Maine’s law enforcement and court systems have returned to something like normal after the trauma of the pandemic, where for a time no cases could be tried and far fewer arrests were made since jails were overflowing.

The same cannot be said for the system of representing indigent defendants — a large proportion of those accused of crimes. The high number of clients awaiting lawyers has hardly budged, despite a huge investment by the state in a brand-new public defender system.

Before 2021, the state relied — as other smaller states do — primarily on court appointments of private lawyers. Although Maine was then unique in not having any public defender office, in some states these exist mostly to assign cases, not provide publicly paid attorneys.

Since then, as Gov. Janet Mills pointed out in her Jan. 28 budget address, spending on the Maine Commission on Public Defense Services has quadrupled, from $11 million to $44 million. The commission now wants a further increase to $55 million.

How can all that additional spending not have rapidly reduced the cases without attorneys? Mostly because Maine is trying to build a new system without providing an adequate transition from the old one. Documented deficiencies in private representation led to creation of the new public defense commission, but in its eagerness to set higher standards, the commission overshot the mark.

Consider: Despite the rate for attorneys more than doubling, to $150 an hour, the commission has fewer attorneys taking cases than before. Court leaders have tried to rectify this, with Chief Justice Valerie Stanfill twice appealing for law firms to take more cases. It hasn’t helped much.

Mills suggested politely last July that the commission should take a harder look at those standards, without response, and her patience has run out. She won’t recommend any new funding until the commission fixes its continuing problem of defendants remaining incarcerated for lack of representation.

The governor called the new system “a disastrous example of the perfect becoming the enemy of the good.” It’s hard to disagree.

On a parallel track, ACLU Maine sued the commission, asking that all defendants have attorneys within seven days, and that charges be dismissed after 45 days if no attorney is assigned. Judge Michaela Murphy ruled for the plaintiffs, though her decision is likely to be appealed.

In similar circumstances involving the state’s mental health and developmental disabilities programs, settlements were made and court masters appointed.

But consent decrees and court administration have their own problems. The Augusta Mental Health Institute (now Riverview) decree was signed in 1990, after a series of deaths at the old hospital and a lack of community-based services.

The AMHI decree wasn’t discharged until 2024, more than three decades later. In the meantime, those covered by its terms were initially offered a wider range of services than those who came after. In the indigent defense case, major structural issues aren’t involved, and the problem — too many defendants without lawyers — doesn’t seem impossible to solve.

What isn’t helping are remarks, such as those by Tina Nadeau, executive director of the Maine Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, who told the Press Herald that, under the previous system, “a judge could sit on his throne, and he could pick anyone before him to represent somebody, not really knowing if they know much about criminal law.” Despite its flaws, defendants were represented; now they wait far too long.

The real question is why more Maine lawyers aren’t signing up. Dissenters on the commission say case limits for individual attorneys are too tight, and some other rules seem unduly restrictive. For instance, they discourage former prosecutors from taking cases, even though attorneys are trained to argue both sides of a case. And it’s a luxury, not a necessity, for trials and appeals to get separate attorneys.

The commission’s director, Jim Billings, sounds unduly defensive, saying there’s “no tidal wave of warriors that want to do our work.” Perhaps not, but it’s the commission’s job to resolve the issue and no one else’s.

Relaxing the rules and providing more waivers may mean defendants don’t receive the best possible representation, but that’s not the constitutional guarantee. Competent representation is better than no representation at all.

Rather than debating who’s responsible, the commission should stop waiting for the phone to ring and start actively recruiting more hands. Ultimately, the state will benefit from having a hybrid system of public defenders leading the way and private attorneys taking the less difficult, simpler cases.

For now, there’s a problem to be solved. The indigent defense commission must do a better job of seeing that it is.