Prosecutors and public defenders often deal with low salaries, a small pool of prospective future attorneys and a lack of resources. All combined, this often leads to burnout and mental health struggles, and ultimately, people leaving the profession.
The result is nationwide shortage—including in Indiana, where according to the Indiana Prosecuting Attorneys Council, the state needs at least 500 more prosecutors to meet its needs. Across the Hoosier State’s 92 counties, TheStatehouseFile.com reported earlier this year, only 11% are operating with staff sufficient to manage cases.
Adam Gershowitz, a professor at William & Mary Law School in Virginia, has conducted extensive research on the prosecutor shortage. He said defendants whose charges should be dismissed often end up sitting in jail for longer than necessary when a prosecutor lacks the time to deal with the case.
“The result is that those people may be acquitted when they’re guilty, they may be offered really light plea deals when they shouldn’t be, and so it creates a public safety danger for the rest of us,” he said.
Gershowitz said the shortages have ramifications for defendants and the public: “These are people’s lives, right? And it’s the public safety of you and me.”
Shortages felt across the country
Elizabeth Miller, who has been with the Office of the Ohio Public Defender for about 20 years and was appointed state public defender in January 2024, deems the shortage of prosecutors and public defenders a constitutional crisis.
In 2023, the RAND Corporation, a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges, released a study showing public defenders across the nation are regularly taking on three times the number of cases they can effectively handle.
“Every person, regardless of their income or ability to pay, has the constitutional right to counsel, and we know that in some areas, that constitutional right isn’t being met,” said Miller, who is also the immediate past president of the National Association for Public Defense.
Most offices strive to achieve the 1973 National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, she said. These recommendations provide limits on public defender caseloads. They call for no more than 150 felonies, 400 misdemeanors, 200 mental health cases, 200 juvenile cases or 25 appeals in a year.
“The practice of law has drastically changed when you think about body cam, dash cam, social media and just how much work is required for a public defender to be able to effectively represent their client. It just looks different,” Miller said, referring to the recommendations that were set more than half a century ago.
Emily Galvin Almanza, co-founder and executive director of Partners for Justice, a nonprofit that works to empower public defenders, said she believes the reason the job is so hard on mental health is due to a lack of resources. She said some public defenders have no forensic labs and limited access to experts, with some not having access to an investigator.
“The profession suffers because our governments ask defenders to do incredibly difficult work—high-stress work, high-emotional-labor work—with less resourcing, sometimes less than half the resourcing of the prosecutors in an adversarial system, and no path to improvement,” said Galvin Almanza, who was a public defender for a decade.
Miller said with new technology, there are sometimes two or three terabytes of dash camera videos or electronic discovery to watch for a case, and there’s no choice but to do it because of an ethical obligation.
Mental health challenges
Heaven DiMartino, chief prosecutor of special projects for the Portage County Prosecutor’s Office Civil Division in Ohio, said attorneys have to deal with vicarious trauma through their clients.
“Everything we see is terrible, especially at the felony level,” she said. “You’re talking about rape, robbery, murder, child rape cases—nothing that helps you sleep at night.”
Attorneys are also constantly dealing with systemic injustices and moral injury from the guilt of not being able to devote all of their time to their clients, Miller said.
“When you open up a file every single day and it’s someone either dead, shot or raped, over and over and over, and you don’t have the time to process what was going on, you can imagine, right, that they start taking a lot of that on,” said Sharmese Walcott, state’s attorney for the Judicial District of Hartford, Connecticut.
Growing caseload makes work-life balance difficult
The heavy workload prosecutors and public defenders deal with makes the job harder and cuts into work-life balance, DiMartino said.
Maggie Ostrowski, chief communications officer and policy advisor for the Ohio State Bar Association, said her organization likes to see one lawyer for every 700 people. As of September, 82 of Ohio’s 88 counties didn’t meet that standard. Some have more than 4,000 people per lawyer, according to the Ohio Access to Justice Foundation.
“The cases don’t go away,” Gershowitz said. “Robberies and burglaries and murders and rapes still get charged by the prosecutor’s office, as they should be, and then the result is that the remaining prosecutors just have more cases to handle, and when they have more cases to handle, they cannot do an adequate job on them.”
Kansas attorneys follow the Kansas Rules of Professional Conduct, which ensures attorneys do not take more cases than they can ethically handle.
When public defenders reach this point, they will stop accepting new clients, and the Kansas State Board of Indigents’ Defense Services (BIDS), which operates public defense services in the state, will find a private attorney through the assigned counsel program to represent those clients.
“There have been discussions of potentially moving to withdraw off of cases due to overload, and I’m not going to say that’s not going to happen within the next couple months, but we haven’t gotten there yet,” said Trey Bryant, chief public defender for the North Central Regional Public Defender Office.
Bryant said if he believes his office has too much work from a specific county, he can temporarily stop taking cases from that county, and the new cases will go to private attorneys through the assigned counsel program.
A representative from the BIDS administrative office in Topeka said assigned counsel attorneys cost $120 per hour. This is a more expensive option for the state, since public defenders typically work for a lower salary.
Walcott said the biggest funding issue in her office is not having enough money allocated to hire more prosecutors.
“A shortage of prosecutors would be like, you know, I have 50 positions to fill and I can’t find 50 people that are interested,” she said. “No—our problem is we need 50 positions to fill and we only have 10. We need the state to recognize that we need more prosecutors to do the work that is required.”
