Under the new law, counties must supplement the state money with their own funding, which varies drastically across the state. Philadelphia, for example, provides extensive public defense services through the city’s Defender Association, a nonprofit firm that receives most of its funding from the city.

Chief Defender Keisha Hudson told Spotlight PA in April that the Defender Association budget alone is more than $50 million, six times larger than the money the legislature approved to aid counties. The organization’s budget helps employ 500 attorneys, investigators, and social workers.

A county-by-county review by the Legislative Budget and Finance Committee of the General Assembly in 2021 found Philadelphia spends the most money on criminal defense per person, around $30.20 in fiscal year 2019.

The same year, Mifflin County in rural central Pennsylvania spent $3.20 per person.

The December legislation also directs the new committee to develop educational curricula for public defenders, particularly for capital offense cases, and to collect data that will help the state oversee the quality of counsel being provided on a county level.

The goal is to have the funds distributed thoughtfully, said Hughes, and provide support as data comes in.

It won’t be enough to level the playing field, said Sara Jacobsen, director of the Public Defenders Association of Pennsylvania, who will serve on the committee. Prosecutors have received millions of state dollars for decades, she said.

But the $7.5 million might be able to address technological deficiencies that prevent local offices from measuring their caseloads and ensuring no single attorney has too many cases or all of the most difficult cases, she said.

“There are new national public defender workload standards that are out this year that would help offices say for X number of cases we need Y number of lawyers,” Jacobsen said, “but offices in Pennsylvania can’t even do that calculation if they don’t have basic case management.”

And though the new funding marks a historic step forward, it does little to move Pennsylvania’s ranking among other states, said David Carroll, executive director of the Sixth Amendment Center, which tracks how states live up to the constitutional promise of free public defense.

“[Pennsylvania’s] indigent defense cost-per-capita figure rises only slightly (from $9.67 to $10.25),” Carroll wrote in an email to Spotlight PA. “For comparison, the national average in 2022 was $19.67.”

Pennsylvania ranks 45th in total indigent defense funding, Carroll said. The states that spend less per capita are Mississippi, Hawaii, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Texas.

Spotlight PA is an independent, nonpartisan, and nonprofit newsroom producing investigative and public-service journalism that holds the powerful to account and drives positive change in Pennsylvania.