WATERTOWN — The Jefferson County District Attorney’s office desperately needs more assistant DAs, after losing nearly half of their filled positions over the last year.
In an attempt to recruit new attorneys to the county and keep them in their positions long-term, the Jefferson County Board of Legislators voted on Tuesday to raise salaries for all attorney positions in the county, including public defenders and social services attorneys. While each person will see a different increase based on seniority and length of time in their position, the starting salaries for an ADA specifically saw an increase of almost $9,000, from $63,052 to $71,968.
This comes at the end of a months-long process started in January, before the county started having financial issues as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We did a salary adjustment across the board, with all county attorney positions for a number of different reasons,” said Scott. A Gray, chairman of the county Board of Legislators. “We recognize that we have budget issues caused by the pandemic, but we also understand that we still have an operation to run.”
The loss of ADAs has had a profound effect on the District Attorney’s office, decimating its ability to handle cases and heaping work on the remaining staff.
“I can tell you right now that my staff is handling over 100 felonies per ADA right now, including myself,” said District Attorney Kristyna S. Mills.
Each seniority level and position saw an increase to its salaries, which were decided on based on salaries in similarly positioned counties in New York, like Oswego County, as well as what private practices in the Watertown area pay their attorneys.
“These raises really just bring us up to be comparable with other DA’s offices,” Ms. Mills said. “We were very underpaid, and that’s part of the reason why we’ve lost so many ADAs.”
The state’s recent set of criminal justice reforms have only added to the workload for the DA’s office, while also encouraging even more attorneys to leave the public sector. A part of the reforms dictates that prosecutors must turn over what they find in discovery, which is the collection of information pertinent to the case, to the defense within 30 to 45 days.
“It’s a tremendous amount of work,” Ms. Mills said. “As far as recorded interviews, which can go hours and hours long, cell phone downloads, body cameras worn by police, all of that information has to be turned over, but it has to be reviewed before we turn it over, so it’s a tremendous amount of work.”
She said that, even during the COVID-19 pandemic, attorneys are working well over full-time hours each week.
While the state has pledged an investment of money into county DA offices to help with the adjustment to the reforms, namely with technology upgrades, Ms. Mills said that she has not seen any of that money, and does not know of any office that has received funding from the state.
She said that she hopes the increase to salaries will help to attract and keep more attorneys in her office, however she can’t be sure of the effects.
“DA’s offices across the state, before COVID hit, were bleeding ADAs, even those that paid more than our office did,” Ms. Mills said. “I can tell you that we’ve had open positions since December, and I think we’ve had two resumes since then, so we don’t even have people applying.”
Further changes are in the works for the New York state criminal justice system, including a number of reforms meant to make public defenders more accessible, as a result of the Hurrell-Harring et. al. v. State of New York lawsuit.
“It’s our burden of proof, we’re the ones that have to lay out the proof of a crime, so it is very disproportionate and could make it very difficult because they will have more work and less time to do it,” Ms. Mills said.
If the county can’t attract more ADAs, Ms. Mills said that her office will have to stop pursuing prosecutions on lower level crimes and would struggle to cover courts of justice.
“We would have to go back to the Board of Legislators and revisit this issue,” she said.“It’s definitely something that needs to be fixed.”
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