Deputy District Attorney Matt Anderson works at his office Thursday. Both public defenders and prosecutors in Jackson County are facing a shortage of lawyers, further slowing the criminal justice system. Jamie Lusch Rogue Valley Tribune

Employers everywhere are struggling to hire people, from fry cooks to pharmacists, construction workers to receptionists.

Add lawyers to that list.

Jackson County District Attorney Beth Heckert says her office, along with many others in the state, have vacancies they’ve not been able to fill. It’s not necessarily that applicants are unqualified, but rather that there often are no applicants at all.

“When we post a new position, we are not getting applications,” Heckert said last week. “Nobody is applying, or occasionally we might get one or two. In the past, we might get six or seven applications if we posted a position.”

For the Jackson County prosecutor’s office, the upshot is five vacant deputy district attorney positions out of a staff of 21 lawyers. Heckert said that’s not unique to her office; she’s hearing the same from district attorneys throughout the state.

The lawyer shortage extends across the aisle in Oregon’s criminal justice system. Multnomah County judges dismissed 300 cases in a nine-month period in 2022 because of a lack of public defenders. According to the Oregon Judicial Department, 791 people were in the state court system on Feb. 2 who did not have attorneys to represent them.

Doug Engle, executive director of the Medford-based Southern Oregon Public Defender, said there was a similar situation in 2003, when a lack of funding for public defenders caused cases to be delayed for months. It’s not so much a matter of money this time, however.

“We just don’t have enough lawyers,” he said. His agency is currently down four attorneys out of 26 positions budgeted for its Medford and Grants Pass offices. In 2022, the office handled just under 2,000 cases.

The state contract for public defenders limits the number of cases each defense attorney can handle, and Engle said he expects that his staff attorneys will have all “maxed out” on their caseloads by the end of April, two months short of the end of the fiscal year.

That would likely impact how the district attorney’s office proceeds on some cases. “We really can’t go forward with a case if you can’t appoint an attorney to the person,” Heckert said.

She noted her office has already taken some steps to reduce pressure on the public defenders by filing violations on some “real low-level” crimes such as minor trespassing or disorderly conduct cases. Defendants charged with violations are not entitled to an attorney and face only fines, not jail time.

That’s not a major issue yet, Heckert said, in part because jail overcrowding meant people convicted of those types of crimes were already not spending time locked up.

The public defender issue has received considerable media coverage in the state; less so with the shortage of prosecutors. Heckert is at a bit of a loss over the cause for the downturn in applications, noting that salaries and benefits are competitive.

Annual salaries for entry-level deputy district attorneys in Jackson County currently start at just under $76,000; senior deputy district attorneys can make as much $135,000. Those positions are covered by the county, while Heckert’s $147,000 salary is funded by the state, as is the case for all district attorneys in Oregon. The pay for public defenders in Jackson County is similar.

So where are all the lawyers?

“Law school entries are down a little bit,” Heckert said. “There’s maybe also a cultural shift for people; this isn’t the kind of public service that they want to do.”

Published statistics back up her reference to law school numbers, with total U.S. graduates declining from 46,776 in 2013 to 35,287 in 2021, nearly a 25% drop.

Heckert also noted that the position of a deputy district attorney is “not an 8-to-5 job.”

“We do work after hours when we get called out to crime scenes; we get called out to crashes, so we do work closely with law enforcement,” she said. “If they’re going to do a search warrant at 2 o’clock in the morning, they called us; we have to be notified and have to review it.

“And, of course, there’s a lot of courtroom time, and some folks in law school don’t really want to do much in the courtroom.”

The nature of the job beyond the hours and the setting may also be a deterrent.

“There definitely are some kinds of trauma that we are vicariously exposed to,” Heckert said, noting that prosecutors can expect to go to the scenes of crimes and grisly accidents and to meet with distraught family members who have lost a loved one.

But there are rewards even in the toughest of situations, said Heckert, who worked on child abuse cases for seven years.

“It’s really difficult, but also really rewarding when things go right and you feel like you’ve made such a huge difference in that child’s life and that family’s life,” she said.

“So, there’s the good and the bad, and you have to try to keep your focus on the good.”