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...