Douglas Rooks’ recent column “More money is not the answer for Maine’s indigent defense cases” (Feb. 13) reflects understandable frustration on the part of a good number of Mainers with our inability to resolve our crisis in the provision of legal counsel to indigent Mainers accused of crime.

The answer, however, is not as simple as diluting the quality of legal help available to indigent defendants or somehow getting the Maine legal community to shoulder the burden of providing this representation without a real structure and a real commitment of our state as a whole.

What lies behind the indigent defense crisis that we are experiencing is a fundamental failure of our governmental institutions — legislative, executive and judicial — to make the commitment and create the institutional framework to ensure that every indigent person accused of a serious crime is afforded timely and effective legal counsel. What we need is a permanent agency of state government that is charged with fulfilling this commitment and is given the resources necessary to do the job.

Maine’s current Commission on Public Defense Services was created to do what it could in the recruitment and support of lawyers willing to represent indigent defendants as appointed counsel at modest hourly compensation. More recently, it has been authorized to hire a handful of full-time public defenders and rent and outfit a few offices. It has never been given the legal responsibility or the means to provide indigent defense services for our state as a whole. That constitutional obligation currently seems to be suspended among the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches, with each trying to do something but no one taking the responsibility of getting the job done right.

More urgent even than increased funding for the current system is the need for our state to do what our neighboring states in New England have done in different ways — namely, to create a solid statewide agency to provide legal defense services to indigent persons accused of serious crimes. There are various forms such an agency can take.

Vermont has a public defender general whose office has provided defense for the indigent using full-time public defenders, as well as contracted private counsel, since 1972. Its budget for 2025 is $28 million for a population a little less than half as large as Maine’s.

New Hampshire’s Judicial Council contracts with a nonprofit entity, New Hampshire Public Defender, to provide comprehensive criminal defense and parental rights case representation for indigents using full-time defenders supplemented by private contract counsel. Its budget request for 2025 is $56 million for a state with a population almost the same as Maine’s but less than one-third the land area.

This is not to say that things are perfect in our neighboring states. The relevant agencies in both states are seeking increased funding. But they are doing so within the context of systems that have the responsibility to get the job done. That is what we lack in Maine, where the Legislature gives drabs of money to hire defenders in specific locales and the commission tries to sign up lawyers at the Bar Association convention.

What our governor and Legislature need to do is to create an effective agency to bear the responsibility to provide indigent defense services for the state of Maine, to let it develop its own plan to do this, and to fund it to the extent that its plan makes sense and the state can afford to do so. We can do so by reforming and strengthening our present commission, or by starting from scratch with a whole new model.

This is not reinventing the wheel. There are plenty of models out there in other states, each with its pluses and minuses. What we need to do is pick a model that will work for us and put it into effect.

It is true that increased funding is not the whole answer to our indigent defense crisis. We need to create an effective state agency with the responsibility to get the job done and then give it sufficient funding to make the constitutional right to counsel a practical reality throughout Maine.