Drug trafficking, weapons offenses, strangulation, felony DUI — 1,465 criminal cases across Oregon vanished this week after the state Supreme Court ruled that defendants who weren't assigned attorneys fast enough must have their charges dropped.

The ruling in State v. Roberts establishes hard deadlines: 60 days after arraignment for misdemeanors, 90 days for felonies. Miss the window, and the case gets dismissed. Oregon missed it — over and over again.

Multnomah County alone accounts for 915 of those dismissals. Washington County lost 263. The rest are scattered across the state. These aren't parking tickets. The charges include aggravated theft, gun crimes, and violent felonies.

A Crisis Years in the Making

According to KPTV, Oregon's public defense system didn't collapse overnight. The Multnomah County District Attorney's Office acknowledged that the shortage of defense attorneys has persisted for several years. As of January 1 of last year, the Oregon Judicial Department counted more than 4,500 unrepresented cases and 1,172 unrepresented individuals in Multnomah County alone.

That's not a crack in the system. That's the foundation giving way while everyone watched.

Attorney Nadia Dahab framed the ruling as an overdue correction:

"We've had thousands of people who have been charged with crimes who have not had the assistance of counsel to help move their case forward and protect them in their criminal cases, that's an ongoing violation of our state Constitution and our court recognized that today, and I think that's the most fundamental thing that comes out of the court's order."

She's right that constitutional rights matter. But the practical result is that people charged with serious crimes are walking free — not because they were proven innocent, but because the state couldn't get its act together. The Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to counsel. It does not guarantee that the guilty go unpunished when bureaucracies fail.

$300 Million a Year — and This Is the Result

Here's where the story turns from troubling to maddening. Oregon spends more than $300 million per year on public defense. According to the Multnomah County DA's Office, that's nearly four times the national per-capita average. Hourly pay rates for public defenders are among the highest in the country.

And yet criminal case filings are already about 15% lower than before the crisis began — meaning prosecutors have been scaling back their caseloads to accommodate a system that still can't keep up.

So the state is spending a fortune, filing fewer cases, and still can't assign a lawyer within 90 days of a felony arraignment. At some point, the question stops being "how do we fund this?" and becomes "where is all the money going?"

Former public defender Jessica Snyder described the downstream damage:

"To have cases stalled out for years on end doesn't help anyone in the criminal system, it is a huge harm to those defendants who have a right to counsel, and a right to assert their innocence in court, and it also has a huge harm on those parties who are impacted by crimes in our society."

She's identifying a real problem — and one that Oregon's political leadership has allowed to metastasize. But the solution the court chose amounts to releasing pressure by opening the doors of the courthouse and letting charged defendants walk through them.

Without Prejudice — but Without Urgency

The dismissals are technically without prejudice, meaning prosecutors could refile charges if they eventually meet the constitutional requirements. In theory, that's a safety valve. In practice, it's a fantasy. If Oregon can't assign attorneys to active cases within the court's deadlines now, it won't magically develop that capacity for refiled ones. Cases grow stale. Witnesses move. Evidence degrades. Victims — the people the system is supposed to serve — are left with nothing.

The DA's office said it has taken steps: special case resolution dockets, adjusted charging practices, efficiency changes, participation in legislative hearings, and work groups. That's a long list of processes. It has not produced results.

Oregon's Leadership Vacuum

Gov. Kotek recently appointed Stephen Sanchagrin as permanent director of the Oregon Public Defense Commission. The DA's office called for swift action to address the attorney shortage.

But "swift" is a strange word for a crisis that has persisted for years under unified Democratic governance in Salem. Oregon hasn't had a Republican governor since 1987. Democrats have held the state legislature for most of the last two decades. This is their system, built with their priorities, funded at levels they chose. And it produced 1,465 dismissed criminal cases in a single week.

Dahab acknowledged the depth of the problem:

"It's been going on for many years now, and it's a complicated problem that requires a complicated solution. This is only one piece of the solution, but it was necessary, given the magnitude of the problem."

Complicated, yes. But also clarifying. When a state spends four times the national average on public defense and still can't meet basic constitutional timelines, the issue isn't resources. It's governance. It's a political class that treats public safety as an afterthought — that will spend any amount of money as long as it doesn't have to rethink the assumptions driving the spending.

Who Pays the Price

The people charged with drug trafficking and strangulation got their cases dismissed. The people against whom those crimes were committed got a letter — or more likely, nothing at all.

Snyder put it plainly:

"The current state of affairs is not helping public safety, and it is not helping [persons impacted by crimes]."

Oregon has managed to build a system that fails defendants, fails victims, and fails taxpayers simultaneously — at record cost. The Supreme Court didn't create this disaster. It just forced the state to acknowledge it publicly, 1,465 cases at a time.

The charges may be refiled someday. The confidence that the system works won't be.