Low-paid prosecutors, public defenders leave jobs or take side gigs to make ends meet

Alex Lopez’s story is a familiar one in the Miami-Dade County State Attorney’s Office: He joined in 2017, earning about $40,000, working his way up to prosecuting robbers and drug traffickers.

But when his wife, a teacher, became pregnant, he knew he had to leave — he was earning $60,000 in a city where “I couldn’t sustain a family and eventually be able to buy a house anywhere we’d want to live,” Lopez said.

So in July 2021, Lopez left the office to start his own law firm. Within a few months, he’d already earned more than his previous salary from just a couple of cases.

Lopez is among some 80 Miami-Dade prosecutors who have left the office in the past year, a trend that Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle attributes to “shamefully low salaries” that are compounded by a rising cost of living.

Those types of stories are starting to color the debate in the state Capitol as state lawmakers begin writing a more than $100 billion state budget for the upcoming fiscal year, which has the potential of including pay increases for state prosecutors and public defenders across the state.

“At a certain point, it becomes a safety concern because you need qualified prosecutors to handle the big cases and we’ve had state attorneys who have shared with me that there are times where convictions are not attained because they don’t have the staff with expertise in their office,” Democratic state Rep. Fentrice Driskell, a Tampa attorney, said Wednesday as she raised concerns about the “lack of new resources” for state prosecutors and public defenders in the House’s budget proposal.

Requests are made but is it a priority?

So far, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican leaders in the House and Senate have not made as big a push to increase the salaries of state prosecutors and public defenders, like they have with sworn law enforcement officers. As DeSantis runs for reelection, he is pushing for a 25% increase for all sworn law enforcement officers, one of the proposals he says he is “most proud of.”

The Florida Prosecuting Attorneys Association, which represents the state’s 20 elected state attorneys and more than 2,000 assistant state attorneys, is requesting $10,000 per full-time prosecutor. Rundle is asking for an additional $15,000 per prosecutor and $8,000 per staff member in Miami-Dade, and is also advocating to raise the salaries of public defenders.

“Every single one of your public defender’s offices and state attorney’s offices is at a critical constitutional crisis point,” Rundle told a Senate panel last week. “If your state attorney’s offices cannot recruit and retain qualified, experienced lawyers to handle serious cases and assist the police in this process, victims will suffer.”

Stacy Scott, the public defender for Florida’s 8th judicial circuit, also told the panel the situation is dire.

“We are in a crisis. It is critical. The system is going to implode if we cannot hire new lawyers or keep lawyers,” Scott said.

Currently, the Senate’s proposed budget does not include any pay increases for state prosecutors and public defenders. The House has pitched a 5.38% pay increase — an amount that is designed to keep up with the cost of inflation, and that would be offered to all state employees as part of a broader pay package.

House Appropriations Committee Chair Jay Trumbull, R-Panama City, said the 5.38% pay raise should help retain and recruit prosecutors and public defenders, though he acknowledged that the state is “not going to compete with the private market.”

“You hear stories all the time about folks who work in the state attorney’s office and they leave and make $142,000 a year or something like that. We are not going to get to that point. But giving them a 5.38% increase in pay, based on what they have already gotten in years past, I think will help us stay the folks that are leaving.”

Big cities pose bigger challenges

However, Republican and Democrat lawmakers who represent large, metropolitan areas for weeks have been pushing for pay increases that take into consideration cost-of-living adjustments, not just inflation.

“One particular concern I have coming from Miami-Dade County is that the cost of living has astronomically increased, as opposed to let’s say Gilchrist County for instance,” state Rep. Juan Alfonso Fernandez-Barquin, R-Miami, said at a House committee meeting back in January. “It is not equitable to have a state attorney or an assistant state attorney getting paid the same salary as someone in a rural county.”

Republican state Rep. Tom Fabricio, a Miramar attorney, echoed those sentiments at the same meeting.

“It is a critical need. They are heavily overburdened and we need to address that,” he said.

A month later, as budget negotiations start heating up, those same concerns continue to be raised.

Senate Appropriations Chair Kelli Stargel, R-Lakeland, told reporters on Wednesday that the Senate is currently focused on the “lowest earners in the state of Florida.”

At the direction of Senate President Wilton Simpson, the Senate is prioritizing a push for a $15 minimum wage for state workers. That effort will also include $100 million to iron out the disparity between existing employees and the new hires. Among government workers, that disparity is known as “compression.”

Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg, said the Senate’s proposal is “not enough.”

“This is not enough to retain them,” said Brandes. “They need to really do an evaluation as to what they need, and they need to do a differential based on the communities they live in.”

As it stands now, the current salaries are forcing some prosecutors to take odd jobs to make ends meet.

Cleaning houses, delivering food to supplement income

A recently departed Miami-Dade prosecutor told the Miami Herald she had to clean houses and deliver food in her off-hours to get by.

“It’s really sad. There are people who love this job and would stay as long as they could, but for the pay,” said the attorney, who asked her name not be used. She now works practicing civil law.

Her story: When she started several years ago, she was making just $34,000 a year — no biggie, she figured, because she was soaking up the valuable trial experience. “I viewed it like a [medical] residency,” she said.

But even as she got incremental raises, they wound up being too paltry to cover rising rent for an apartment she shared with a roommate, utilities, car payments, insurance — plus about $500 a month in student loans. Her money troubles weren’t unusual. Many of the young prosecutors were adept at stretching their once-a-month pay, borrowing lunch money here and there, taking advantage of supermarket deals.

Eventually, she had no choice but to help some relatives with house cleaning and eventually delivering food via DoorDash because she needed money for things like gas and food.

Embarrassed, she told few people — and hoped she wouldn’t run into any fellow attorneys while making a delivery. There was one scare: She ran into family friends at a Cuban restaurant but managed to escape with few question asked.

“I went to law school, and these people saw me graduate from law school, and here I was picking up an order,” she said.

This story was originally published February 10, 2022 at 1:25 PM.