Wisconsin court staffing bill dies in state Senate

A Republican lawmaker and the state public defender’s office are among those expressing dismay about the apparent death of a bill that would have added more court personnel.

The aborted proposal would have allowed Wisconsin to hire more than 100 people to work in courts across the state. That included nearly 69 additional district attorneys, 18 assistant public defenders, several dozen public defender support staffers and several more judges.

The proposal cleared Wisconsin’s GOP-controlled Assembly in February, but never made it to a Senate vote.

Last week, the Republican-led state Senate wrapped up its regularly scheduled business for the rest of the year. That means the bill appears to have fizzled out with the end of the legislative session.

The proposal’s author, Rep. David Steffen, R-Howard, called that development “greatly disappointing,” but said he’s “confident” the court positions will be added in when lawmakers start work next year on the upcoming state budget.

“We have a system that’s on the brink and needs to have the proper staffing in order to operate correctly,” Steffen said during a Monday afternoon interview with WPR.

The statewide public defender’s office expressed a similar sentiment after state senators adjourned last week. In a news release, the office accused lawmakers of having “cut short a lifeline for Wisconsin’s overburdened public defense system.”

“Our attorneys are drowning, and it’s Wisconsinites who pay the price when constitutional rights are treated as an optional expense,” State Public Defender Jennifer Bias said in a statement.

The No. 2 person in that office, Deputy Public Defender Bridget Krause, echoed those concerns in an interview Friday with PBS Wisconsin’s “Here & Now.”

In some instances, Krause noted that Wisconsinites are stuck in jail while they’re waiting for their cases to move forward.

“We don’t want people sitting there that could be innocent of the crimes that they’ve been accused of because they don’t have a lawyer to represent them,” Krause told PBS Wisconsin host Frederica Freyberg.

Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostburg, has not yet responded to a question from WPR about why the legislation was never scheduled for a vote.

Steffen said some Republican senators were concerned about the proposal’s cost and believed it should have been addressed through the state budget instead of as a standalone bill.

Steffen said he introduced the legislation to counteract a “dramatic backlog” of criminal cases. That backlog has been hurting victims and infringing on the rights of defendants, Steffen said. And he said, in many cases, counties are bearing the costs of locking people up for extra time pre-trial.

“Individuals, who should typically have a preliminary hearing within 10 days, are sometimes waiting up to two years to have their day in court.” Steffen told WPR. “That is justice denied.”

Last year, it took nearly eight months on average for a felony case to work its way through Wisconsin’s courts. In recent years, the state’s court backlogs have eased somewhat although cases are still taking longer to resolve compared to before the COVID-19 pandemic struck.

The state’s most-recent budget included funding for additional prosecutor positions, but Krause said hiring for public defenders hasn’t kept pace with the need for those attorneys.

“If you don’t have the lawyers on the other side to represent those clients, it just bottlenecks the system,” Krause said on “Here & Now.”

In 2022, a group of people who had been charged with crimes in Wisconsin filed a lawsuit in Brown County. That ongoing lawsuit alleges their constitutional rights have been violated by long wait times for public defenders.

Steffen’s proposal had previously attracted bipartisan support, but some Democrats voted against it in the Assembly after Republicans added an amendment that removed four assistant public defender and six public defender support staff positions.

Those positions had been earmarked for Milwaukee County.

State Sen. LaTonya Johnson, D-Milwaukee, said she was told that those positions were taken out because some Republicans were upset with the Milwaukee-area public defender’s office because of that office’s criticism of Enough is Enough, an anti-reckless driving advocacy group.

Steffen told WPR he agreed to take out those public defender positions in order to get enough Republican support to pass the Assembly. He said he’s hopeful those Milwaukee County staffers could be included as part of the next budget.

“That’s just part of the process of sausage-making in the state Capitol — sometimes you have to give in on some things in order to get the votes,” he said.