Oregon resident Corshelle Jenkins was charged for a crime she did not commit in August 2023, accused of shoplifting pink boots from Nordstrom while she was actually at her job at a senior living facility.
But the 36-year-old Black mother of six did not learn about this charge until May 2025, when she received a letter from the Multnomah County court system informing her she had a warrant for her arrest because she had failed to show up to court.
However, when she went to court to clear up the matter, a judge told her there were no public defenders available — which is guaranteed by the Constitution — so she was told she had to wait while the false charges against her remained pending.
And she waited for eight anxiety-ridden months before the charges were dismissed after prosecutors acknowledged it was a case of mistaken identification, another “matched the description” blunder by police — a period when she remained petrified about going to jail over the false warrant for her arrest.
“I was worried about getting pulled over and arrested with my kids in the car,” Jenkins told The Guardian.
“I was really upset – it was interfering with how I provide for my children,” she said, adding that she was denied a second job because of the pending charge and also placed at risk of losing her current job.
“I was at risk of losing my job and being jailed for something I didn’t do.”
Jenkins is one of thousands of citizens denied public defenders for months or even years due to a backlog of cases in the Oregon court system – a constitutional crisis that has kept many defendants incarcerated since they have nobody to represent them in court.
The issue has also led to widespread dismissal of cases since there were not enough public defenders to represent the defendants, including one man accused of rape and another accused of strangulation.
The main reason for the issue is an underfunded bureaucracy that contracts public defenders through private law firms and nonprofits rather than maintain a government-funded public defender’s office as many states do.
The result is a “stunning lack of oversight” that allows the state to violate the constitutional rights of defendants, according to a 2019 report by the Sixth Amendment Center, a national nonprofit that “exclusively examines, uncovers, and helps fix the root of the indigent defense crisis.”
Defendants Released Without Trial
The 2019 report determined that one of the main reasons for the crisis was that the system relied on a flat fee per case when contracting attorneys regardless of hours logged, incentivizing attorneys to take as many cases as possible and resolve the cases as quickly as possible.
“The complex bureaucracy obscures an attorney compensation plan that is at root a fixed fee contract system that: pits appointed lawyers’ financial self-interest against the due process rights of their clients; and is prohibited by national public defense standards,” the 238-page report states.
Oregon lawmakers began making changes to the system following the report by eliminating the flat fee per case and by hiring 20 attorneys as public defenders, but the backlog continues.
Oregon Governor Tina Kotek has recommended increasing the budget by 20 percent to hire an additional 40 lawyers, but the state has not fully followed through on her idea.
But the number of defendants without public defenders has been decreasing after the state implemented the Oregon Public Defense Commission in January 2023.
The commission published a report in December 2025 stating that it has reduced the number of unrepresented defendants by 32 percent compared to a year earlier, from 3,778 cases to 2,559 cases.
“We have made important progress, but more work remains,” Ken Sanchagrin, who was appointed last year by the governor to oversee the commission, said in a press release from the governor’s office.
Meanwhile, citizens with little money to hire a private attorney are still having their constitutional rights violated by being denied legal representation.
Most of these defendants were arrested for misdemeanors, with driving under the influence making up 17 percent of the cases, reported OPB.
But defendants facing felony charges are also affected, including a man who spent two years in jail on charges of raping a minor, as well as another case of a man who spent six months on strangulation charges — both of whom were released because they did not have legal representation — putting the public in danger.
‘I Didn’t Do It’
In 2023, an Oregon judge ruled in a preliminary injunction, a temporary ruling that any defendant held in the Washington County jail without a court-appointed attorney would be released after ten days of their initial appearance, which applied to 36 defendants at the time, OPB reported.
In February 2026, the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that defendants without court-appointed attorneys must be released after 60 days for misdemeanor charges and 90 days for felony charges.
The state supreme court’s ruling led to the dismissal of more than 1,400 cases on charges of drug trafficking, aggravated theft, gun and weapons offenses, felony DUI and strangulation, KPTV reported.
“The current state of affairs is not helping public safety, and it is not helping victims,” said former public defender Jessica Snyder.
“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.”
Jenkins, the Black mother who was falsely accused of shoplifting, discovered the reason for the charges against her five months after her initial hearing when she was finally granted a court-appointed attorney, who showed her surveillance video of the alleged shoplifting.
Jenkins recognized the woman as a “loose acquaintance” who told police her name was Corshelle Jenkins, the Guardian reported.
The Guardian reported the two women looked nothing alike aside from their skin color, but Portland police wrote in their report that “DMV photo matched the subject in custody.”
“It really makes you angry. This wasn’t me. I didn’t do it,” she said. “But all I could do was just wait for an attorney.”
“I wanted to prove this wasn’t me. I wanted to get this moving,” Jenkins continued.
But her case was not dismissed until January, two-and-a-half years after she was initially charged and eight months after receiving that letter, threatening her with arrest for missing a court date.
“Had a defense attorney accepted the appointment when this individual was initially arraigned, this would undoubtedly have been resolved months earlier,” said Pat Dooris, spokesperson for the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office.
