No ordinary time. Public defenders union will meet Thursday to confront crisis in agency.

Members of the state public defenders union will face a disorienting truth when they meet on Thursday to confront a crisis in leadership at their $60 million agency. They are on their own as they seek to maintain the rules that govern the more than 400 lawyers in their division. Four of the six members of the Public Defenders Services Commission resigned last week after receiving a menacing March 6th letter from a lawyer retained by Chief Public Defender TaShun Bowden-Lewis.

The Commission had been exercising its authority and performing its oversight obligations. Bowden-Lewis’s lawyer accused the members of using disagreements with her client as creating a “pretext for discrimination.” Four members of the Commission, including Chair Allison Near, resigned. The letter is consistent with The Courant’s Ed Mahony’s reporting in his essential Sunday story on the turmoil at the agency. “Bowden-Lewis sees everything through the lens of racism,” a public defender told Mahony. “The problem is that anyone who pushes back on her is a racist. And that is what she has done to the commission. And that’s what she has done to many other people.” This appears to be the cost of taking a stand in opposition to Bowden-Lewis.

The two judges who quit the oversight board provided only cryptic explanations in their letters of resignation to Chief Justice Richard Robinson. Near told Governor Lamont, who appointed her to the position, that she was finding the demands on her time were intruding on her obligations to her clients.

None of the four has explained the mass resignation. Public defenders have lost their guarantee that rules will be followed. They must act.

When the frontline criminal lawyers for the indigent meet in two days they will need to set their course. The new members of the Commission will be chosen soon. It’s essential that those members are committed to facing down attempts to intimidate them as they oversee the agency of more than 400 lawyers and support staff. Union members must impress upon Chief Justice Robinson, Governor Lamont and Senate President Martin Looney that public defenders are working in a growing atmosphere of intimidation and retribution, as Mahony reported.

The public defenders need to bring their courtroom skills to this critical moment by presenting specific instances of abuse of norms to Robinson, Lamont and Looney as they consider their appointments. They should make it clear that, as Daryl McGraw, the agency’s Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion wrote in a prophetic email to the agency’s staff, “Some behaviors are long overdue for being addressed, and it’s time to completely rid the Division of them.”

Public defenders know how to make their own case and dismantle an opposing one. On Thursday, they will decide if they are willing to take the risks required to preserve the integrity of their agency. They can summon the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt, who told the 1940 Democratic National Convention, “This is no ordinary time. No time for weighing anything except what we can do best for the country as a whole, and that responsibility rests on each and every one of us as individuals.”

The stakes are highest for the agency’s thousands of clients. They depend on the state’s merit system to provide them with the most qualified lawyers who have access to essential resources. It’s their fight too.

Published March 28, 2023.