Massachusetts Committee for Public Counsel Services

In Massachusetts, the Committee for Public Counsel Services (CPCS) oversees the state public defender system for indigent criminal defendants.

Organization and responsibilities
Some attorneys are public defenders employed by the Committee itself. Others are private criminal defense attorneys appointed by the courts to represent indigent defendants.

CPCS has several divisions: a Private Counsel Division, a Public Defender division, a Youth Advocacy division, and a Mental Health Litigation Division. It also operates an Innocence Program representing those who are wrongfully convicted. In addition to overseeing public defense services for defendants at trial, the committee also assigns counsel to represent inmates in parole hearings.

CPCS's main office is at 75 Federal Street, Boston. It has 20 regional offices across the commonwealth.

History
CPCS was established in 1983 by the Massachusetts Legislature in Chapter 673 of the Acts of 1983. It consolidated scattered previous programs including the Massachusetts Defenders Committee (MDC) (a public defender program established in 1960), the County Bar Advocate Program (a court-appointed counsel program affiliated with bar associations in most Massachusetts counties), and the Roxbury Defenders Committee (RDC), a private non-profit that worked in the Roxbury District Court and the Suffolk Superior Court.

In 2008, CPCS had 253 staffers, with an estimated 3,000 private attorneys on the list of lawyers approved to be appointed counsel. In 2018, CPCS has approximately 500 staff attorneys and 3,000 private attorneys certified to accept appointments. In the period 2019–2022, CPCS had an estimated 868 employees and 16 unpaid interns (includes employees who left the organization during this period).

As of 2008, private attorneys assigned to represent indigents were paid an hourly rate of $100 for murder cases, $60 for Superior Court cases, and $50 for district court cases.

Public defenders and other CPCS employees, such as investigators, have repeatedly but unsuccessfully attempted to unionize; efforts in 2015 and 2018 to form a bargaining unit failed. A 2014 study by the Massachusetts Bar Association found that Massachusetts had the lowest-paid public defenders in the country. In 2017, thousands of private court-appointed attorneys in Massachusetts were not paid for weeks for their services; the legislature ultimately approved retroactive funds to compensate them.

After the Annie Dookhan scandal (in which a Massachusetts drug lab chemist falsified test results, implicating many defendants), CPCS as well as the ACLU of Massachusetts, advocated for the dismissal of cases. In 2017, approximately 6,000 drug cases were dismissed because of the misconduc, although the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court declined CPCS's request for wholesale dismissal of all cases linked.

In 2019, CPCS's servers were targeted by a ransomware attack, disrupting operations; it took around 10 business days for data to be fully restored.