Public defenders look back on 2025 legislative session
Chief Public Defender Bennet Baur. (Photo courtesy of the Law Offices of the Public Defender)
Philip Larragoite, chief of staff for the New Mexico Legislature's Senate Judiciary Committee, says his measure of a legislative session's success isn't so much the bills lawmakers passed but, rather, the ones they did not.
'You can't hear 'em all, and the Judiciary Committee in the Senate was pretty rigorous about what it hears and what it acts on,' Larragoite told the state Public Defender Commission on Friday during its regular meeting in Albuquerque — its first since the session ended on March 22. 'Our Constitution is hard-wired — it's supposed to be hard to adopt legislation, hard to pass bills.'
The commission oversees the Law Offices of the Public Defender, the independent state agency that employs public defenders who represent anyone charged with a crime in New Mexico.
Larragoite, who is also LOPD's deputy chief of policy and statewide offices, noted that he has participated in more than 70 legislative sessions, the earliest in 1961 as a page for Jack Campbell, who was House Speaker at the time.
Appellate Defender Kim Chavez Cook, who also works as LOPD's policy advocate during legislation sessions, agreed that it is important to note the bills that did not pass.
She highlighted two examples of bills that were 'priorities for us to stop': House Bill 204, a proposal that comes up every year to try to remove defense pre-trial interviews from certain cases; and House Bill 190, which would have given alleged victims in criminal cases the right to be a litigant in those cases.
Chavez Cook said LOPD had 'serious due process concerns' with HB204, and put a lot of time and energy into discussions about it. HB190 raised 'some serious separation of powers and other related concerns,' she said. Neither bill received a single vote in committee this year.
'We'll keep doing that year after year, many of these things will come back again,' Chavez Cook said.
Policy aside, Chief Public Defender Bennet Baur told the Commission on Friday he was disappointed by the budget outcomes. During the recent session, his agency asked lawmakers for a nearly 13% increase in its annual budget but only received a 4.1% increase.
Lawmakers did not give LOPD any money for additional full-time staff positions, Baur said, but they did give the agency $450,000 to spend over the next two years for recruitment and retention.
Hundreds of additional public defenders would be needed to properly handle all of the cases coming through the state's criminal legal system, and there is a longstanding disparity of resources between public defenders and their opponents in court, district attorneys.
The American Bar Association found in 2022 that New Mexico needs at least 602 full-time attorneys and is currently only meeting 33% of clients who need a legal defense.
Baur said many lawmakers were concerned about the economy in the U.S. and the state as they considered the budget, and are probably even more concerned about it now than they were during the session.
In the last four years, he said, lawmakers have funded 54 new staff positions. LOPD has an overall vacancy rate of 11%, better than most state agencies, he said. That rate is higher for attorney positions, at 16.8%, he said.
Many public defenders aren't actually full-time staff employed by LOPD, but are contractors who are paid a flat fee for taking on cases rather than an hourly rate.
For example, when a contractor takes on a first-degree murder case, the state pays them a base rate of $5,400. For the whole case. That means, on average, that attorney is making $13.81 per hour representing their client, according to the ABA's study.
In some jurisdictions, paying a public defender a flat fee is outlawed, said Commissioner Jacqueline Flores, a former Second Judicial District Court judge.
Baur said lawmakers didn't give LOPD money to launch a pilot project for paying contract attorneys an hourly rate. But he said he's determined to still try to do it by 'rearranging money' within the agency's existing budget.
'Those of you that know the budget process know that you never get what you ask for,' Baur said. 'But if you don't ask for it, then you don't get it.'
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