Corshelle Jenkins was charged with a crime she didn’t commit – and now, there was a warrant for her arrest.

In May 2025, the 36-year-old Portland resident received a letter saying she had been arrested for theft, and after failing to appear in court, police were instructed to take her to jail. The mother of six was stunned. She had never been arrested for stealing. She assumed a visit to court would prove it was a case of mistaken identity.

But in court, a judge told her the state had no lawyers available to represent her. She would have to keep returning for appearances until one freed up. That day, roughly 1,280 other defendants in her county were also waiting for attorneys. Some had gone months – or more than a year – without representation.

The charges would remain pending, and Jenkins had no way to fight them.

Jenkins is one of thousands of Oregonians charged with crimes who have been forced to wait long-term for a public defender, lawyers the state is constitutionally mandated to provide to defendants if they can’t pay for their own attorney. The shortage has pushed the legal system to the brink.

Trapped in a byzantine court process, some people with outstanding charges and no representation have lost jobs, housing and custody of their children, and some have suffered health crises like relapses and miscarriages in the process, the Guardian found.

In a sign of the magnitude of the crisis, the Oregon supreme court ruled in February that the state must dismiss all charges for people who have waited 90 days or more for a lawyer in felony cases and 60 days in misdemeanor cases. The ruling called for more than 1,400 pending cases to be dropped.

Still, for many defendants in the state, the problems aren’t over. People who saw their case dismissed because of the supreme court decision could be charged again for the same offense. They may only learn of the fresh prosecution when a police officer arrests them on a warrant and sends them to jail.

And people newly entering the court system are still facing long delays in getting attorneys due to the shortage, with roughly 1,180 defendants statewide currently waiting for a lawyer.

“It really makes you angry. This wasn’t me. I didn’t do it,” said Jenkins. “But all I could do was just wait for an attorney.”

‘I want to prove this isn’t me’

On a recent evening in east Portland, Jenkins sat in her kitchen with her smiley three-month-old daughter on her lap. Her four other kids blasted television and ran circles around her as she recounted her surprise prosecution.

After receiving the warrant last spring, Jenkins learned the district attorney of Multnomah county, which includes Portland, had charged her with an August 2023 theft. A police report said she had shoplifted pink boots from Nordstrom and was detained and cited by police.

The letter left her petrified. “I was worried about getting pulled over and arrested with my kids in the car,” said Jenkins, a Portland native who works at a senior living facility administering medications.

It also left her baffled. Jenkins was at her job at the time of the theft. She had never been arrested in her life. Let alone charged with a crime.

Jenkins called the court, which scheduled a hearing in May. Jenkins took off work for her arraignment, the proceeding when defendants are formally charged and, traditionally, appointed a public defender if they can’t pay for their own lawyer. After waiting 90 minutes to be called, she tried to explain the mixup.

But she couldn’t make formal arguments without a lawyer.

“I’ve used all the attorneys I have for the afternoon,” the judge told Jenkins, according to audio from her hearing. The judge placed her on the “unrepresented list”, charging her a $235 fee to get a public defender and barring her from entering Nordstrom. The judge told her to keep returning to court – or else the warrant would be reissued.

“I wanted to prove this wasn’t me. I wanted to get this moving,” Jenkins recalled.

She returned for another hearing in August, now six months pregnant with her daughter, but still no attorney was available. She missed her next hearing in September. A warrant was again issued.

The pending charge soon caused new problems. She learned she wasn’t eligible for a second job she was seeking. She worried her current job, which conducts annual background checks, could be jeopardized, too: “I was really upset – it was interfering with how I provide for my children. I was at risk of losing my job and being jailed for something I didn’t do.”

A crisis brewing for years

In May 2025, when Jenkins first requested an attorney, roughly 3,900 defendants across Oregon were waiting for a lawyer, with 1,700 others also unrepresented, but not prioritized for counsel because they had missed court hearings. Data shows there were roughly 122,000 total pending criminal cases at the end of that year.

The crisis had been brewing for years. It has long been difficult to recruit and retain attorneys for public defense positions, grueling jobs which generally pay significantly less than private sector roles and often have lower salaries than equivalent prosecutor roles.

Meanwhile, the number of people in need of representation was high. Oregon’s court system had struggled to catch up after shutting down during Covid. When courts did reopen, in addition to the backlog of older cases, the system saw an influx of people caught up in the state’s homelessness and addiction crises, some with complex mental health issues.

By 2022, Oregon needed 1,300 additional full-time public defenders to meet demands, the American Bar Association estimated.

In the following years, the system was further strained by an exodus of public defenders; a surge in prosecutions for minor drug offenses; and a rise in cases involving body-camera footage and other digital evidence, which often require time-consuming reviews by attorneys and their staff.

