New York State Allocated Millions For Public Defense. NYC Isn't Using It.

By Reuven Blau, The City

Jan. 21, 2026, 5:00 a.m.

New York State has poured more than $65 million into public defense over the past seven years, but nearly all of that money bypassed New York City, helping fuel what defender groups now warn is a staffing and retention crisis in the city’s courts, according to a new report by eight local bar associations.

The state’s Office of Indigent Legal Services has allocated those funds for public defender groups, but nearly all have gone to organizations outside New York City, the report published Monday evening says.

The report places much of the blame on the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, commonly known as MOCJ, saying the agency applied for only a small portion of the available money and has failed to meaningfully reform or adequately fund the city’s Assigned Counsel Plan (ACP), which provides court-appointed lawyers for people who can’t afford one in criminal cases.

“By failing to make any sort of positive change in the way ACP representation is provided, MOCJ has thwarted the [plan’s] legislative mandate and failed hundreds of thousands of low-income individuals accused of crimes,” according to the 17-page report.

The bar associations’ task force — which represents attorneys in New York City — urged the city to take “immediate action” to remove the program from the office’s control.

The recommendation comes as Mayor Zohran Mamdani prepares to place his highly anticipated new “community safety” office under the agency’s jurisdiction, according to multiple government insiders.

MOCJ already oversees assigned counsel contracts and criminal justice data analysis, giving the agency sweeping influence over how the city polices, prosecutes and defends low-income New Yorkers.

Its ability to access state funding for the defender organizations was constrained for years by its placement within City Hall for budgetary purposes, according to the agency, which is also in charge of the shutdown plan for Rikers Island jails, now delayed until at least 2031.

Under the first five-year contract, which ran from 2018 through mid-2023, the state allocated roughly $33 million to the counsel program. That included more than $23 million for staffing and millions more for training, quality improvements, technology and support programs.

Yet for the first two and a half years of that contract, MOCJ did not submit a single reimbursement claim to the state, leaving more than $13 million in available funds unspent, according to the report.

MOCJ has also barely touched another $34.5 million state contract for similar expenses which took effect July 1, 2023, and runs through June 30, 2026, the task force said.

A spokesperson for MOCJ said the agency agrees with many of the task force’s findings, including the need to restructure the Assigned Counsel Plan, but cautioned against what the agency described as quick fixes.

“Addressing some of the challenges identified in the report with immediate ‘fixes’ — such as doubling the current staffing — would further complicate that restructuring and chances for long-term success,” said MOCJ spokesperson Noah Pransky.

Pransky said the office has welcomed the task force as a partner and defended the agency’s record, saying it’s “proud of our work thus far to improve the ACP’s ability to respond to the needs of vulnerable New Yorkers.”

“There are many challenges that face the [program], but we look forward to hearing more from the task force about their ideas for long-term solutions toward restructuring,” he added.

MOCJ is currently being run by Deanna Logan, who was appointed by former Mayor Eric Adams. Mamdani’s team has been interviewing potential new candidates to head the agency, according to a City Hall source.

During the Adams administration, the agency took a backseat, rarely issuing public reports until the last month of the administration. MOCJ formerly controlled the city’s Cure Violence contracts, though oversight was later moved to the Department of Youth and Community Development as part of a broader restructuring.

Approximately two years ago, MOCJ was officially moved out of the mayor’s office and designated its own agency. But bureaucratic red tape has slowed that transition.

The report was produced by a joint task force formed last year amid mounting concerns about chronic delays, staffing shortages and funding failures within the Assigned Counsel Plan.

Eight local bar associations created the panel to evaluate the structure and operation of the program and to recommend reforms.

Task force members stressed that their review was not an evaluation of individual court-appointed lawyers, whom the report describes as an “indispensable component” of the city’s public defense system. Instead, the panel conducted extensive fact-finding into the program’s independence, funding mechanisms and staffing.

People charged with a crime who can’t pay for their own lawyer must get one appointed to them, according to a landmark 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision known as Gideon v. Wainwright and multiple subsequent court decisions.

Currently, defender organizations handle between 80% and 90% of all criminal cases in New York City. But the groups have long argued that their staff are overwhelmed by high caseloads and the low pay leads to massive attrition.

The task force includes court-appointed panel attorneys, ACP staff, current and former employees of institutional public defender offices, family court panel members, bar association leaders, and representatives from the New York Supreme Court Appellate Division’s First and Second Departments.

Overall, the report also found that the Assigned Counsel Plan has been chronically understaffed for years. The program lacks a technical coordinator to manage the massive volumes of digital discovery now required under recent changes to state law, according to the task force.

In 2019, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a discovery reform law requiring prosecutors to turn over all evidence before trial.

The ACP was also eligible for discovery-management grants from the state Division of Criminal Justice Services, but MOCJ did not include the program on a list of city providers submitted for funding, the report said.

The report also found that court-appointed lawyers in New York City often lack meaningful access to expert witnesses and specialized professionals.

Currently, the Assigned Counsel Plan maintains a roster of approved experts including investigators, interpreters, mental health specialists and forensic professionals.

But the list is outdated and difficult to use, and some experts have retired or are no longer available, according to the report. The roster also lacks sufficient experts in critical areas such as DNA analysis, digital forensics and mental health, the report concluded. Attorneys also reported chronic shortages of criminal case investigators and interpreters, particularly for cases involving clients held at Rikers, the review found.

The report blamed those gaps in part on staffing failures within the ACP itself.

The program’s Director of Expert and Ancillary Services is overwhelmed with clerical duties and lacks the capacity to recruit and manage expert providers, the task force said.

Meanwhile, MOCJ has declined for nearly a year to fill a key support position responsible for enrolling new experts into the city’s payment system even though a qualified candidate has already been identified, according to the report.

As a result, panel attorneys often struggle to secure pre-approved experts and must instead search for their own, a time-consuming process.

The task force also faulted the office for saddling the Assigned Counsel Plan with a case management system that attorneys and administrators say still fails to meet basic operational needs.

Before 2023, the ACP did not have a true case management system at all, relying instead on a city-run voucher platform known as 18B Web. When the city abruptly shut that system down in July 2023, MOCJ rushed to roll out a new platform, ACP Cases, the following month, leaving little time for testing or training.

Panel attorneys reported widespread problems after the launch, including misassigned cases and months-long delays in voucher payments, the report said.

Since that time the system has improved and some attorneys say they are now being paid more reliably.

Still, the report found that ACP Cases remains cumbersome and poorly suited to the work of court-appointed lawyers. Attorneys said they must manually enter billing information because the system’s drop-down menus do not reflect the work they actually perform, and the platform cannot reliably distinguish between open and closed cases. That makes it difficult for administrators to monitor workloads.

More critically, the report said the system does not collect key data the ACP is legally required to report to the state. That includes the number of hours attorneys spend on different types of cases, case outcomes, and whether expert witnesses were used.

Task force members noted that comparable programs elsewhere in the state use systems better tailored to assigned counsel work and said repeated requests to fix ACP Cases have gone unanswered.

This press release was produced by The City. The views expressed here are the author’s own.