In the face of a criminal prosecution system plagued by injustice, there are three actors in a criminal court who could reasonably strike in order to assure justice for the accused: Defense attorneys, defendants, and the jury. (For the purposes of this thought exercise, we can realistically exclude judges, court officers, probation officers, and prosecutors.) Juries can act through jury nullification. Defendants can engage in a plea strike, forcing individual cases to trial. But public defenders, employed and compensated for their time in the courtroom, shut the courts down when they go out on the line. This post explores the stresses on public defenders, their ethical obligations to their clients and profession, the rights of defendants who require counsel, recent organizing efforts, and the interests of society as a whole. 

Better working conditions for public defender

Despite performing a crucial job whose duties are mandated by the U.S. Constitution — representing poor people who cannot afford a criminal lawyer — public defenders face overwhelming caseloads, difficult conditions causing turnover, staggering law school debt, and in many areas of the country, low pay and inadequate staffing. These conditions threaten the erosion of rights for criminal defendants, who are denied zealous representation. 

This is exemplified through high caseloads. In Los Angeles, public defenders sounded the alarm in 2023 about caseloads as high as 500 per attorney at a mental health courthouse, saying attorneys felt pressured to violate the Constitution by inaccurately declaring their clients competent to stand trial. Overwhelming caseloads quickly beget ethical violations. The ABA’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct require lawyers provide competent representation, including thoroughness and preparation (Rule 1.1), and diligence and promptness (Rule 1.3). These obligations become impossible when caseloads are too high to devote adequate time to each client. Los Angeles public defender workloads are more than double the number of possible work hours in a year, the ACLU of Southern California has noted. 

Excessive caseloads also incentivize plea deals. Prosecutors cannot possibly bring every case they handle to trial. A glut of charges, with too few lawyers to prosecute or defend against them, exacerbates coercive plea bargaining, in which defendants are pressured to take guilty pleas to reduce the burden on trial attorneys. 

When clients’ rights are violated this way, states are held responsible. Gideon v. Wainwright held that the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee the right to assistance of counsel, but the right is dwindling with increased prosecution and overstretched public defense. To vindicate this right, the ACLU and its state affiliates have sued in Nevada, Missouri, Louisiana, Idaho, Maine, California, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and other states over inadequate access to, oversight of, or funding of public defenders for defendants. Caseloads are just one example of injustice to which public defenders have a front-row seat.

Recent organizing efforts

2025 has been a pivotal year for agitation and concerted action by public defenders. In New York, over 1,000 unionized public defenders nearly went on strike this summer, as their contracts lined up to expire simultaneously. In Massachusetts, bar advocates coordinated a work stoppage for several months for higher pay, causing disruption to courts and forcing the state to release thousands of unrepresented defendants from confinement. 

Public defense typically operates with three different types of structures, all of which are suitable for organizing. The first is a central public defender office within a branch of the government, where public defenders are often public employees. The second is a system of assigned counsel, like “bar advocates” in Massachusetts, where private attorneys are assigned to take cases and paid by the state. Private counsel are typically independent contractors, exempt from many federal labor protections. The third is an organizational contract system, as in New York, with a broad array of nonprofit public defender organizations. Workers in all three models have engaged in collective work stoppages.

Many defenders envision a world beyond higher pay and more staffing, where rather than accepting the infinite expansion of the need for legal services, fewer crimes are prosecuted in the first place. Public defender strikes, like defendant plea strikes, can push a state to reckon with over-criminalization. As Free Speech Movement organizer Mario Savio said, “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part.” Halting the system through a public defender strike may advance abolitionist aims by forcing the state to immediately decarcerate people, if courts are prepared to recognize defendants’ constitutional rights against prolonged detention.

For example, at the beginning of August of 2025, there were more than 4,000 unrepresented defendants in Massachusetts courts during the bar advocate work stoppage. In the state, defendants who have been incarcerated for a week without representation must be released, and those who remain unrepresented for 45 days see their cases dismissed, under a protocol stemming from the case Lavallee v. Justices In Hampden Superior Court, 442 Mass. 228 (2004). In July, over 100 cases were dismissed. 

But work stoppages can leave incarcerated people in poverty languishing in jail without representation — disproportionately affecting Black defendants, people with mental illness, and immigrants, who are all more likely to face criminalization. Still, months into Massachusetts’ bar advocate strike, the state finally embraced releases. (Indefinite detention without representation has constitutional limits: In 2023, a federal district court similarly ordered Oregon, in its own public defender crisis, to release defendants within seven days if not provided an attorney by the court, in Betschart v. State of Oregon.)

Meanwhile, this summer, a union representing many of New York City’s public defenders, the Association of Legal Advocates and Attorneys (ALAA), UAW Local 2325, undertook historic sectoral bargaining to fight for better conditions for themselves and their clients and higher pay to reduce turnover. ALAA has a long-term strategic vision: They lined up many of their contracts to expire simultaneously on June 30, 2025. Members mobilized not only for reasonable workloads, but also considerations like remote work and student loan debt relief, and won a new contract on the eve of a strike. They plan future contracts which will expire simultaneously across the city in 2028.

This alignment allows union members to not only demand concessions from their employers, but extract funding from the state and city for underfunded legal services. ALAA now represents workers at nearly all legal services firms in New York City. Because of the union’s power and membership numbers across the city, they can threaten a strike that would effectively shut down NYC courts. 

Furthermore, sectoral bargaining opens the possibility for bargaining for the common good, including public defenders bargaining for abolitionist aims, like jail closures, diversion, less funding for police, or cash bail elimination, with the goal of shrinking the system of carceral punishment.

Whatever the structure, and with or without a union, attorneys defending indigent clients in criminal courts are responding to a deep crisis and acting collectively to demand the resources to do their jobs — and possibly slow the growth of an unjust criminal system.