Several other states have experienced similar challenges, including Massachusetts, Maine and Wisconsin, but few at the scale and duration of Oregon’s crisis.

That Oregon’s challenges reached this level was partly due to its convoluted public defense bureaucracy. While many other states hire public defenders to provide free representation to low-income defendants, Oregon has long contracted a patchwork of nonprofits, private firms and individual lawyers to perform that role.

The model, a 2019 state-commissioned report concluded, operated with a “stunning lack of oversight”, and meant the state had little visibility into whether defendants were getting adequate representation or if Oregon had a sufficient number of defenders.

The state made some reforms to the system over the years. In 2020, it stopped paying individual defenders a flat fee per case, regardless of hours logged. That change aimed to address concerns that attorneys were financially incentivized to take as many clients as possible and quickly resolve cases, but it also meant fewer cases were picked up, contributing to the lack of available attorneys for new clients.

In 2023, the state directly hired a handful of trial public defenders in an effort to reduce the backlog.

Still, the reforms did not solve the problem. “For years, we’ve been underwater with excessive caseloads, burning attorneys out. And when those attorneys left, we had to redistribute their cases, causing caseloads to rise and more attorneys to leave,” said Grant Hartley, Multnomah director of Metropolitan Public Defender (MPD), the largest nonprofit provider of public defense services in the state.

The tolls of delays: lost jobs and pregnancy complications

In October 2024, Veronica Gates’s car ran out of gas and she got in an argument with an officer about the vehicle being towed. Police ticketed the 20-year-old for being a minor in possession of alcohol and jailed her. The DA charged her with “disorderly conduct”, alleging she had obstructed traffic. It was her first brush with the law. At her arraignment, there was no attorney. She returned for hearings in November and December. Still no lawyer.

Gates became pregnant during that time and struggled with morning sickness in court, she recalled. She stopped driving out of fear of further trouble with police. Her boyfriend had to take off work to get her to court. When she applied for an apartment, she had to explain the arrest: “It was humiliating,” she said.

The stress overwhelmed her, and she had a miscarriage, she said: “The case had a terrible effect on me. I felt like the world was against me.”

Gates finally got an MPD public defender in February 2025. When MPD investigators looked for surveillance footage from the incident, they discovered too much time had elapsed to find videos, said her lawyer, Rachel Maremont. Gates, who was pregnant again, did not want to accept a plea. She felt strongly she had done nothing wrong.

Two weeks before the scheduled trial in April, the DA dismissed the case. Gates cried with relief.

“I was emotional because it was like, what the fuck was all of that for?” said Gates, who now has a newborn. “Now I feel like I can’t trust the court system.”

In its February ruling, the Oregon supreme court recognized the serious harms of delays in assigning counsel to people charged with crimes. Defendants, the court said, cannot gather evidence while prosecutors prepare cases; are subject to restraints on their freedom that they have no way to challenge; and have to keep returning to court under the threat of arrest.

That was Corshelle Jenkins and Veronica Gates’s experience. It was Nacyus Berry’s story, too.

In March 2024, Berry had a mental health episode at a Starbucks. He was 18, unhoused, and was living with schizophrenia. While behaving erratically, police arrested him for misdemeanor trespassing and disorderly conduct. After the arrest, he started getting his life back on track, he said, receiving mental health treatment and reuniting with his adoptive father, who got him off the streets.

The main factor holding him back was his criminal case, he said. His first-ever charges, his record delayed him from returning to school, prevented him from getting hired for fast food jobs and blocked him from housing opportunities, he and his father said.

It took nearly a year for the courts to assign him a lawyer – a law school student working with MPD. An evaluator hired by MPD concluded Berry had diminished capacity, meaning he lacked intent to commit the crime, but the Multnomah DA pushed ahead with the case for weeks. Days before trial in July, the DA dismissed the case. It has since been expunged.

“I feel a little down that the system failed me,” said Berry, now 20 and working as a dishwasher. “It would’ve been nice if they did this case more quickly … I was causing no harm that day. I wasn’t hostile. I didn’t need to go to jail.”

The office of Nathan Vasquez, Multnomah county DA, who started in January 2025 after the cases were first filed, defended the prosecutions. Pat Dooris, Vasquez’s spokesperson, said when a supervisor reviewed Gates’s case, prosecutors agreed to dismissal after seeing a “supplemental police report”, writing in an email: “This is the system working as it should: cases are re-reviewed when additional information is brought to our attention and disposed of short of trial if proceeding forward is not the right outcome.” He said he could not comment on Berry’s case; the records are no longer accessible due to the expungement.

Signs of progress

There have been some signs of improvements in the system since Berry’s and Gates’s cases. Oregon saw a 23% dip in unrepresented defendants between November 2024 and November 2025, from roughly 3,700 people to 3,000 people, according to the Oregon Public Defense Commission (OPDC), the state body overseeing the system.

