Young lawyers seeking higher salaries are part of a staggering exodus over the past year among the ranks of prosecutors and state-funded defense lawyers in Miami-Dade County. With the economy humming, private law firms have expanded hiring attorneys prized for the invaluable trial experience gained in the grind that is Miami-Dade’s criminal courthouse, the Miami Herald reports. State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle and Public Defender Carlos Martinez will travel to Tallahassee next week to lobby for a significant pay increase for their lawyers. There is a kernel of hope: The proposed budget from the Florida House of Representatives increases starting salaries from $41,500 to $50,000, still low among publicly funded lawyers.
Over the past year, the prosecutor and defender officers each has lost nearly a quarter of its lawyers, too fast to replenish them with new recruits, who must be trained over years. Seventy-two prosecutors left the office between July 2018 and March 1, a clip so rapid that younger lawyers are being thrust into more complex cases sooner. Thirteen of the 20 prosecutors known as “A’s”who handle major first-degree felonies such as attempted murder have been in these positions less than six months. “A lot of these losses are lawyers in the trenches,” Fernandez Rundle said. “We need them there fighting for safety, fighting for victims, fighting for justice.” The Public Defender’s Office is down to 192 attorneys — far below the 220 or so needed to staff adequately the thousands of cases that pour into Florida’s most populous county. Complex cases become revolving doors for court-appointed lawyers while the months slip away, with some defendants languishing in jail. “You can have a client who had three to five assistant public defenders in a matter of two or three years, and those are the serious cases,” Martinez said.