Corshelle Jenkins received a warrant for her arrest in May 2025 for a crime she never committed. A judge told her the state had no lawyers available to defend her. She would have to keep showing up to court until one became free. That day, roughly 1,280 other defendants in her county faced the same predicament.
Jenkins, a 36-year-old Portland resident and mother of six, had been charged with shoplifting boots from Nordstrom in August 2023. She had no idea why. She was at work when the theft occurred. She had never been arrested. At her arraignment, after waiting 90 minutes, a judge told her the courtroom had run out of public defenders for the afternoon. She was placed on the "unrepresented list," charged a $235 fee, and instructed to return when a lawyer might be available.
Six months pregnant, Jenkins came back in August. Still no attorney. She missed her September hearing. Another warrant was issued. The pending charge began destroying her life. She feared losing her job to a background check. She worried about being pulled over with her children in the car and arrested for something she didn't do.
Jenkins is one of thousands of Oregonians trapped in a broken system. The state is constitutionally required to provide public defenders to defendants who cannot afford private lawyers. But an acute shortage of attorneys has made that promise impossible to keep. In May 2025, roughly 3,900 people across Oregon were waiting for a lawyer. Some waited more than a year.
The human cost has been severe. Defendants have lost jobs, housing, and custody of their children. Some experienced miscarriages and mental health crises while waiting for representation they had no way to accelerate.
The crisis reached such proportions that in February 2025, the Oregon Supreme Court ruled the state must dismiss all charges for people who had waited 90 days or longer for a lawyer in felony cases and 60 days in misdemeanor cases. The order called for dismissal of more than 1,400 pending cases. Yet even this drastic measure has not solved the problem. Newly charged defendants continue to face months-long waits, and those whose cases were dismissed may be charged again for the same offense without warning.
A System Broken by Design
Oregon's public defense system is unlike most others in the country. Rather than directly hiring public defenders, the state has contracted a patchwork of nonprofits, private firms, and individual lawyers to handle the work. A 2019 state-commissioned report found the system operated with a "stunning lack of oversight," giving the state little visibility into whether defendants received adequate representation or whether enough defenders existed.
The shortage did not emerge overnight. Recruiting and retaining public defenders has always been difficult. The work is grueling, the pay far lower than private practice or prosecution. Courts struggled to reopen after COVID shutdowns, and when they did, they faced a massive backlog plus an influx of cases stemming from Oregon's homelessness and addiction crises. By 2022, the American Bar Association estimated Oregon needed 1,300 additional full-time public defenders.
The state made changes in 2020, ending a flat-fee payment model that had incentivized attorneys to take as many cases as possible and resolve them quickly. The shift aimed to improve representation quality, but it had an unintended consequence: fewer cases were picked up, leaving more defendants without lawyers. In 2023, Oregon directly hired a handful of trial public defenders to reduce the backlog. The efforts fell short.
By 2024, the system was hemorrhaging attorneys. Caseloads ballooned. More attorneys left. Their cases were redistributed, causing remaining defenders to burn out. Grant Hartley, director of Metropolitan Public Defender, the largest nonprofit provider in the state, described it as being "underwater with excessive caseloads, burning attorneys out." When those attorneys left, the cycle repeated.
Veronica Gates was 20 years old when she got a ticket for disorderly conduct after a minor incident with police. At her arraignment, there was no attorney. She returned for hearings in November and December. Still no lawyer. During that time, she became pregnant and suffered morning sickness in court. She stopped driving out of fear of police encounters. Her boyfriend had to take time off work to drive her to hearings. When she applied for an apartment, she had to disclose the arrest. The stress and humiliation, she said, contributed to a miscarriage.
Gates finally got a public defender in February 2025. When investigators looked for surveillance footage of the incident, too much time had passed. Two weeks before trial in April, the DA dismissed the case. "What the fuck was all of that for?" Gates said afterward. "Now I feel like I can't trust the court system."
Nacyus Berry was 18 when he had a mental health episode at a Starbucks. Unhoused and living with schizophrenia, he was arrested for misdemeanor trespassing and disorderly conduct. He spent nearly a year waiting for a lawyer while his case prevented him from returning to school, getting hired, or securing housing. A law school student working with a public defender concluded he lacked intent to commit the crime. Days before trial, the DA dismissed the case. Berry was 20 by then, working as a dishwasher. "I feel a little down that the system failed me," he said. "I was causing no harm that day."