Ken Sanchagrin, OPDC’s executive director, attributed the improvements to several interventions, including expanded capacity for some public defense offices; specialized dockets aimed at fast resolutions for cases; and strategic deployments of OPDC-employed trial lawyers to jurisdictions with severe crises. Some small counties, he noted, have largely eliminated their attorney shortages.

He noted the state’s complex contracting bureaucracy posed has challenges, but said: “There’s a light at the end of the tunnel.”

Willy Chotzen, an Oregon state lawmaker and former public defender, said the system was starting to see the benefits of increased funding, including for law school clinics that enable students to provide defense for misdemeanors.

In addition to continued recruitment and training of new defenders, he said the attorney shortage could be reduced by prioritizing alternatives to prosecution when possible. Efforts to speed up cases, such as requiring prosecutors to disclose evidence in a faster manner, could also help.

While some have debated overhauling the public defense system to make it entirely state-run, those discussions have not advanced. The change would be momentous, and there are concerns that the state could lose attorneys if it ended contracting and have to pay more for attorneys moving to government salaries.

In a sign of the complexity of the system and the problem, an OPDC spokesperson was unable to provide an estimate of how many more public defenders would be needed to end the deficiency statewide.

The epicenter of the crisis remains the courts in downtown Portland, where systemic progress has been elusive. The courthouse has a large Martin Luther King Jr quote engraved on the facade: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Inside, judges regularly encounter unhoused people accused of petty crimes, who shuffle through short jail stays and at times appear bewildered or angry at dragged out proceedings that they have to navigate without lawyers.

The Multnomah district attorney and public defenders in the region strongly disagree on solutions.

Public defenders argue cases like Berry’s and Gates’s are a key reason why the crisis continues. Hartley of MPD said both cases illustrated how the Multnomah DA clogs the system with unnecessary prosecutions that have little public safety interest, only to drop them last-minute.

In 2025, under DA Vasquez, in more than 1,100 cases heading to trial, prosecutors were unable to proceed and the charges were ultimately dismissed before they reached a jury, according to MPD’s data analysis of DA records. That was about 15% of all cases that were moving to trial after arraignments.

“That is wasted weeks, months, sometimes years while the public defender was working the case the entire time,” said Hartley.

Vasquez, who was elected in 2024, has argued that filing such cases is essential to crack down on lower-level crimes that are frustrating many of the city’s residents.

In an interview, Vasquez defended his office’s filing decisions, saying dismissals can happen when domestic violence victims don’t want to proceed. The long delay in cases, he said, also makes it harder for his office to win convictions as witnesses fall through the cracks. His spokesperson said the DA has reduced the dismissal rate during his tenure.

Vasquez laid the blame for the stagnation squarely on public defenders, and is particularly critical of nonprofit providers like MPD. He accused the defenders of engaging in a “work stoppage”, asserting there was, in fact, no shortage of lawyers in Multnomah, but rather defenders were refusing to take more clients with the goal of creating roadblocks to cases moving forward: “They seem more driven by an ideological bend … a constant drumbeat of how to tear down the criminal justice system and avoid anyone being prosecuted.”

The DA praised private lawyers who are part of a consortium contracted to provide public defense: “I see some attorneys take lots of cases, who are willing to step up to help with this crisis … The nonprofit defense firms are not.”

MPD’s data shows domestic violence cases were 24% of 2025 dismissals. Hartley pointed to state data showing Multnomah nonprofit defenders have exceeded the maximum attorney caseloads prescribed by the state – 104% above their contracted capacity in March. The consortium lawyers were at 90%, meaning they took fewer cases.

Hartley condemned Vasquez’s “work stoppage” remarks, saying the DA was “putting the blame for the system’s failings on the shoulders of the people doing this difficult and emotional work”.

Sanchagrin of OPDC argued that having defenders take on more cases could be detrimental to their clients. “Certainly you can solve [the] crisis by just having people take more cases. But then we’d be back to the system that we had before,” he said, referring to the previous flat fee model where lawyers were incentivized to take as many cases as possible. “Merely taking more cases does not necessarily mean the individuals served by those lawyers are having either constitutionally adequate or certainly high-quality representation,” he said.

New rules from the supreme court

The supreme court’s decision in February has increased the urgency to resolve the crisis.

The case was brought by Allen Roberts, who went unrepresented for four years. The ruling said felonies must be dropped after 90 days without counsel, and after 60 days for misdemeanors. If defendants miss a hearing, the clock resets. The decision largely impacted people out of custody awaiting trial. A previous federal ruling had already established that most defendants jailed without attorneys had to be released after seven days.

