Public defense lawyers in Connecticut are stretched thin. 

For years, the Office of the Chief Public Defender has been lobbying for higher pay for contract attorneys who handle criminal and child welfare cases, known as assigned counsel. The legislature approved incremental raises in 2023 and 2025. But the rates remain below those offered by other New England states and below the Connecticut federal rate.

“You can’t make a living off of it, that’s for sure,” said James Pastore, the lead public defender for Fairfield County.

Lawyers who take on assigned counsel work say they’re overburdened, and OCPD has seen backlogs and case delays due to the lack of attorneys. Recent pay bumps have stirred some interest, OCPD said, but the office is still facing an attorney shortage.

And pay rates are even lower for child protection cases. OCPD failed to meet its own standards for protecting children — including missing home welfare visits — due to the lack of attorneys for children, a December 2024 report released by the Office of the Child Advocate found.

The Connecticut legislature has wrestled with competing priorities in funding the public defender’s office. In an effort to ease the burden on contract attorneys, the division advocated for additional hiring of translators and social workers. The legislature granted that request while denying the agency funding to hire social workers it needs to complete mandated child welfare visits.

And in the 2023 budget bill, the state increased access to public defender services by raising the income threshold for individuals to qualify, from $30,120 annually to $37,650. That drove up the number of clients seeking representation from an already-shrinking number of counsel available. 

State Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, who co-leads the legislature’s Appropriations Committee, said she believes there’s more to be done to strengthen staffing for public defender services. 

“I don’t think we’ve yet addressed that issue at all,” she said, referring specifically to the low pay rates for child welfare cases. She cited spending constraints this past year and said she expects lawmakers will address child protection rates in the next budget discussions.

How we got here

The state’s attorney’s office relies on assigned counsel. They’re necessary in cases with multiple defendants, when a conflict of interest would arise if the same office represented them all.

For example, Fairfield County attorney Pastore explained, “if there are three people who go into a store to rob it, what happens if one guy says ‘don’t look at me, it was the other guy?’ Someone needs to defend those people,” he said, and “it can be difficult sometimes to find people to represent those conflict clients.” 

Assigned counsel often represent especially vulnerable clients, including low-income people, abused and neglected children, and parents losing custody of their kids. They are typically attorneys in private practice who see taking on cases for the public defender as doing a public service. They take on this work knowing it pays far less than other legal work they could be doing.

They’re paid $98 per hour for state criminal cases and $113 hourly if the case goes to trial. This rate is lower than other Connecticut offices and New England states, officials with the public defender’s office wrote in a 2023 memo to a legislative subcommittee. For comparison, hourly pay ranged from $350 to $650 for lawyers employed by Connecticut at the governor’s and attorney general’s offices. It was $158 for assigned counsel in New York, $150 in Maine, and $125 in New Hampshire, according to the memo.

The federal rate for assigned counsel is $177 per hour for non-capital criminal cases and $226 per hour for capital cases.

“We’ve got people here in this state that are great defense lawyers, and they’d rather do that work at the federal level,” OCPD’s legal counsel director Deborah Del Prete Sullivan testified at an Appropriations Committee hearing last year. “They’re very qualified people, so we’ve lost people because of that.”

How did compensation for state contract attorneys get this bad? Over 15 years, there were no meaningful rate increases while inflation degraded the pay. Attorneys stopped taking cases.

“As the list of attorneys declined, we had to give more assignments to existing ones,” which made the job even more unattractive, acting chief public defender John Day told the Connecticut Mirror.

The problem came to a head in 2023 when the agency considered legal action if the state didn’t include raises for public defenders in the budget. The legislature partially funded the agency’s request, but rates remained prohibitively low.

In 2025, after further appeals from the office, the legislature passed an additional 11% pay increase for assigned counsel. That brought the rates to their current level.

