Public defenders have long been the overburdened heroes of a legal system that relies on them to quite literally keep the scales of justice in balance.
Without them, the criminal justice system can indeed come to a grinding halt — as it did in at least two counties for several months last year.
Each year more than 100,000 defendants pass through the state’s criminal justice system. The overwhelming percentage of them will be represented by public defenders. In 2025 alone, according to figures provided by the Office of the Commissioner of Probation (OCP), some 74.4 percent of defendants were declared indigent, and another 9.6 percent had public defenders appointed but were able to contribute toward their own defense. Only 16 percent hired private counsel.
So when Massachusetts Inspector General Jeffrey Shapiro looked at the cold, hard numbers of how the state’s public defender system operates, and in a new report found it “broken, expensive, and resistant to oversight,” that’s serious business.
Even the way the courts determine who is indigent is “outdated,” the IG‘s report insisted, when that determination should look more like the process used “by any merchant seeking to conduct a credit check.”
At the heart of the controversy, of course, is the thorny issue of who is truly indigent and, therefore, qualifies for state-funded legal services and the waiving of certain court fees. That determination is made by the probation department, and it’s a system the report called “broken.”
“In almost all circumstances, Probation makes a recommendation about indigency status without verifying spousal income and, with some frequency, does not verify indigency against a single government source,” Shapiro wrote in his cover letter to lawmakers.
Fixing that critical element in the system is high on the IG’s list of needed reforms. But “fixing” that part of the system is one of those tales as old as time in this state. Many have tried. No one has succeeded.
At least as far back as 1992, reports have called for better verification of indigency both before and after the appointment of public defenders.
Governor Deval Patrick wanted to revamp the system in 2011, noting, “there are significant concerns about the rigor of the current eligibility determination process.” A 2018 report by the Office of the State Auditor sampled 80 case files in eight district courts, four superior courts, and four juvenile courts, and found 23 of these files lacked sufficient paperwork to prove indigency. It was an improvement over the 2011 report, though, which found 98 percent of courts “not compliant with indigency verification laws.”
The IG is now recommending that the Legislature demand OCP submit annual reports to the House and Senate Ways and Means Committees detailing the number of indigency verifications performed and audits conducted. In fact, Daniel Hunt, Democratic state representative from Dorchester, and Will Brownsberger, Democratic state senator from Belmont, have been trying to get just such a bill passed since at least 2021.
In addition, the IG recommended that OCP create an independent division to oversee indigency verification and audit the results.
The IG also found fault with the Committee for Public Counsel Services, whose lawyers, he reported, “work the lowest number of cases of any statewide public defender system for which the OIG could find comparable data, including Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Vermont.”
And he criticized the Supreme Judicial Court for failing to adequately scrutinize the caseload numbers CPCS presented in the midst of that 2025 work stoppage by bar advocates — the private lawyers, working under CPCS auspices, who accept cases of indigent defendants.
It was that crisis last year, in which judges dismissed 1,689 cases and released 213 defendants from custody for lack of access to a lawyer, that Shapiro’s report contends could have been averted — or at least mitigated — had CPCS been living up to the caseload burden it told the Legislature it was shouldering.
The Legislature mandates that CPCS cover 20 percent of the indigent defendants coming into the state’s courts, while private bar advocates handle the other 80 percent. The IG found that in some years that figure for CPCS was as low as 12.4 percent (2021) and 14.4 percent in 2025.
For its part, the CPCS asserts that its lawyers have been doing more than their share — especially if you factor in the complexity of cases and “the professional effort required to handle those cases effectively,” as a draft white paper prepared by CPCS and shared with the editorial board found.
Applying that methodology — one used in the Rand Corporation’s 2023 National Public Defense Workload Study — the white paper found that current attorneys in the CPCS Public Defender Division “are performing work equivalent to approximately 2.1 full-time attorneys.”
And it notes, “Digital evidence, electronic discovery, forensic evidence, motion practice, client communication, investigation, and mitigation advocacy all require significant attorney time that is not captured by simple case counts.”
The Legislature asked for the IG’s assessment after appropriating an additional $40 million last year for CPCS to hire 320 new staff attorneys and raise the hourly pay of private bar advocates by $10 last year and another $10 this August, which will bring their hourly pay to $85 for district court cases. The aim of the new hires was to begin to shift that 20-80 workload split away from private bar advocates.
Taxpayers deserve a system, as the inspector general‘s report said, “that protects Massachusetts residents who rely on its counsel at times of their greatest need while also appropriately protecting the expenditure of public dollars.” We have seen the consequences of a system in crisis, and it wasn’t pretty. Preventing the next one is essential.
Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us @GlobeOpinion.