set of private firms under state contract, principally Deschutes Defenders, the Atlas Law Group, and the Bend Attorney Group. When those firms run short of attorneys, there is no public office standing behind them to absorb the overflow.
That fragility became visible in 2024. As defenders left and high-level felony filings climbed, the largest of the three firms, Deschutes Defenders, temporarily shut off, meaning it stopped accepting new cases. Atlas was reported to be near its own shut off after taking on 35 cases in a single week, roughly triple its normal volume. By October the county had around 150 people charged with crimes and no lawyer to represent them, and the presiding judge said the county had passed its tipping point.
The county clawed its way back. By late December 2024 officials said the number of unrepresented defendants in Deschutes had reached zero, and the district attorney and the courts spent early 2025 telling reporters the local shortage had been solved through pressure on the state and added attorney capacity. But the relief came from squeezing more cases into the same small set of contracted firms. Resolving an unrepresented-defendant count by loading more files onto the lawyers who remain does not fix the quality problem underneath it. It can deepen it, because the defender who now carries the overflow is the same defender who has even less time for any one client.
Joel Wirtz, executive director of Deschutes Defenders, has framed the shortage less as a defender failure than as a justice system absorbing what other systems abandoned. He has pointed to Oregon ranking at the bottom nationally on mental health and addiction treatment, and to Bend's housing costs making it nearly impossible to recruit younger attorneys to the work. The cases pile up because the county routes its untreated problems into the courtroom, and then there are not enough defenders to carry them.
What the research actually supports
It would be easy to take the next step and claim the research proves public defenders deliver worse outcomes than any other lawyer. The honest answer is more specific, and more damning of the system than of the people inside it.
The strongest study on this question, an analysis of Philadelphia murder cases by Anderson and Heaton published in the Yale Law Journal, found that defendants assigned full-time institutional public defenders did dramatically better than those assigned appointed private counsel. The public defenders cut their clients' murder conviction rate by about 19 percent, reduced the probability of a life sentence by 62 percent, and reduced expected time served by 24 percent. A resourced, full-time defender is not the problem. The problem is what happens when defenders are starved of time and paid to churn.
That is where the caseload research points. Studies linking county-level defender caseloads to sentencing outcomes find that lighter caseloads are associated with less pretrial detention and shorter incarceration. The mechanism is not mysterious. A lawyer carrying three or four times a sane caseload cannot interview witnesses, cannot test the state's evidence, cannot file the motions that create leverage, and cannot build the mitigation case that shortens a sentence. With nothing built, the plea offer becomes the only available exit, and the defender's advice to take it is rational even when it is ruinous for the client.
The pressure to plead does not come from the defender alone, and it is not mainly about how well anyone could have fought. Roughly 90 to 95 percent of criminal defendants nationally plead guilty rather than go to trial. Part of that is the trial penalty, the documented gap between the sentence offered for a plea and the heavier one threatened if you insist on trial and lose. But the larger force, the one that decides most cases before a defense is ever mounted, is whether the accused is sitting in a cell while the case grinds forward. That force deserves its own accounting, because it is the part of the machine most people only understand once it has already closed on them.
The threat written in the law
Everything above is about representation: who you are given, what they are paid, whether they investigate. For a person who cannot make release, that nearly does not matter next to a simpler fact. Contesting the charge means staying in jail. Pleading means going home. The choice is built before any lawyer opens their mouth.
Malcolm Feeley named this in 1979. Studying sixteen hundred lower-court cases, he found not one trial, because the pretrial process itself was punishing enough that defendants avoided it almost without exception, guilty or innocent. The decades since have only confirmed it. For lower-level charges, the pretrial process is the punishment, regardless of how the case would have come out. Interviews with detained defendants describe the mechanism in plain terms. Plead, and you cap your time at something known, often time you have already served. Fight, and you wait in a cell for an undetermined stretch with no floor under it. The numbers track the testimony. In Harris County, Texas, detained misdemeanor defendants were 25 percent more likely to plead guilty, 43 percent more likely to be sentenced to jail at all, and received jail sentences more than twice as long as comparable people who were released.
And the arithmetic the accused is actually doing is not measured in days behind bars. It is measured in everything those days take down with them. Miss enough shifts and the job is gone. Lose the job and the rent goes unpaid, and the apartment goes next. The car gets towed or repossessed while no one is there to move it or make the payment. Children get handed to relatives or to the state, and a custody schedule built on showing up cannot survive a parent who has vanished into a jail. The dog nobody was left to feed gets surrendered. Friends stop answering. A person weighing whether to hold out for a not-guilty verdict is not weighing a few weeks of discomfort against vindication. They are weighing the survival of their entire life on the outside against the chance, never a guarantee, of being believed. The research measures the wreckage. Economists Dobbie, Goldin, and Yang found that even three days of pretrial detention left people about 9 percent less likely to be formally employed three to four years later, and a follow-up estimated the long-run loss at close to thirty thousand dollars per person in earnings and benefits, alongside lost housing, family separation, and deepened poverty that reaches into the next generation. Three days. That is how little it takes to begin pulling a life apart, and the people making this calculation know it, because many of them have watched it happen before.
Set against that, a guilty plea that ends the detention today is not irrational. It is often the only move that keeps anything standing. That is why innocent people take it.
The system then does something quietly vicious with the time. Every jurisdiction credits time served against a sentence, which sounds like mercy and works like a snare. Plead guilty, and the weeks you already sat are subtracted from your sentence, frequently leaving nothing left to serve, so you walk out that afternoon. Refuse, fight, and win, by acquittal or dismissal, and you are credited nothing, because there is no sentence to credit it against. The innocent person who prevails gets the same days back as everyone else, which is zero. The guilty plea is the only version of events in which the detention you already suffered is permitted to count for something. Holding to your innocence makes those days pure loss.
