Lawyers Ask Supreme Court To Support Public Defender Pay Increase

Private lawyers who represent low-income clients in Wisconsin are asking the state Supreme Court to support their first pay raise in decades.

Private lawyers are hired when the Wisconsin State Public Defender’s Office has a full workload or other conflicts. Those lawyers are paid $40 an hour. That amount hasn’t changed much since the 1970s.

Jerry Buting, a defense attorney in Wisconsin, said at a state Capitol press conference Thursday that the current hourly pay isn’t enough to hire good attorneys to represent those who qualify for public defender representation in court.

“The scales of justice are not balanced in Wisconsin,” Buting said. “Poor people lose and the rest of us lose respect for the law and increasingly lose our faith in the reliability of the outcomes that happen in our courts.”

A coalition of lawyers filed a petition with the Supreme Court on Thursday to support increasing the salary to $100 per hour and linking future compensation rates to annual cost of living increases.

“Unreasonably low attorney compensation rates interfere with a lawyers’ ethical and constitutional obligations to give undivided loyalty to each and every defendant,” the petition reads.

Francis Deisinger, president of the State Bar of Wisconsin, argued it is in the state’s financial interest to increase the private lawyers’ pay.

“The shortage of qualified private bar attorneys willing or even able to work at this rate, especially in areas outside our population centers, has caused delays and postponements, which inconvenience victims and police officers and increase county jail stays at great cost to our taxpayers,” he said.

A similar petition was filed seven years ago with no success.