The agency’s staffing struggles come on the backdrop of a tumultuous few years for OCPD. Connecticut’s first Black chief public defender, TaShun Bowden-Lewis, was fired in 2024 after an investigation into alleged workplace misconduct.

Day has been running the agency in the interim. The state’s Public Defender Services Commission is slated to appoint a new chief public defender Jan. 20. (Osten said the vacancy at the head of the office did not affect funding discussions.)

The office’s mandate and case volume grew significantly in 2025. At the beginning of last year, the eligibility threshold to qualify for representation by a public defender was raised to 250% of the federal poverty line. Defendants now qualify if they make below $37,650 annually. OCPD hired new staff attorneys to address the influx of new clients. 

Then, during last year’s legislative session, Gov. Ned Lamont’s office proposed lowering the threshold back to 200%, which would have required OCPD to fire the attorneys they just hired. That led to a small skirmish with the governor’s office. 

The public defender’s office pushed back, and ultimately the budget passed without a change to the eligibility threshold. Day said his office has “addressed the need effectively” of the increased mandate and “things are operating smoothly.”

Children’s attorneys particularly underpaid 

The rate OCPD pays assigned counsel who take on child welfare cases is lower still, and the ranks of attorneys who take on this work has thinned. The gig pays a flat fee of $750 per case, even if it stretches out for months or years. A 11% pay hike in 2025 brought the fee to its current level.

These attorneys represent children and guardians in juvenile court cases including abuse and neglect. Some can receive slightly more on top of the flat fee — such as hourly pay for trial or home visits, better pay for termination of parental rights matters, and a higher flat rate for nonprofit firms.

The low pay has led to a decline in the number of attorneys available for child protection matters. Renee Cimino, OCPD’s delinquency defense and child protection director, told the Appropriations Committee that the number fell by 60% over a six-year period.

The list shrank from 275 assigned counsel to 87 at its lowest, as of last February, she said. As of December, there were 98 attorneys on the list, an uptick since the legislature approved raises last year, but still fewer than half the agency’s former ranks.

And the number of attorneys who actually accept cases may be even fewer, said Justine Rakich-Kelly, executive director of the Children’s Law Center of Connecticut. Attorneys don’t usually take their names off the list because it’s easier to remain on it and decline cases as they come, she said. The annual number of cases that assigned counsel decline to take has soared.

Because of the lack of attorneys for children, OCPD fell short of its own child protection standards. The agency failed to make all the child welfare visits it was expected to make, according to a report by the Office of the Child Advocate following the deaths of two children.

OCPD responded last February with an emergency plan to hire 20 social workers, tasked with supporting strained child welfare counsel by conducting in-home visits, collecting records and otherwise assisting attorneys.

But the effort was stymied when it was excluded from the most recent budget, signed into law in June 2025 by Gov. Ned Lamont. Cimino told CT Mirror the agency “did not receive a specific reason from the Legislature for why funding was not provided for the requested 20 social workers.”

OCPD instead hired six social workers, using funds from its general budget, and has amped up recruitment, an effort to respond despite the lack of funding.

What comes next

The agency says the incremental pay increases so far have helped with recruiting and retaining assigned counsel, including for child welfare cases, but more attorneys are needed.

The legislature signaled it would continue to increase pay until Connecticut catches up.

“We’ve been trying to bring those salaries up. We’re not quite there yet,” Osten said. “We want to have people stay and do the work.”

Over the next three years, OCPD has said it will request a total budget increase of $10,711,434 to ultimately settle at an hourly rate of $120 for assigned counsel — still a modest goal compared to peer states.

In the meantime, OCPD is trying to support attorneys in other ways. The agency successfully obtained funding for 13 new translator positions, one for each judicial district. The office hopes that hiring staff interpreters who speak Spanish and Portuguese, the two languages they see most often, will reduce court dates and case delays caused when court translators are unavailable.

“There is a lack of motivation to accept cases,” said Rakich-Kelly. “But the OCPD’s been doing an incredibly great job getting an increase.”