None of this requires a prosecutor to threaten anyone, and that is the entire point. The threat does not have to be spoken because the statutes already say it. In Oregon, the legislature repealed the hard statutory deadline for bringing a case to trial in 2013 and replaced it with a reasonable period standard that hands courts broad discretion over how long delay may run. Under that standard, Oregon courts have found a delay of more than two years neither unreasonable nor prejudicial. There is a ninety-day rule for defendants held in custody who demand an early trial, but it bends in exactly the directions that hurt them. An overcrowded docket can be good cause to exceed it, and a single continuance for an evaluation erases the clock entirely.
Read those provisions together and the trap closes. The continuances a real defense requires, the time to investigate, to secure an expert, to test the state's evidence, are the same continuances that reset the speedy-trial clock and keep a detained client locked up longer. The right to prepare a defense and the right to a fast resolution cannot both be exercised from inside a cell. Building the case extends the detention. The plea is the only motion that points at the door. A defendant who holds a not-guilty plea has, by operation of law and nothing else, chosen more jail and everything that comes apart during it. That is the threat. It is not whispered by anyone. It is written down, in the revised statutes, where anyone can read it and almost no one does until it is their turn.
My case, against that backdrop
Set my experience next to that record and it stops looking like a personal grievance and starts looking like a data point.
The matter ran on two tracks at once. A petitioner initiated proceedings against me, the track that produced the ex parte hearing, and the district attorney's office pursued the allegations from there. I could not afford a lawyer, so the criminal defense fell to appointed counsel under the same contract system the Sixth Amendment Center had already called unconstitutional.
What that defense did, and did not do, lines up with what the structure rewards. I raised abuse. It was not investigated. I pointed to the petitioner's documented inconsistencies. They were not pursued. I filed grievances about how the prosecution was handling the case, and the response from the people who were supposed to be my advocates was not to sharpen against the state but to soften toward it. My attorneys made statements the record contradicts, and I can show where. The single fact that holds the whole thing together is the one I opened with. The proof that mattered was already inside the ex parte record. It cost nothing to find. It required no expert, no subpoena, no funding, no motion practice. It required someone to read the file. The person who finally did was me, the defendant, not any of the lawyers paid to defend me.
I am not claiming anyone in that courtroom received an instruction to abandon me. I do not need to claim it, and neither does this article. The entire point of the documented system is that it produces this outcome without anyone having to intend it. A defender paid by the case, buried in volume, with no financial reward for investigating, declines to investigate. That is not a conspiracy. It is an incentive working exactly as designed, and I am one of the people it was designed on.
What changed, and what did not
Oregon eventually acted on the 2019 findings. In July 2023 Governor Tina Kotek signed Senate Bill 337, which abolished per-case flat-fee contracting in favor of a hybrid model combining staff public defenders with assigned private counsel, and added the oversight and structural independence the old system lacked. The reform adopted much of what the Sixth Amendment Center recommended.
But the law did not reopen the convictions already entered under the old incentives, and the transition collided with a defender shortage that had already metastasized. By early 2026 the Oregon Supreme Court ruled in State v. Roberts that charges must be dismissed when the state fails to appoint counsel within 60 days for a misdemeanor or 90 days for a felony, forcing the dismissal of more than 1,400 cases statewide. The same shortage that pushed represented defendants toward fast pleas left thousands of others with no lawyer at all.
For everyone still carrying a result they got under the old system, the record offers something more useful than sympathy. It offers a cause. The flat-fee design that rewarded volume over advocacy was real, was documented by the state's own investigators, and shaped the incentives in the rooms where these cases were resolved. The harsher outcome was not an accident of one careless lawyer. It was the cheaper way to run the system, and the state ran it that way for years after being told it was unconstitutional.
I found my proof in ten minutes' worth of reading that no one I depended on was paid to do. That is the whole story of indigent defense in Oregon, compressed into a single afternoon. I am writing it down because I am no longer the only person it has happened to, and because the next person should not have to be their own investigator to learn what was in their file the entire time.
Sources
- Sixth Amendment Center, The Right to Counsel in Oregon (2019), and 6AC commentary on Oregon's flat-fee structure and Senate Bill 337.
- The Bulletin, Public defender shortage escalates in Deschutes County (2024); Deschutes court officials cautiously optimistic public defender crisis has abated (2024).
- The Source Weekly and KTVZ reporting on the Deschutes County shortage and its resolution (2024 to 2025).
- Oregon Supreme Court, State v. Roberts; KPTV and OPB reporting on statewide dismissals (2026).
- Anderson & Heaton, Measuring the Effect of Defense Counsel on Homicide Case Outcomes, Yale Law Journal.
- Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research, study on public defender caseloads and incarceration outcomes.
- Vera Institute of Justice, In the Shadows: A Review of the Research on Plea Bargaining.
- Malcolm Feeley, The Process Is the Punishment (1979).
- Paul Heaton, Sandra G. Mayson & Megan Stevenson, The Downstream Consequences of Misdemeanor Pretrial Detention, 69 Stan. L. Rev. 711 (2017).
- Dobbie, Goldin & Yang, The Effects of Pretrial Detention on Conviction, Future Crime, and Employment (American Economic Review, 2018), and Dobbie & Yang, The Economic Costs of Pretrial Detention (2021).
- Euvrard & Leclerc, Pre-trial detention and guilty pleas: inducement or coercion (Punishment & Society, 2016).
- Oregon Revised Statutes 135.747 and 135.763 (speedy trial standards), and the 2013 repeal of ORS 135.746.
- Senate Bill 337 (Oregon, 2023).
- Author's case file, including the record of the initial ex parte hearing and grievances filed during the proceedings.
