By Ruth Brown, Idaho Reports
The Joint Finance-Appropriation Committee lobbed questions at the new State Public Defender Eric Fredericksen on Tuesday as his office asked for a significant budget increase.
The SPD budget includes three supplemental requests for the current fiscal year totaling about $8.3 million, most of which will go to additional needed personnel and contract attorney costs.
Sen. Kevin Cook, R-Idaho Falls, asked if the office could actually spend that much by the end of the fiscal year.
Fredericksen said he believes they could, focusing on rural areas where they most need attorneys.
The new office has filled most of its available positions but lost some attorneys from the prior county-level offices during the changeover. Some existing county public defenders faced significantly decreases in salaries and didn’t take the job with the state.
The governor’s recommendation for the office for fiscal year 2026 is $88 million, with most of the funding coming from a dedicated fund. That’s up from the $52 million appropriation last fiscal year, but the office did not take over public defense for the state until Oct. 1, 2024, which was mid-fiscal year. So, the increase in expenditures should not be entirely surprising.
Fredericksen’s budget requests funding for nearly 18 new positions and funding to create institutional offices in Elmore, Shoshone, Benewah and Jerome counties. Those counties currently use contracted private counsel to handle indigent defense. The new institutional offices would be in addition to the 12 Idaho counties already using institutional offices.
“The struggle that we have had was that numbers the new agency was created on were based on COVID, and COVID numbers, cases were low, trials were low, a lot of cases were held,” Fredericksen said about need for funding increase. “So, the numbers we had initially were low.”
He acknowledged that the office also lost a lot of attorneys with experience because they didn’t have the allocation to pay them.
Sen. Melissa Wintrow, D-Boise, questioned him about the history of the public defense in Idaho, saying the Legislature could have done a better job of setting him up for success.
“We lost a lot of contractors,” said Fredericksen. “There were a lot of flat-fee contracts in the state of Idaho, but we can’t have flat-fee contracts. It’s unethical and unconstitutional. And so the way to move forward was to increase (the payment).”
If the state were to use flat-fee contracts, the amount of compensation could vary by county, which is what the state is trying to avoid.
Fredericksen said his attorneys have also been appointed to cases like custody cases where an attorney is unavailable, which is not necessarily the intent of his office.
The Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution entitles all criminal defendants to an attorney at public expense if they cannot afford one.
The committee will set a budget for the Office of the State Public Defender at a later date.
Ruth Brown | Producer
Ruth Brown grew up in South Dakota and her first job out of college was covering the South Dakota Legislature. She’s since moved on to Idaho lawmakers. Brown spent 10 years working in print journalism, including newspapers such as the Idaho Statesman and Idaho Press, where she’s covered everything from the correctional system to health care issues. She joined Idaho Reports in 2021 and looks forward to telling stories about how state policy can impact the lives of regular Idahoans.