“We are failing the people who are dragged every day to the criminal legal system, the family separation system and the immigration detention system,” Luongo said. “Because that is who is at the heart of representing clients and representing those families.”
The public defender groups said the new funding would go directly toward attorney salaries, which begin around $80,000 to $90,000 at most organizations in the five boroughs.
Salaries for public defense attorneys in places like Los Angeles, Atlanta, Seattle, Oakland and San Francisco begin at upward of $100,000. The same is true for public defenders in at least seven counties in upstate New York, according to Stan Germán, the executive director of New York County Defender Services.
“Our staff are forced to choose between, ‘Do I have a child and incur all the expenses with child care? Or do I stay as a public defender?’” Germán said. “What we see increasingly is, of course, they’re leaving our offices, whether it’s to buy a home or to start a family.”
“When you lose that experience, case processing takes a hit,” he added. “A more senior lawyer can adjudicate a case more quickly than a younger attorney who’s learning the process.”
Though they said a disparity between public defenders and prosecutors already exists in New York, it would likely only grow larger if the additional funding for staff isn’t allocated by the city in its upcoming Fiscal Year 2027 budget.
District attorneys’ offices have seen new funding to hire prosecutors and buy new technology for case processing from both the city and state in recent years. The NYPD’s budget, which is currently over $6.4 billion, has also consistently grown over the past decade, though Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s preliminary budget plan keeps police department funding relatively flat for the coming fiscal year.
“Year after year, this city and this Council has found money to keep police officers and district attorneys in their jobs and guarantee them a pension, while at the same time, our union members have been pushed out, told they are not worthy of an affordable wage or dignified retirement because of the people we represent every day,” said Jane Fox, the chair of the chapter of the Association of Legal Advocates and Attorneys at the Legal Aid Society.
ALAA union members at The Bronx Defenders, Neighborhood Defender Services of Harlem, Catholic Migration Services, the Center for Family Representation and Brooklyn Defender Services will all see their labor agreements expire in June.
Fox said that without city funding, there won’t be enough money for the union to demand “fair contracts” from the organizations.
“Austerity budgets in legal services hurt our union and they hurt New Yorkers,” she said. “Settling fair contracts will provide stability and ensure working-class New Yorkers get the absolute best legal representation, because they deserve nothing less.”