Alva Review-Courier -

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas has slowed the public defender turnover rate following a pay raise, but it remains high.

Last year, the state lost 13% of its public defenders, an improvement from one year earlier when nearly a fourth of them quit, the Kansas News Service reported.

"We have a lot of things that are on fire in our agency," said Heather Cessna, who heads the State Board of Indigents' Defense Services, the agency that provides lawyers to criminal defendants who can't afford their own. "We need to stabilize what we have before we really start to move forward."

Cessna credited the small pay raise from the Legislature for the slowdown. But she says the agency will need more money to fill jobs that have stayed open for years. And the lawyers who remain need better back-up — from support staff to information technology, she said.

Maban Wright makes $66,000 as one of those public defenders, up from the $43,000 she earned at the agency 10 years ago.

"It can be emotionally exhausting," said Wright, who manages 50 to 60 clients at a time. "People who are very kind and giving and softhearted have to develop a thicker skin pretty quickly to survive."

Currently, one office in Wichita, as well as offices in Topeka, Chanute and Independence, have stopped taking cases because they are maxed out on caseloads. Office shutdowns mean cases go to private lawyers paid through state contracts. When those private practices get overwhelmed, cases go to a list of court-appointed attorneys who are paid an hourly rate of $80 — the maximum rate allowed by the state Legislature.

On average, cases that go to private attorneys cost the state $282 more than cases handled by public defenders in fiscal year 2019. The extra cost totaled $4.3 million.

"You can't help people if you're in crisis yourself," Cessna said. "And that's kind of where we're at."

For decades, the legal community has been aware of the low funding and high workloads for public defenders across the country, said Ernie Lewis, executive director of the National Association for Public Defense and a former public defender in Kentucky. But he said there's been little change.

In the long term, he said, that leads to more people going to prison, which puts even more strain on government finances.

"If you don't fund your public defenders sufficiently," Lewis said, "you're going to get mass incarceration."