Maryland Public Defender's Office Seeks More Help

By William J. Ford, Maryland Matters

December 2, 2025

The Maryland Office of the Public Defender plans to continue pushing its mantra to pursue justice and equity to serve all people fairly — but says it needs help to do so.

Boosting the size of the office to keep pace with an increased workload will be among the office’s main requests to legislators next year, along with trying again to end the practice of charging youths as adults and cutting down on random traffic stops by police.

The office’s workload increased from 85,000 cases in fiscal 2023 to more than 100,000 in fiscal 2025. Public Defender Natasha Dartigue said in an interview last week that the office needs another 550 attorneys and 240 administrative positions, which include secretaries and paralegals. The office’s 2025 report states it has about 630 attorneys in 52 locations in all 23 counties and Baltimore City.

There’s no price tag for that request yet, but Dartigue put the salary for an entry-level attorney at $85,000, rising to the low $100,000 for an individual with several years of experience.

Acknowledging the state’s fiscal woes — latest estimates predict a nearly $1.5 billion deficit for fiscal 2027 — Dartigue said her request tries “to address our needs, even though that is not going to make us whole.”

“We have to invest in OPD [Office of the Public Defender] because either you’re going to pay it on the front end, or you’re going to pay it on the back end,” she said.

On that point, she noted recent Board of Public Works payments to people wrongfully convicted, like the August payment of $3 million to Baltimore resident James Langhorne, who spent 27 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

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She also pointed to a 2023 National Public Defense Workload Study that said excessive attorney caseloads not only affect client representation, as “overloaded public defense attorneys simply cannot give appropriate time and attention to each client,” they can harm communities as well.

“A justice system burdened by triage risks unreliability, denying all people who rely on it – victims, witnesses, defendants, and their families and communities – efficient, equal, and accurate justice,” the report said.

Dartigue said her office is currently working on a new workload study. That report, being done in conjunction with the RAND Corp., will include an assessment of the number of cases and hours spent on juvenile cases. The study produced two years ago focused on adult cases.

In a Nov. 18 legislative briefing, Dartigue asked for the public’s help to “support budget requests.” She also highlighted two criminal justice reform proposals that failed last year, but which her office will push for again in 2026.

Traffic stops

Baltimore County Democrats Sen. Charles Sydnor III and Del. N. Scott Philips plan to bring back a bill to reclassify a number of primary traffic violations — for which police can pull a driver over — to secondary violations.

Their 2025 bills would have made secondary offenses out of driving without a mirror or with obstructed or damaged mirrors, excessive noise, and failure to illuminate a license plate, among others. Drivers could still be cited for those violations, but only after being pulled over for another primary violation.

Sydnor said last week that work continues on drafting a bill for the incoming session that may cut down on the number of targeted primary offenses.

The proposal aims to combat racial profiling, which Sydnor said is even more important now, after a preliminary U.S. Supreme Court ruling in September that lifted a lower court’s ban on law enforcement officials using “apparent ethnicity” as one factor in determining reasonable suspicion, as long as it is not the only factor.

“You’ve given it a foundation where you give them the go-ahead to racially profile,” Sydnor said of the court’s ruling. “It’s … on us as state officials to protect our citizens from this stuff, and to make certain that our law enforcement is not acting in that manner.”

But Maryland Fraternal Order of Police President Clyde Boatwright said some of the targeted primary violations have “value,” such as when a motorist leaves a bar at 2 a.m. without the headlights on.

“That person could be pulled over and given a warning [and told], ‘Hey, cut your headlights on,’ or that could be a person that’s driving under the influence of some sort of substance,” said Boatwright, who’s running for Baltimore County sheriff in next year’s election.

‘We care’

Dartigue’s office also plans to again back Sen. William C. Smith Jr.’s (D-Montgomery) bill to ban the state’s practice of automatically charging youth as adults.

Smith, who talked about the legislation last month at a juvenile justice forum at Georgetown University, said eliminating the practice could save the state $17 million, which could be used for mental health treatment and other social services. Smith said at least 85% of cases that involve youth brought into adult court are dismissed or brought back to juvenile court.

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His bill this year would have raised the age at which a youth would be tried as an adult, from 14 to 16. It also would have made those 16 and younger eligible for juvenile court if charged with crimes that include first-degree assault, third-degree sex offense and certain offenses involving firearms.

Boatwright said youth who commit serious crimes are having an “impact on the officers in the line of duty.” He pointed to the case of Baltimore County Police Officer Amy Caprio, 29, who was struck and killed in 2018 by a stolen vehicle driven by Dawnta Harris, then 16. Harris was eventually sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole, and another 20 years for burglary. Three other teens in the vehicle, ages 15, 16 and 17, pleaded guilty to felony murder and were sentened to 30 years.

“Young people, particularly minors, involved in violent crime should be able to be held accountable, and the law already provides guardrails on who can be charged as an adult and who shouldn’t,” Boatwright said.

“We care about how experiences impact young people and shape their lives,” he said. “Allowing kids to be kids? Yes, we agree with that statement, to the extent that people are not being severely injured or killed.”

Dartigue reiterated a statistic that hasn’t changed: Maryland ranks second in the nation, behind Alabama, in the number of 14- to 17-year-olds automatically sent to adult court. The number in Maryland rose from 618 in fiscal 2024 to 798 in fiscal 2025.

About 81% of the children charged as adults are Black, compared to a 30% Black population in the state overall.

“We somehow forget that they are children,” Dartigue said. “We, as the adults and the system operators, also have to be accountable to our communities and one another.”