New Hampshire Public Defenders Look for Long Awaited Raises

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The head of New Hampshire’s Public Defender program says his department’s 100 attorneys need a 15 percent raise.

Christopher Keating says they haven’t had an increase for more than 3 years and the low salaries simply aren’t cutting it.

It’s a demanding job. You have 60 or 70 open cases at a time. You’re in court, sometimes 3 different courts, every single day. you have a lot of clients in custody. You have a lot of clients under stress. so the work itself takes its toll. And so oftentimes if its not the work, it’s the pay that drives people out.

Starting public defenders earn about 36,000 dollars a year.

If they work the agency average, about 55 hours a week, the rookies make about 12 dollars an hour.

At that rate, it’s almost impossible to put away enough money to pay off law school debt.

New hires are required to commit to three years on the job, but Keating says many of the young lawyers find that commitment hard to keep.

And so we’re able to attract talented people. Keeping talented people is the difficult part. Because once they join us they tend to get married and then they tend to have kids and then they tend to want to send their kids to college and it gets more complicated on our salary.

The few experienced lawyers on the Public Defender staff would also get a boost in pay if the raises go through.

But they still won’t make as much as equally experienced prosecutors at the Attorney General’s office.

Attorney Joch Barth has been with the Public Defenders for nearly 15 years.

He says he thinks he should get the same compensation as the prosecutors.

If you want that done right you do need to pay for it. And you need to pay for experience, because there is a marketplace out there that is competing for those skills and experiences, and I think it can only go so far to expect people to provide public service…without some measure of …appropriate pay and no one is looking to get rich at this but like I say there are competing forces…..

The state has a constitutional obligation to provide competent counsel to people accused of a crime but can’t afford a lawyer.

But, says Barth, the difference in pay gives prosecutors the edge.

Representative Neal Kurk, a Republican from Weare, says he has no problem with that.

Kurk doesn’t believe public defenders should make as much as prosecutors.

It’s a reasonable judgment to say we want to give the state every advantage possible in protecting its citizens, as long as we comply with the minimal constitutional standards for providing counsel for the indigent criminal defendant. That’s not an unreasonable public policy decision. I don’t believe the constitution requires equity.

In the upcoming budget, lawmakers have also seen fit to create ten new slots for attorneys in the Public Defenders program.

Program officials say that will help a great deal to lighten their caseload which has grown over the last decade to 25,000 cases a year.

In the past, private attorneys have helped fill the void when the Public Defenders office has needed help.

Attorney Mark Sisti runs his own law firm in Chichester.

Sisti says his firm occasionally has stepped in for Public Defenders, and he’s paid by the program when that happens.

You try not to handle too many….if you want to keep the lights on.

Still Sisti says he and other defense attorneys feel an obligation to help out when the PD’s office is strapped.

But he says the money the state pays for these cases doesn’t cover the bills.

…one first degree murder case…I have to dedicate two lawyers to it. And I have to dedicate two lawyers not only for the preparation of the case and all the pretrial work but two lawyers who will be clearly away from the business for a month and a half.

The raises for Public Defenders are part of the budgets passed in both the Senate and the House.

Lawmakers have proposed raising the agency’s budget about 30% to nearly 18 million dollars over the next two years.

But details still have to be worked out between House and Senate lawmakers.

Public Defender officials are waiting anxiously for the Legislature to finish its work.