Alaska Public Defender Agency has no attorneys in Nome to take on new serious felony cases

By Megan Gannon
As of last Monday, the Alaska Public Defender Agency is no longer accepting new serious felony cases in Nome and Bethel. Those regional offices currently face a shortage of experienced public defenders who can handle such cases, according to Samantha Cherot, head of the Alaska Public Defender Agency.
In letters to the Superior Court judges presiding over Nome and Bethel, Cherot said that the agency “lacks the capacity internally to provide representation in these matters consistent with its ethical and constitutional obligations.”
The news was first reported by the Anchorage Daily News.
Cherot declined an interview with the Nugget and instead sent statements she had given to other reporters. She said that the agency needs four to five experienced attorneys between Nome and Bethel to ethically represent clients charged with unclassified and class A felonies. These are considered the most serious crimes—such as murder and sexual assault—and may be punishable by long prison sentences if defendants are found guilty.
The agency “continues to lose trial attorneys with the necessary training and experience to handle the most serious felony cases,” Cherot said. In her letter to Presiding Judge of the Second Judicial District Paul Roetman, Cherot wrote that the agency currently only has two lawyers to represent individuals who are charged in Nome and the surrounding areas. One works in the Nome office and has only been practicing law for about one year. The other attorney, who started the job two months ago, works in the agency’s Anchorage office and is new to criminal law.
“Neither lawyer has the experience necessary to represent individuals charged with unclassified or A felonies,” Cherot wrote. She added that the agency is trying to reassign the caseload of a more experienced attorney who recently resigned from the Nome office.
“[T]his includes approximately 100 cases, including approximately 20 unclassified and class A felonies,” Cherot said. “If the agency is unable to reassign all of these cases, it may require the agency to withdraw.”
Cherot said in her emailed statement that the agency rarely receives job applications from experienced attorneys. “The majority of applications the agency receives are from third year law students or law clerks who can’t join the agency until August or September of each year,” Cherot said. “This means that when an attorney resigns between October and July each year, not only does the Agency not have a replacement for several months, the new attorneys lack the experience and training necessary to handle serious felony cases.”
Cherot was hopeful that the situation could improve with few additional attorneys with the necessary training and experience to handle unclassified and A felonies. “Otherwise, the agency needs time for its existing qualified attorneys to resolve many of their pending cases before they can ethically accept new cases or for newer attorneys to gain the necessary experience to be able to handle these case types,” she said.
Alaska has another state agency, the Office of Public Advocacy, or OPA, that represents clients who are not able to pay for their own defense attorney. However, OPA is only supposed to be assigned cases when the Public Defender Agency, or PDA, has a conflict of interest that prevents it from representing a client. Resource and staffing issues at the PDA have never been considered a conflict, James Stinson, OPA’s director, said in an email. “The legislature never intended for OPA to be the front-line defense agency for the state,” he said. “We are not staffed, funded, or structured to be.”
OPA has a Rural Defense Section that handles cases for areas like Nome. But only three attorneys work in that office, and they carry all levels of criminal cases, including a high number of unclassified and A felony cases, Stinson said. Michael Schwaiger, OPA’s supervising attorney for the Rural Defense Section, also told the Nugget that it would be “impossible” to have a three-attorney office in back-to-back serious felony trials, especially when they have other important work to handle, such as child-in-need-of-aid, or CINA, cases.
“No one can manage that,” Schwaiger said. “There are daily hearings for all different types of cases. All clients and all cases are important.”
One driving factor in this shortage of experienced public defenders is “the immense backlog of cases that built up during COVID,” according to Stinson. Very few trials occurred during the early pandemic. Data from the Alaska Department of Corrections shows that the percentage of individuals incarcerated and still awaiting trial has increased from about 43 percent in July 2017 to 56 percent in July 2022. Now the courts are trying to clear that backlog.
“But attorneys can only be in back-to-back felony trials for so long before they burn out,” Stinson said. “The pace of trials is certainly a factor contributing to attrition. This is a difficult problem, because I understand why the judiciary wants to clear the backlog as fast as possible. Everyone wants the backlog cleared. But we also cannot afford to lose our most experienced practitioners.”
The PDA and OPA can hire contract lawyers, but Stinson noted that there are fewer and fewer attorneys willing to take on contract defense work for clients who don’t have the resources to pay for their own attorney. Cherot also said her agency “has only been able to identify a limited number of contractors with the skill and experience to represent individuals charged with unclassified and class A felonies.” She added that these contractors usually can only take a few cases at a time.
Rex Butler, a private attorney who has taken on contract work with OPA since the 1980s, told the Nugget he thought the news about the public defender shortage seemed “unbelievable” at first.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Butler said. “Obviously the agency must be stretched thin in order to even come out publicly with such a statement.” He also saw the caseload as one of the problems within the PDA.
“Everybody knows, or should know, that lawyers within the agency are overworked,” Butler said. “You have good lawyers who have a deluge of clients with not enough support.” He said it should not come as a surprise when they leave—especially when those lawyers know that serious felony cases “need attorneys who can put their heart and soul into the defense” to get the best results for their clients.
“You can’t do it with those current workloads,” Butler said. “I think that’s what drives people out.”