Pennsylvania’s first two years of state funding for indigent defense have brought early improvements to county defender offices, including new attorney hires and case management systems, according to reports released earlier this year. The funding also established statewide oversight through an Indigent Defense Advisory Committee that set new standards for how no-cost criminal defense should be delivered—standards now awaiting approval by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Advocates and public defenders say the progress matters, but they warned the system still faces staffing gaps, rapid turnover and workload pressures that limit effective representation.
Sara Jacobson, who spoke with Spotlight PA as executive director of the Public Defender Association of Pennsylvania, said the money is “a good start.” Jacobson also served as chair of the advisory committee for its first two years. At the same time, she said the funding cannot deliver further gains if it stays “flat-funding,” arguing that without increases, offices would “stay where we are.”
The state’s approach was built through a $7.5 million investment that, in the first rounds, was split across 67 counties. County defender offices hired new attorneys, added support staff and implemented case management systems, some for the first time. The reports said the grants are noncompetitive and allocated by formula, with each county receiving between $184,000 and $295,000. The money was designed to supplement county funding rather than replace it, with state law still requiring counties to be the primary funder of public defense.
The advisory committee also created statewide standards for indigent representation. The committee finalized the standards in September and submitted them to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania for approval. The standards require that attorneys providing no-cost criminal defense have sufficient knowledge of the law, continue their education, and have a reasonable understanding of relevant technology and forensic science. They also establish that effective representation should use a client-centered approach. Ted Skaarup, an assistant public defender for Northampton County and chair of the advisory committee, said the standards are currently pending before the Supreme Court’s criminal and juvenile rules committees.
Despite the improvements, the reports described continuing shortcomings. An analysis by the advisory committee and the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency found the state is about 400 attorneys short of what it needs to provide adequate representation for adult criminal cases. The analysis also found starting public defender salaries lagged behind the average attorney salary in Pennsylvania, and it described staff departures at a rate that the reports said is undermining continuity. Counties reported that nearly 40% of the attorneys hired within the past five years had already left, with most departing within two years.
Those losses show up in the overall workforce, the reports said. Because of turnover, counties reported fewer full-time public defense attorneys than in 2024, when the county offices received their first round of funding from the state government. The committee’s findings also reported that the number of full-time public defense attorneys actually decreased from 828.5 to 820.5 over the course of the grant program, attributing the change to aggressive turnover in the offices.
Public defenders described the changes as a shift after years of insulation created by a county-by-county model. Samuel Encarnacion, a veteran public defender with the Lancaster County office, said the earlier system functioned as “little fiefdoms,” with limited efforts to connect defender offices across the state. He said three developments helped break that pattern: PDAP’s increased organizing activity beginning in 2020, the legislature’s and Gov. Josh Shapiro’s approval of $7.5 million in 2023, and a 2024 ACLU of Pennsylvania lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the county-based funding system, which he said remains ongoing.
Encarnacion said the funding has helped open a conversation about larger changes, but he pointed to ongoing structural limits. In his view, the “volume of cases and the number of cases per lawyer” remain a “cancer for effective representation.” He contrasted Pennsylvania’s smaller offices with larger, better-funded defender operations in places such as Philadelphia and Allegheny, which can delegate work more and give senior attorneys more managerial time. He also said that after the COVID-19 pandemic, his office was hollowed out as attorneys left for better-paying private-sector jobs, and he described that as an additional obstacle the state funding only partially addressed.
The reports and interviews also highlighted how systems and data work—along with staffing—can affect representation quality. Jacobson said case management systems are essential because public defender offices cannot accurately measure caseloads without them. She argued that without reliable tracking, offices struggle to match their work against national caseload standards and are more likely to triage cases and negotiate guilty pleas rather than provide effective defense. She said preliminary caseload figures may undercount the true workload because the data collected from the court system can be incomplete, including that in up to 20% of cases, court documents showed the defendant had either no representation or “unknown” representation.
Looking ahead, the advisory committee said it is focused on several areas beyond the immediate standards. Skaarup said the committee is creating a centralized, digital resource library for indigent defenders statewide, where standards and practices vary by county. He also said the committee is continuing to engage with the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania and rules committees to produce robust standards for public defense, while describing better data as a core next step—saying an accurate picture of caseloads is the “baseline” for further work on indigent services quality.