From Thanksgiving to the New Year, Alyssa Mendez wondered what would be left for her when she finally got out of jail.

She had been arrested in November by Scarborough police — accused of possessing drugs and violating bail conditions in another case — and charged in Cumberland County with drug trafficking and three misdemeanor-level charges.

Two days later, on Nov. 17, a judge ordered that she receive a court-appointed attorney.

Weeks went by without word.

Once the attorney on her other case said he couldn’t represent her on the new charges, Mendez sent handwritten letters to the court and the Press Herald.

“I have a sick feeling that because I have sat here for so long with no way to contact anyone that I am going to lose everything I own and will have nothing when I finally get released,” Mendez wrote to a reporter in late December.

That month, when the Press Herald inquired about Mendez’s situation, the Maine Commission on Public Defense Services said it had not been aware of her case and quickly assigned her an attorney from the recently established Casco Bay Public Defender’s Office.

It had been more than 40 days since her first court appearance.

Mendez is one of several hundred defendants throughout Maine who, since 2023, have not promptly received court-appointed lawyers.

A judge in Kennebec County ruled early last year that the lack of continuous and early legal representation was a constitutional failure. Maine’s highest court is still deciding whether some defendants should be released from jail or have their charges dismissed.

The commission, which oversees the lawyers assigned to these cases, has again warned the issue will get worse if the agency runs out of money this spring. Lawmakers and the governor have both proposed giving the commission more money, but they have not decided whether that will happen now, which the commission prefers, or when the new fiscal year starts in July.

In Mendez’s case, the state’s public defense office was not aware she needed representation, according to Executive Director Frayla Tarpinian. She said Mendez was not included in a regularly updated list of people who need attorneys that is maintained by courthouse clerks and the commission.

Like the commission, the courts have been understaffed and overwhelmed, which she said has contributed to people not having timely representation.

“There are people that are slipping through cracks,” Tarpinian said, “and those cracks are unavoidable if you have a system that is so reliant on humans who are overworked.”

Court records show Mendez was also never called back to meet with a Cumberland County judge on a weekly basis — a process that court leaders ordered in November 2023 for all jailed defendants waiting for lawyers. Instead, someone from the court wrote that it was appointing Mendez’s first attorney, with a question mark by his name. He later told them he couldn’t take the case.

After William Vargas, a public defender in the Casco Bay office, was appointed to represent Mendez, he requested a hearing to argue that she be given a lower cash bail, which, according to court records, a judge denied on Jan. 16.

In an interview Friday, Vargas said he signed up to take Mendez’s case as soon as he was notified that she was unrepresented. He said the office would have stepped in much sooner had they known, and that they regularly monitor and sign up to represent defendants in Cumberland County.

“It’s unacceptable for us to not even know,” Vargas said.

‘SLIPPING THROUGH CRACKS’

As of Feb. 13, there were about 138 people facing criminal charges waiting for representation. That list had been reduced from more than 1,000 defendants in December 2024 to just over 250 by the end of last year, according to the commission’s annual report to state leaders.

Tarpinian said the list has worked well for addressing the crisis, but that it’s not a sustainable solution.

Courthouses across the state are suffering clerk vacancies, an issue court officials have raised at the Legislature while seeking more funds. A study by the National Center for State Courts recommended in 2023 that Maine needed an additional 53 clerks.

Barbara Cardone, a spokesperson for the courts, said clerks regularly add new defendants to the list and have 72 hours to look for a commission-approved lawyer who can take a case, before the commission takes over.

Cardone only provided information about the process of maintaining the list. She did not respond to questions about how Mendez’s case went unnoticed or whether there have been other similar incidents.

In her annual address on Feb. 12, Chief Justice Valerie Stanfill of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court thanked state lawmakers for recently funding some new clerk positions, but said that Maine’s courts still run “lean compared to other states.”

“We have been understaffed,” Stanfill said. “We really have operated very lean and been understaffed for years. That’s not going to change overnight.”

Mendez was on bail conditions and suspended from driving at the time she was arrested in November, according to Scarborough police. Mendez, the department said, was a passenger in her own vehicle, which was being driven by an acquaintance who also wasn’t allowed to drive. Police allege that they found marijuana, pills and small bags of a white substance in the car.

Mendez, who was living in Denmark before her arrest, said the wait was frustrating because she feels a lawyer might have helped her get answers about her case, and to coordinate with her family.

In a phone interview from the jail on Jan. 8, Mendez said there had been “no worse feeling than wondering if anybody even knows I’m here.”

Tarpinian doesn’t believe Mendez’s situation is widespread because she wasn’t aware of any similar examples.

She said that, in some cases, jails or attorneys will notify the courts when they’ve noticed a defendant in custody who appears to be waiting for legal representation. In several cases involving other defendants, Tarpinian said there has been a lag between when they are appointed an attorney and when that attorney is officially notified.

Tarpinian said most of Maine’s courts still operate using paper files. When clerks have to scan and send important documents after an attorney is assigned to a case, it can take days or weeks for that paperwork to arrive, she said.

The state’s courts are transitioning to a new, electronic record system that is already active in Androscoggin County. The judicial branch has announced that Kennebec County will transition next.

ONGOING CRISIS

Reports that people were waiting in jail without lawyers started coming up in late 2022 and, despite major investments by the state, the commission still fears it will run out of money to pay private attorneys, who are still doing a majority of the state’s public defense work, Tarpinian said.

Tarpinian said officials calculate what the agency needs based on what she described as an outdated reimbursement rate for private attorneys, who have been paid $150 an hour for their work since 2023.

Lawmakers are considering emergency legislation to allocate $13 million to avoid the shortfall and hire more public defenders. Gov. Janet Mills included both items in her proposal for a supplemental budget.

Sen. Anne Carney, D-Cape Elizabeth, who chairs the Judiciary Committee, is sponsoring the emergency bill. She said she is afraid that any gap in funding would “take us back to the conditions” that led to a 2022 lawsuit against the state by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine. That lawsuit is still pending before Maine’s supreme court.

Tarpinian said she’s heard from some private lawyers who can’t afford to take more cases without being paid on time. Several lawyers also submitted testimony to lawmakers.

Paul Corey, an attorney in Androscoggin County who opened a firm in 2023, urged lawmakers last month to pass the legislation. Corey said his team has helped represent many criminal defendants in the region who previously would have waited longer for legal help.

“If I close my doors, the young lawyers in my firm that are diligently handling court appointed cases will be let go, hired elsewhere in the private sector and highly unlikely to ever return to court-appointed work out of mistrust of the system,” Corey stated in written testimony.

Tarpinian said she fears that could lead to even more defendants who need lawyers.