Maine lawmakers last week declined to study concerns raised by prosecutors about their pay and benefits being less than the state’s public defenders.

Prosecutors have argued that public defenders with less experience are eligible for higher salaries than their counterparts, while district attorney offices around the state struggle with vacancies, turnover and high caseloads.

“It’s a difficult position when you’re hiring,” said Neil McLean, district attorney for Androscoggin, Franklin and Oxford counties. He said the district is down about five attorneys, meaning nine prosecutors are covering nearly 3,600 active cases. “‘You should come work for us. We’re going to give you much higher caseloads, which translates to much more work, and pay you much less.'”

McLean and several other prosecutors shared these frustrations with state lawmakers last year, when the judiciary committee was considering a bill to address the issue by raising prosecutors’ salaries. Lawmakers agreed they needed recommendations on how to tackle the different pay structures — public defenders are unionized, prosecutors are not — and planned to do a pay study.

There have been recent political debates about taking away the public defenders’ ability to participate in collective bargaining. None of the efforts was successful, and defenders say it’s important to their work.

Last week, leadership at the Legislature declined to fund the prosecutors’ pay study while considering proposals at the end of the session.

A spokesperson for Senate President Mattie Daughtry said that was due to competing proposals and limited resources. This study would have cost about $3,000 over two years, according to a fiscal note. There was more than $66,000 available for study proposals during that time, including carry-over funding from the last session, according to the note.

“At the same time, the Legislature made significant investments in legal services, including supporting our Public Defense Services, judicial branch, and civil legal aid this session,” Mary Catus wrote in a statement Wednesday. “The fact that this proposal advanced as far as it did shows it’s something that is on legislators’ radar.”

Prosecutors say they’ve spent years putting these issues on lawmakers’ radar, even before Maine transitioned to a public defender system in 2022 after years of being the only state without one. Prosecutors have asked the Legislature previously for more staff positions to help handle what they described as an increasingly unsustainable workload.

This year, McLean said, he asked for, but did not receive, funding to replace a domestic violence prosecutor in Oxford County whose job had been covered by a federal grant since 2013.

Prosecutors said cases have become more overwhelming due to an increasing volume of video and digital evidence. And a persistent backlog, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and a shortage of lawyers available for court-appointed work, has led to cases taking longer to resolve.

Shira Burns, director of the Maine Prosecutors’ Association, said the group decided to shift its advocacy to focus on better conditions for existing prosecutors because it has become harder to attract and retain new lawyers.

“I felt very disappointed and disheartened,” said Chelsea Lynds, an assistant district attorney in Penobscot County. “They know this was a mistake and they’re just screwing around, and screwing over prosecutors. … And I did feel like it has been turned into a political issue.”

UNION DEBATE

In testimony last year, prosecutors cited some job postings in which defenders were offered pay up to $15,000 higher than what a prosecutor with the same level of experience earns. Public defenders also have policies that call for caseload limits, which prosecutors say they don’t get.

“It was frankly insulting,” Carlos Diaz, a long-time assistant district attorney in Cumberland County, said he recalled thinking at the time.

When lawmakers agreed in 2022 to hire public defenders, the Legislature didn’t specify whether they should be able to participate in collective bargaining. That decision was made administratively by the Maine Bureau of Human Resources. A spokesperson for the department did not respond to requests for comment.

Last year, Gov. Janet Mills asked lawmakers to remove public defenders’ ability to participate in collective bargaining as an amendment to an emergency funding bill for the Maine Commission on Public Defense Services, which was struggling to find enough available attorneys for defendants.

This year, House Republicans threatened to withhold support from another emergency bill when the commission was about to run out of funding to pay court-appointed private attorneys, who cover a majority of Maine’s public defense cases. The Republicans said they would only support a version that stripped the state’s public defenders of their ability to participate in collective bargaining.

They later changed course and supported the emergency bill.

Several defenders testified during a public hearing in 2025 that their union activity serves as an important buffer, since they are routinely in an adversarial role against the state in court. District Defender Jesse Archer in western Maine said during a hearing last year that removing collective bargaining would “get rid of some of the protections our attorneys need to have to do what they need to do.”

The Maine Prosecutors’ Association did not take a stance on the debates to take collective bargaining away from public defenders.

Burns said there’s no consensus on whether prosecutors should be allowed to unionize, but it’s a conversation they’d entertain.

“But then we will need lawmakers to change the law to let us even have the chance to have that conversation,” Burns said.

‘BALLOONED’ CASELOADS

Prosecutors have also raised concerns that public defenders follow caseload limits that are stricter than those applying to their counterparts.

Chelsea Lynds, an assistant district attorney in Penobscot and Piscataquis counties, said caseloads for prosecutors have “ballooned” as evidence becomes more voluminous. Cases are also taking longer to resolve as some parts of the state still struggle with an inadequate number of defense attorneys available to represent defendants who need and are entitled to a lawyer.

Diaz, with the Cumberland County district attorney’s office, said in early April he was carrying more than 700 cases, including those actively in court and those that he was reviewing for charges.

Burns called the caseloads of prosecutors “unethical.”

“They have really hard jobs, under really stressful situations, when they’re getting scrutinized by their decisions all the time,” Burns said.

Lynds said they’re not able to control what or how many cases they handle.

“In theory, we can decline (cases), we have discretion,” Lynds said. “But we have victims and the public to consider.”

Judges have found in some cases that prosecutors failed to turn over all evidence in the state’s possession to defendants in a timely manner. In those cases, judges have ruled that certain evidence discovered too late can’t be used.

That includes a robbery case in Cumberland County, where Diaz said prosecutors learned too late that police had a video of the alleged crime. Because prosecutors hadn’t given that to the defense, the judge said they couldn’t use it.

“It’s so much worse for the victim of a crime,” Diaz said. “We live in a society where we don’t feel that the criminal justice system protects us, or hears us or honors our value as a people — we have a big problem. And that is the problem we’re dealing with right now.”