A large percentage of public defenders are working hours that exceed recommended standards, the state auditor’s office found in a recent report, and corrective measures are needed to ensure adequate representation for the criminally accused.

The auditor’s report noted that since its last study of the Office of the State Public Defender in 2003, the number of cases closed had nearly doubled. The office estimates it had only 76% of the attorneys and staff it needed to handle the 130,900 cases it closed last fiscal year.

At the same time, “none of the OSPD attorneys we spoke with indicated that high caseloads caused them to provide representation below the standards established under the Rules of Professional Conduct,” the audit noted, while also cautioning that some public defenders indicated they were working seven days a week.

Megan Ring, the head of the public defender’s office, told lawmakers earlier this year that a key driver of the increased workload is the routine use of body-worn camera footage, phone recordings and data in criminal prosecutions.

“We’ve seen a 4,500% increase in discovery since 2016,” she said in January. “Body-worn cameras have been phenomenal. We need to have that. But it is so much data.”

The public defender’s office agreed with virtually all of the audit’s recommendations, including the need to study its workload and measure its overall staffing needs. However, the office disputed, in part, the suggestion that individual attorneys’ time should be tracked more precisely.

“It is a public defender’s core belief that individual time spent does not equate to effectiveness or ethical representation,” Ring’s office wrote. “It stifles creative practice, professional independence, defenders helping each other and co-chairing cases.”

The report countered that the public defender’s office does not have any mechanism currently for tracking attorney hours, which is necessary to evaluate staffing needs.

The audit found that the various benchmarks for public defender staffing suggested at least 46% and as many as 99% of attorneys work on more cases than are recommended. During this year’s legislative session, four Democratic lawmakers introduced a bill that would have required the public defender’s office to implement workload standards to guard against “excessive” caseloads. The bill died in committee.

“Excessive caseloads create unnecessary delays in resolving criminal cases, increasing rates of pretrial detention, coercing innocent clients into guilty pleas, and forcing high attrition within OSPD. These harms impact everyone involved in the criminal legal system, including victims, defendants, witnesses, law enforcement, and the community as a whole,” said the Defenders Union of Colorado at the time.

The audit also identified rural public defenders needing to drive long distances, supervisors having high caseloads in addition to their management duties and staff vacancies as additional factors leading to high workloads. Attorneys who spoke to the auditors said they are not able to speak to their clients as much as they would like or explore every possible issue in a case because of their obligations.

Auditors further found the office did not always have sufficient documentation to justify its decisions for whether defendants qualified as indigent and eligible for public defender representation. The auditors acknowledged clients may struggle to complete the forms or provide supporting documentation, but suggested the office better train staff and implement a process to review eligibility decisions.

Finally, auditors recommended the office do a better job at monitoring the training of new attorneys.