Public defenders launch push to close prosecutor pay gap

Saying they face the biggest recruiting challenge in decades, Florida’s public defenders are launching a campaign to bring starting salaries to parity with their prosecutor counterparts.

Nineteenth Judicial Circuit Public Defender Diamond Litty warns that the $22,500 starting pay disparity between her office and the local state attorney is the largest since Treasure Coast voters elected her 34 years ago.

“How can I compete with that?” she asks. “I can’t.”

Litty is reaching out to the Florida Sheriff’s Association and other criminal justice advocacy groups to form a special committee. She is planning to launch a parity public awareness campaign ahead of the March 2 beginning of the 2027 legislative session.

“I am working tirelessly for the next session, because this is the hill I am willing to die on,” she said.

Lawmakers this year approved a $117.6 billion budget that included a $10,000 pay increase for prosecutors, and an additional $5,000 “CAD,” or cost-area differential, to compensate for higher living expenses in eight judicial circuits, including Litty’s.

In a lean budget year that saw no across-the-board raises for state workers, public defenders weren’t forgotten, Litty acknowledges. But the $3,500 pay increase lawmakers appropriated feels like “a slap in the face” compared with prosecutors, Litty says.

“We are equal players and equally important in the criminal justice system, and we should be treated the same as far as the budget is concerned.”

Litty stresses emphatically that she “does not begrudge in any way” that prosecutors saw a second round of significant pay increases. Giving a $5,000 CAD increase to prosecutors in certain regions was a good thing, Litty says, because the cost of living along the Treasure Coast is more expensive than much of the rest of the state.

But she wonders why the Legislature wouldn’t expect her staff to face the same economic struggles.

“The logic of that just defies me,” she says.

Litty’s approximately 35 front-line public defenders represent clients in Indian River, Martin, St. Lucie, and Okeechobee counties.

She offers beginning lawyers a $65,000 starting salary, but the same job candidate could make $87,500 by going down the street and working for the state attorney, Litty says.

For a typical law school graduate carrying $112,000 in student loan debt, it wouldn’t be much of a choice, Litty says.

“I don’t care how good your heart is, how much you want to help people, because those are the people we get, you’ve still got to pay the rent.”

With recruiting “pretty much down to zero for a while now,” Litty warns that the drought is only going to get worse.

“This is going to cause backlogs in the system, and backlogs in trials because if we don’t have enough attorneys, the system stops.”

The most immediate threat, Litty says, is the resources her office can devote veterans court, drug treatment court, and reentry programs that assist ex-felons in returning to the workforce.

“Specialty courts work,” Litty says. “The average recidivism rate for someone that goes to prison is 68%, and it drops to 12% for those that complete the program.”

Late last year, when the Legislature was beginning to build the current budget, Florida Public Defender Association President Stacy Scott told a Senate panel that her members needed an additional $6 million just to keep pace with growing caseloads associated with new judges.

Florida public defenders saw 563,361 new cases assigned in FY 2024-25, while experiencing a 20% turnover rate, Scott told the committee.

The public defenders’ highest priority, Scott said, was a $14 million request to bring starting salaries to $80,000.

Parity with prosecutors is vital to keeping the criminal justice system balanced and operating as efficiently as possible, Scott said.

Cliff Wilson, Jr., the new Florida Public Defender Association president, couldn’t agree more.

Wilson was elected the Third Judicial Circuit Public Defender five and half years ago. He considers State Attorney John Durett a good friend and won’t criticize the higher pay raises prosecutors received.

“Even though he pays way substantially better than I, I’ve seen the struggles that he’s had in retaining staff,” Wilson says.

At the same time, Wilson says the impact the uneven pay increase has had on his office is hard to ignore.

“I have a funding gap in my circuit where the disparity between lawyers on average is over $25,000,” he says. “I can show you on paper where I have attorneys with a lot more experience who are making a lot less money than theirs.”

In the best of times, Wilson has 19 assistant public defenders to serve clients in the North Panhandle counties of Columbia, Dixie, Hamilton, Lafayette, Madison, Suwannee, and Taylor.

For now, Wilson is down to 17 and leaning more heavily on a “robust” internship program.

“I’m assigned right now to a county division, and a juvenile division in one of my smaller counties because we’re short staffed,” he said.

Wilson starts his beginning assistant public defenders at $70,000 a year, but it’s a struggle to lure legal talent to less populous areas of the state, he says.

“We’ve been probably two years and haven’t got really qualified applicants in the door,” he says.

All 20 elected public defenders in Florida face recruiting and retention problems, “but for different dynamics,” based on their region, Wilson says.

The pay disparity will only make the challenge more difficult to overcome, Wilson says.

“It doesn’t matter if you are in Miami or Jacksonville, those two people in the courtroom are serving justice, and the stresses of life and everything else are the same, so we need to get the pay to be pretty close to the same.”

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