District attorneys’ offices across the U.S. are struggling to recruit and retain lawyers, with some experiencing vacancies of up to 16% and a dearth of applicants for open jobs, according to interviews with more than a dozen top prosecutors and five state and national prosecutors’ associations, according to Reuters.
The district attorneys said the effects of the
COVID-19 pandemic and increasing concern about racial inequities in the
criminal justice system — compounded by long-standing issues with relatively
low pay and burnout — have made a career as a state prosecutor a tougher sell
in the past several years.
“We're seeing
a prosecutor shortage throughout the country; it's not limited to large
jurisdictions versus small jurisdictions,” said Nelson Bunn, executive director
of the National District Attorneys Association, a trade group with 5,000
members.
The number of applicants to prosecutor positions in
San Diego County — which has the second-largest district attorney’s office in
California at 330 lawyers — fell 28% between 2019 and 2021, according to chief
deputy district attorney Dwain Woodley.
In Utah, open positions in the Salt Lake County
District Attorney’s Office are hovering between 21 and 25 in an office that
should have 133 lawyers, and attorneys in its special victims’ unit are
handling double the number of cases recommended by the American Bar
Association, District Attorney Sim Gill said.
“Crime has not dissipated in any significant way to
offset the backlog,” Gill said.
Staffing shortages are affecting prosecutors’
decisions about whether to bring certain criminal cases to trial, according to
Anthony Jordan, president of the District Attorneys Association of the State of
New York.
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