Lawmakers voted in April to spend nearly $1 million on the first team of public defenders, but a disagreement over whether their pay should equal that of prosecutors has stalled the hiring process.
“We are at the point where we are not staffing all of our cases,” said Justin Andrus, executive director of the Maine Commission on Indigent Legal Services. “I have come in here month after month saying we are pulling it off. We are no longer pulling it off.”