The Portland District Attorney's office, under Nathan Vasquez who started in January 2025, has defended its prosecution decisions. The DA argued that dismissals can happen when victims decline to proceed, and that long delays in cases make convictions harder because witnesses disappear. In 2025, prosecutors were unable to proceed in more than 1,100 cases heading to trial, with charges ultimately dismissed before trial. That was roughly 15 percent of all cases moving to trial after arraignment. Vasquez blamed public defenders, accusing nonprofit firms like Metropolitan Public Defender of engaging in a "work stoppage" and refusing to take more clients as an ideological stance against prosecution. However, state data showed nonprofit defenders were operating at 104 percent of their contracted capacity in March, while private consortium lawyers were at 90 percent.
Ken Sanchagrin, executive director of the Oregon Public Defense Commission, defended the limits on caseloads. "Merely taking more cases does not necessarily mean the individuals served by those lawyers are having either constitutionally adequate or certainly high-quality representation," he said, pointing to the dangers of repeating the failed flat-fee model.
Jenkins did not get her answer until October 2024, more than a year after her first court appearance. Her public defender, Kate Blankinship, reviewed surveillance footage and discovered the woman arrested was someone else entirely. The woman had given police Jenkins's name. An officer wrote that Jenkins's "DMV photo matched the subject in custody." The women were similar in age and both Black but looked distinctly different, with noticeably different weights and heights. The woman who gave the false name was herself being prosecuted by the DA for providing false information to an officer.
Blankinship sent extensive documentation to prosecutors proving mistaken identity. Her calls and emails went unanswered for weeks. She showed up in person to leave a message. As the holidays passed and the new year began, Jenkins remained stuck. She was recovering from an emergency C-section at the time, caring for a newborn, with a cloud hanging over her head.
Finally, in January 2025, two and a half years after the wrongful theft charge, Jenkins was removed from the case. The DA's office said prosecutors rely on police to verify identities and blamed public defenders for delays, saying the case would have been resolved months earlier had a lawyer accepted the appointment at arraignment. A supervisor, they said, resolved the matter once the mixup became clear.
Jenkins felt used. "They just thought of me as another case. They didn't believe me." She was relieved to be free but worried her name had been tarnished. She feared being wrongfully accused again and finding herself back in that same courtroom, waiting for a lawyer who might never come.
The Supreme Court's February ruling has created new urgency. More than 1,500 cases have been dismissed under the order through the end of March, though more than 1,200 defendants remained unrepresented. The court decision allows cases to be refiled when the state can provide counsel. Some defendants have discovered this the hard way, learning of new charges only when police arrest them on fresh warrants and send them to jail.
There are signs of slight improvement. Oregon saw a 23 percent decline in unrepresented defendants between November 2024 and November 2025, from roughly 3,700 people to 3,000. The state credited expanded capacity, specialized dockets, and strategic deployment of trial lawyers. Some small counties have largely eliminated their shortages. Sanchagrin said he saw "a light at the end of the tunnel," though he also expressed concern that defendants could get caught in a "Groundhog Day" situation where dismissed cases are refiled without warning.
State lawmakers point to expanded funding and law school clinics as potential solutions. Willy Chotzen, an Oregon state legislator and former public defender, said the system was beginning to benefit from increased investment. He suggested prioritizing alternatives to prosecution and requiring faster evidence disclosure could also help. Yet while some have proposed overhauling the entire system to make it state-run, those discussions have stalled. Such a change would be momentous and carries concerns that the state could lose attorneys and face higher costs.
The epicenter of the crisis remains Portland's downtown courthouse, where systemic progress has been elusive. A Martin Luther King Jr. quote is engraved on the building's facade: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Inside, judges regularly encounter unhoused people accused of petty crimes, shuffling through short jail stays, often appearing bewildered or angry as they navigate proceedings without lawyers.
Author James Rodriguez: "This system isn't just slow, it's a machine that grinds innocent people down while they wait for basic constitutional protection, and the state has known about it for years."
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