Judges say Montana public defender backlog taking a toll in Great Falls city court

At a budget meeting in July, Great Falls city court judges identified a key challenge that has created scheduling headaches, case delays and has left some people waiting in jail without an attorney.

“I would say the bigger problem is the delay with the public defender’s office,” Judge Mark Dunn told city commissioners July 21. “And I have found there have been cases 30 to sometimes 60 days out where someone does not have an appointed attorney. And those cases are being continued one to two times before an attorney is even assigned.”

The Montana Office of the State Public Defender (OPD) is the agency that provides defense attorneys to people who otherwise couldn’t afford representation. It operates 20 offices across the state and also contracts with private-practice attorneys to cover its workload.

In statements to Montana Free Press and in agency reports , OPD acknowledged several challenges, including difficulty filling vacant positions, a shortage of contract attorneys and growing caseloads.

In the 2025 fiscal year (roughly mid-2024 to mid-2025), OPD assigned defense attorneys within 14 days in 80% of cases statewide. But for the 5,727 clients who didn’t get an attorney within that two-week benchmark, the average time has been as long as 50 days, according to one OPD report . The agency tracks the metric, along with a complex workload weighting system, to determine its shortfall.

“The shortfall is also not uniform across Montana,” Andrea Moore, OPD’s communications officer, said in emailed statements to MTFP. “It varies by court based on the number and type of new appointments, the local public defender office’s workload capacity, and the local availability of contract public defenders qualified to handle the case type.”

OPD provided emailed statements but declined requests to interview an agency official, citing time constraints.

In Cascade County, the Eighth Judicial District Court has the best average time to assign counsel at 5.7 days, according to data shared by OPD. That is the court that sees most felony criminal cases and larger civil lawsuits. The Cascade County Justice Court, which handles lower-level cases, has an average wait time of 23.8 days.

The latest average wait across all courts in the state is 9.8 days, according to OPD.

At the Great Falls Municipal Court, where judges recently raised concerns, the current average wait time for a defense attorney is 13.7 days, according to OPD. The workload can fluctuate significantly. OPD data show that in 2024, 11 staff attorneys handled 598 cases in Great Falls Municipal Court. The next year, 936 cases were handled by just five staff attorneys — a 56% increase in caseload with fewer than half the personnel.

In cases that take longer to secure a defense attorney, the impact can be significant — for the courts and for defendants who might not have the means to post bond if they end up in jail.

“It is not uncommon for a defendant to be in the jail for over 20 days before they are assigned an attorney,” Municipal Judge Cassidy Blomgren told Great Falls commissioners on July 21. “So this does cause some delay and backlog in the court calendar.”

Blomgren is a former city prosecutor who opposed public defenders in municipal court cases. In Great Falls, that court handles traffic tickets, small civil matters and misdemeanor criminal cases that happen within the city.

In an emailed statement, Great Falls Chief Prosecutor Neil Anthon acknowledged that some defendants have spent a “significant” amount of time waiting in jail before getting an attorney. He said that about two defendants per week need their scheduled hearings postponed because they don’t yet have an attorney.

“It does not have a huge impact on us,” Anthon said in his statement. “The only impact it has is that trials must also be continued, and that can back up trial days.”

Scheduling is a problem for the court. Speaking to commissioners in July, Dunn said that if it takes a month to assign a defense attorney, it often takes additional time for that attorney to get up to speed on a case. Due to all the continuances, a glut of trials might end up being pushed to the same week or day.

Blomgren, the city’s other municipal judge, added that there is potential for challenges to speedy-trial rights.

“I certainly could see an issue coming up at some point in the future of a defendant being like, ‘I didn’t want to waive my speedy trial right, but I didn’t have a choice,’” she said.

Public defenders are subject to lengthy regulations that limit the amount of work that one attorney can accept at once. Those regulations, called “ethical case management,” assign weight to each case based on the perceived work required to complete it, and municipal court cases tend to be weighted lower than complex felony cases in the district court, for example.

Workload limits factor into another group of criteria that dictate how cases are prioritized for assignment, according to Moore, the OPD communications officer. Whether a defendant is in jail is one of the factors. But in general, the need typically outweighs the available staff capacity.

The agency then turns to private practice attorneys to fill the gap.

“Once OPD’s employee public defenders have reached their available monthly capacity under the ECM (ethical case management) workload limits, the agency seeks to place additional cases with contract public defenders,” Moore said in a statement. “However, the number of private attorneys willing and available to accept public defense contract work does not meet the statewide need. This contributes to a monthly shortfall in available public defense services.”

OPD noted in one report that a state finance bill passed by the 2025 Montana Legislature allows wage reviews that led to more competitive salary adjustments for senior and starting public defenders. And the workload through late 2025 and into 2026 has been lower than in previous years.

And for the Great Falls Municipal Court, the addition of a second courtroom last year as part of a remodel has increased the court’s capacity to address its case backlog. But that capacity is diminished when cases can’t proceed because of a shortage of public defenders.

“It causes our schedule to expand,” Dunn said last month. “It creates more time on the court.”

This story was originally published by Montana Free Press and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.