There's one thing Eric Affholter has no shortage of: new faces.

In the last 3 1/2 years, the head of the St. Louis public defender's office has seen 36 attorneys exit an office that employs 28 defenders.

With starting salaries of $35,148, most new lawyers have law school loans double or triple the size of their annual pay, so they can't afford to stay on the job, he said.

That's just the start of Affholter's problems. Though the caseload has grown significantly during the past five years, the Missouri Legislature has not approved any funding for new attorneys in that time. Since 2001, the statewide caseload of public defender cases in the trial division has increased by more than 12,000 to over 88,000 cases.

The Missouri Public Defender Commission, which oversees the state defender system, recently considered voting to stop accepting new cases, but decided against that action.

"Our crisis here in the state has reached a critical point where I think we as lawyers are exposed to the allegation that we are not meeting our ethical duties or constitutional obligation to provide effective assistance," Affholter said.

PROSECUTORS HURTING

St. Louis is not an isolated example. A review by The National Law Journal shows that many public defender's offices across the country are strained beyond capacity or tipping into crisis.

Inadequate funding has led to constant turnover, staff reductions and spiraling caseloads.

Litigation over poorly funded public defender systems are pending in Michigan and Louisiana.

The problem has become so acute that in at least one jurisdiction, officials toyed with the idea of trimming back workweeks.

New York attorneys, tired of inconsistent funding and a patchwork organization, are pushing this month to launch a statewide public defender system.

In some jurisdictions, prosecutor's offices are not much better off. While salaries are slightly higher, prosecutors in states across the country are seeing the same budgetary stalemates and rising caseloads as their defense colleagues.

In one jurisdiction, prosecutors are thinking of unionizing to counteract the effect of static budgets and rising caseloads.

The St. Louis circuit attorney's office, which handles felonies and misdemeanors for the city, seems to be faring better. It is funded by the city and federal grants, said Jane Darst, the first assistant circuit attorney.

"In the early 2000s and during the previous administration, we had funding and staffing cuts, but we've made progress in the last few years," she said.

The office has 65 lawyers who start at about $40,000, but the minimum salary is expected to increase to $45,000 within weeks, Darst said. Salaries go up to $103,000, but most attorneys earn less than $75,000, she said. Turnover also is an issue for the department, as about 20 lawyers left in 2005, Darst said.

In Cook County, Ill., where the city of Chicago accounts for the bulk of the cases, the county board president recently said he would put public defenders on three- and four-day workweeks to cut costs. The proposal was later withdrawn but illustrates the challenges in the Windy City's public defense system, which is funded by the county.

"This is the first year that our budget has been cut to the point that we've had to cut back on persons; in the past we've been able to absorb it in nonpersonnel accounts," said Xavier Velasco, chief of operations for the Law Office of the Cook County Public Defender. "It's a very, very challenging time."

Last year's budget of $52 million was slashed to $43 million this year, reducing the number of lawyers from 538 to 489, support staff from 149 to 124 and investigators from 76 to 73, Velasco said. He declined to say what the lawyers' caseloads are because, he said, they vary greatly depending on the types of cases they handle, yet he did say the workload has increased. Turnover can be a problem, he said, with salaries starting at about $45,000 for new lawyers and going up to about $135,000 for supervisors, he said.

John Gorman, a spokesman for the Cook County State's Attorney's Office, said his office has had similar issues. The prosecutors may soon explore unionizing because their budget was reduced from about $96 million last year to $87 million this year, the largest cut in decades, he said.

"There may well be new efforts," Gorman said, referring to the forming of a union, which already exists in the public defender's office.

In February, the office dismissed 43 lawyers, 10 investigators and 47 administrators due to budget cuts, Gorman said. The total number of lawyers was reduced to 746, he said. As a result, the prosecutors' average caseload of 108 cases will go up by at least 6 percent, he said. Prosecutors' salaries start at $48,000 and go up to $148,000 for the highest nonelected official, Gorman said.