In a cramped windowless courtroom of the Multnomah justice center one February morning, three weeks after the ruling, some defendants were brought in from jail cells for their arraignments, while others sat in the audience waiting for their names to be called. Roberts was frequently cited, though the outcomes varied.

Melanie Moores, a 38-year-old unhoused woman, had been waiting 84 days for an attorney on a minor unlawful camping charge. There was still no available attorney, so under Roberts, the case was dismissed, though the judge still admonished her: “If you stay in the same place, the city can charge you again.”

Outside court, she breathed a sigh of relief: “I was really worried, because if they had fined me, I couldn’t have afforded it.”

Others weren’t as lucky. Robert Hayes, 43, had gone 87 days without a lawyer for a misdemeanor charge of giving a false name to an officer. The judge said his case would be dismissed due to Roberts, then changed his mind, saying he did have an attorney available. The case would continue.

After his hearing, Hayes said he had missed work and an addiction recovery group to attend court.

Michelle Roberts, 33, had waited 84 days for a lawyer for a minor criminal trespass charge stemming from a 2024 incident. But her case was also not dismissed. “You get an attorney,” the judge told her, saying she must return to court in two weeks.

Roberts said she was now sober and in recovery in southern Oregon, four hours away. Traveling back and forth to Portland by bus was extremely challenging, and she wanted to stay away from the city where she fell into addiction. The judge refused to let her appear remotely at her next appearance.

“I don’t want to be here. I just want this to be done so I can continue with my life,” she said. Veston Anderson, her 79-year-old stepfather, said he was proud of her sobriety and got emotional as he discussed his fears that the two-year-old case, with no end in sight, could get in the way: “I get flustered having to go to court … It feels like torture.”

Standing in the courthouse hallway, Roberts dialed her newly assigned attorney. The voicemail was full and she couldn’t leave a message.

Records show Hayes’s and Roberts’s cases were both later dismissed. The DA’s spokesperson said it was “unfortunate timing” that there was a delay in their dismissals.

State data shows more than 1,500 cases have been dismissed under Roberts, through the end of March, though more than 1,200 were still unrepresented. The Roberts order said that cases could be refiled “when the state is able to provide the counsel to which a defendant is entitled”. Sanchagrin, of OPDC, said in an interview at the end of March that it wasn’t yet clear how many cases have simply been re-filed, though he had heard anecdotal reports of rising arrest warrants for individuals charged a second time.

Sanchagrin said he was concerned about defendants getting stuck in a “Groundhog Day” predicament, where they think the case is over, but then find themselves back to square one.

Vasquez, the DA, said statutes of limitations and witnesses accessibility could limit which cases prosecutors pursue after they are dismissed. But his overall goal, he said, was to re-file as many cases as possible.

“The guidance I give my office is that we are here to hold people accountable … that means we need to be doing everything we can to see those cases come forward.”

After two years, finally a dismissal

In October, five months after her first appearance, Corshelle Jenkins finally got a lawyer – and learned why she had been wrongfully charged.

Her MPD public defender reviewed the DA’s surveillance footage of the shoplifting incident and showed it to Jenkins. She immediately recognized the woman who was arrested as a loose acquaintance. That woman, it turned out, had given police Jenkins’s name, and an officer believed it, writing that Jenkins’s “DMV photo matched the subject in custody”. The women are similar in age and both Black, but do not look alike and had significantly different weights and heights.

In December, Jenkins’s lawyer, Kate Blankinship, emailed extensive documentation proving it was mistaken identity. The woman who gave Jenkins’s name was also being prosecuted by the DA for giving false information to an officer in a separate case.

For several weeks, Blankinship’s calls and emails to the DA went unanswered, and at one point she showed up in person to leave a message urging prosecutors to dismiss the case, according to MPD records. As the holidays came and went, and the new year began, Jenkins was still stuck waiting to be freed from the case.

“I wanted to get on with my life, and not have this cloud hanging over my head,” said Jenkins, who was recovering from an emergency C-section at the time. “How is this fair?”

In January, two and a half years after the wrongful theft charge, Jenkins was finally removed from the case.

Dooris, the DA’s spokesperson, said prosecutors rely on police to verify people’s identities: “There was nothing in the reports provided to suggest that the person police identified and confirmed as the defendant was not who she said she was.” Once a supervisor learned of the mixup, “the matter was resolved”, with the correct defendant charged, he said. He blamed public defenders for the delays, saying: “Had a defense attorney accepted the appointment when this individual was initially arraigned, this would undoubtedly been resolved months earlier.”

Portland police declined to comment on Jenkins.

Jenkins said she felt abused by the system: “They just thought of me as another case. They didn’t believe me.”

She felt relief that she was no longer being prosecuted, but said she has lingering anxieties that her name could be tarnished by the case. And she worries that if she is wrongfully accused again, she’ll find herself back in court, waiting for a lawyer.