Low salaries and difficulty hiring graduates
All of this work does not add up to a reasonable salary, which is one of the main issues for most people, Gershowitz said—especially when paying law school loans and keeping up with the rising cost of living.
In 2020, DiMartino, a prosecutor, said her office’s starting salary was $50,000. They had no applications at all during this period. Today, it’s $75,000-$95,000, depending on placement.
Justin Bravi, chief public defender for the Salina Regional Public Defender Office, said the prosecutor’s office in Salina, Kansas, can offer at least $80,000 a year to new graduates, plus a bonus of about $10,000 if they agree to serve for a certain amount of time. But Bravi’s office can only offer $65,000 a year to public defenders.
Bravi said his office started recruiting from law schools. He has hired three students in their third year of law school over the past three years. But, he said, two left within 18 months because the state is not keeping up with pay.
Even though Sedgwick County is the second most populous in Kansas, McKinnon said she has been having trouble hiring experienced attorneys and keeping newly graduated attorneys for the long term.
McKinnon said many attorneys who join her public defense office leave shortly after gaining some experience to pursue work with better incentives and pay. Bravi said new graduates usually stay about 18 months.
“You come here for learning grounds to cut your teeth, so to speak, but there’s not the pay structure to keep you here to make this the profession that it is,” McKinnon said.
In wealthier counties with larger tax bases, prosecutors’ offices often have more resources and are not affected as much by the shortage, Gershowitz said. But these places likely have less crime.
What’s being done to address the issue
Many firms and organizations are trying to get in front of law school students as much as possible.
“The focus has to start in law school, putting an emphasis on how rewarding and important the work is of being a prosecutor and/or a public defender or defense attorney,” DiMartino said.
Miller feels Ohio has been successful in the past couple of years in helping to solve the shortage. She said offices should partner with law schools to create programs, practicums and placements in public defender offices.
The University of Akron in Ohio is working on applying for a grant to start a prosecutors’ class, DiMartino said. It would bring in prosecutors from across the state to educate students and encourage them to become prosecutors.
The National District Attorneys Association, an organization for prosecutors’ offices, hosted a recruitment and retention symposium, Gershowitz said. It brings together offices from around the country and runs interview programs. The association also holds wellness seminars throughout the country for prosecutors, something DiMartino said more offices need to focus on.
The Rural Practice Incentive Program in Ohio provides loan repayment to new attorneys who work in designated underserved communities for at least three years. The Ohio State Bar Association worked with the state’s General Assembly to create and initially fund this program, Ostrowski said. It was approved and expanded in the last state budget for another two years.
The Washington Supreme Court cut its statewide caseload standards for indigent defense. It lowered the annual felony case expectation from 150 to 47 and the annual misdemeanor case expectation from 400 to 120.
Families pay the price for the shortages
When Chad Rouse was little, he tried to give his clothes to a homeless man. As a teen, he had an old Chevy Impala with the Hulk painted on it that everyone in his Kokomo, Indiana, neighborhood instantly recognized.
Similar anecdotes are told every year on the anniversary of his death, when his mother, Athena Rouse, and her family gather to light paper lanterns in his memory.
Rouse remembers Chad’s blue eyes and his smile the most, and how he would never leave home without reminding his mother and sister that he loved them. She said her son was full of life and a friend to all.
Nov. 15, 2025, marked the 19th anniversary of 20-year-old Chad Rouse’s death. In 2006, he was found murdered in his Kokomo home, allegedly from a robbery gone wrong. Yet nearly two decades after his death, the case has still not gone to trial.
Howard County prosecutor Mark McCann partly attributes that fact to staffing shortages within his office, which he claims have stretched attorneys thin and forced them to work longer hours.
Chad’s murder case went cold until May 2023, when authorities issued a warrant for two suspects in the case.
Kevin Maddox was arrested with charges of robbery resulting in serious bodily injury and conspiracy to commit robbery resulting in serious bodily injury. Amber Brigham was arrested for conspiracy to commit robbery resulting in serious bodily injury and aiding, inducing or causing robbery resulting in serious bodily injury.
It would take two more years until either suspect was scheduled for trial. Then, in April 2025, the Howard County Prosecutor’s Office dismissed Maddox’s case due to staffing issues, and all charges were dropped without prejudice, meaning the case could be refiled at a later date. Brigham’s charges were also dismissed without prejudice.
In August, the prosecutor’s office refiled the charges against Maddox and began his trial. However, after the jury was sworn in, Fox59 reported, McCann “asked the judge to dismiss all charges against Maddox with prejudice. This enacts double jeopardy, meaning Maddox would be released and could not ever be charged again in connection with Rouse’s death.”
“I just really think they were tired and didn’t want to go to court,” said Rouse. “They just wanted it dismissed to save a lot of money.”
Howard County filed 3,004 new criminal cases in 2024, but McCann says his office is operating with less than half the number of prosecutors he needs.
“We’ve run thin for however many years it’s been—30 years—but made it work,” he said. “But that’s no different than any other, you know, regional city, I guess.
“The people who do my job throughout the country have a passion for this and are compassionate people. We don’t want to see anything go wrong, anybody get hurt, the ball dropped, anything like that … We’re there to protect and serve the people who vote us in.”
Chad’s family pivoted to Brigham, the remaining suspect.
“I just want justice for my son,” Rouse said earlier this year. “He needs to rest.”
But on March 19, a jury acquitted Brigham after hearing two days of evidence and deliberating for less an hour. The Kokomo Tribune reported that Chad’s relatives wept in the courtroom when Howard Superior Court 2 Judge Blake Dahl read the verdict.