SUING IN MICHIGAN

The Michigan Coalition for Justice, which consists of advocates for criminal defendants, filed a lawsuit against the state on Feb. 22 alleging that it has not spent enough money to provide defendants with their constitutional right to counsel.

The lawsuit names three Michigan counties -- Berrien, Genesee and Muskegon -- but seeks class action status in a state that has long been viewed as having one of the nation's worst public defense systems.

In Detroit, where public defenders are funded by Wayne County, cuts have been common for years, said Deierdre Weir, executive director of the Legal Aid and Defender Association Inc. The Detroit office now has 17 lawyers, compared with 26 lawyers in 2000, she said.

Weir added that she is no longer able to employ any investigators to assist the attorneys, who average 400 cases a year. Their salaries range from $35,000 to $70,000, and turnover is starting to become a problem, she said.

"The whole area is just drastically depressed," she said of Wayne County's economy. "And I think as the officials look at the budget, that tends to be where the money gets squeezed."

The Office of the Wayne County Prosecuting Attorney has also had cuts, said Jack Fennessey, a principal attorney. The department's budget was reduced from about $37 million in 2006 to $35.9 million in 2007 because of expired grants, said Maria Miller, a department spokeswoman.

The office had to lay off 10 support staff this fiscal year in order to keep its 183 attorneys, she said.

Prosecutors' salaries range from about $44,600 to $115,000, Fennessey said. Attorney workloads vary from section to section, such as the average of 108 juvenile trials per attorney in the Juvenile Division and 702 warrants reviewed per attorney in the Domestic Violence Unit.

The county prosecutor, Kim Worthy, said in an e-mail statement that the office needs more funding. "Any way you look at it this office has been chronically understaffed and underfunded," she said.

In her annual State of the Judiciary speech on Feb. 26, New York Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye said the county-based public defense system is in disarray and called for a statewide system.

A number of public defenders have been urging legislators to fund $6 million in the state budget so infrastructure for such a system can be created. Many public defenders and their advocates planned to meet in Albany, N.Y., on Monday to iron out the details of their proposal.

"There is tremendous amount of energy around this," said Jonathan Gradess, executive director of the Albany-based New York State Defenders Association. "I think it's really a perfect storm of change."

Steven Banks, attorney-in-chief for the Legal Aid Society of New York, pointed out that there is still parity between salaries, as public defenders in New York City start at $50,000 while district attorneys start at $55,000.

Any changes in the system will have to address funding issues, he said.

"Regardless of what the structure is in a state, the key ingredients are adequate funding and standards for how many cases is appropriate for a lawyer to handle at any given time in order to provide constitutionally adequate representation," he said.

James M. Kindler, chief assistant district attorney for the New York County District Attorney, which is primarily funded by the city and employs about 450 lawyers, said the office absorbed a cut in 2003, but most of the funding has been restored since then. While the job is desirable -- 1,800 people applied for 54 openings last year -- turnover is becoming a growing problem, he said.

"It's a very good job for a number of reasons, but you have many young people coming in with a lot of substantial debt, so they leave after four to seven years," he said.

While prosecutors in New York City have slightly higher starting salaries than the city's public defenders, the situation is reversed in most other parts of the state, said Jim Murphy, Saratoga County's district attorney and president-elect of the Albany-based New York State District Attorneys Association.

Murphy also pointed out that while prosecutors handle all crimes, the public defenders have fewer cases since they only represent those involving the indigent. "District attorneys are asked to do more," he said, "but are not given the additional resources."

Lawsuits against states regarding funding for their public defense systems are pending in Michigan and Louisiana, but the problems are spread well beyond their borders, said Malia Brink, indigent defense counsel for the Washington-based National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

But the lawsuits, as well as the recent exonerations of innocent people, may finally lead to some results, she said.

"If you talk publicly about providing for criminal lawyers and better resources for lawyers, it's difficult to get people to understand why that's necessary," she said.

"But if you tell them the result of not providing those resources is that the wrong people go to jail and people who commit crimes remain free to commit other crimes, they understand the situation better," Brink said. "They show that public defense impacts public safety."