Towns would be barred from charging fees to people using public defenders under the bill. Supporters say the fee unduly burdens low-income residents. (Photo by New Jersey Monitor)
The Senate Judiciary Committee approved legislation that would end municipalities’ ability to charge for public defenders in a party-line vote Monday.
The bill would repeal a law that allows municipalities to charge indigent defendants up to $200 for representation in municipal court, a fee the bill’s backers say unduly burdens residents who already cannot afford legal representation.
“This fee can deter people from applying for a public defender and thus undermines the purpose of public defenders: to ensure that all people, regardless of their financial situation, can access legal counsel when they are accused of a crime,” said Lauren Aung, a policy fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey.
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Clients can repay the fee over up to four months. The collections can only be used to pay for low-income defendants’ legal representation.
Some Republican members of the committee said they worried about how eliminating the fee would impact local finances. Sen. Kristin Corrado (R-Passaic) said those costs had become more pressing as more cases are referred to municipal authorities.
“You’re looking at it as a revenue generator for the town. When I look at it, it’s just going toward covering the cost for the public defender that the town is obligated to pay for and the taxpayers are obligated to pay for, so waiving the fee is not going to make more funding available for public defenders,” she said.
Judges, she added, have the discretion under existing law to waive the fee if a defendant lacks the means to pay it and the debt would amount to an unreasonable burden.
The bill’s supporters said the fees generate little revenue at the local level, often accounting for a small fraction of a municipality’s annual spending.
In East Orange, public defender fees brought the municipality just $3,523 in 2024, Aung said, or about 1.5% of the $229,965 the municipality spent on public defenders that year. The city’s 2024 budget called for $195.2 million in spending.
“It’s simply not making much of a difference in terms of the court budget,” said Peter Chen, a senior policy analyst for progressive think tank New Jersey Policy Perspective. “It is making a huge difference in terms of these defendants and their families and their ability to not be financially burdened by relatively low-level contact with the criminal legal system.”
Relying on judges’ discretion to waive fees could lead to inconsistent outcomes, Aung said.
Gov. Phil Murphy in 2023 signed legislation that eliminated fees for representation by state public defenders, but the bill left in place fees paid at the local level.
Officials from the Office of the Public Defender supported the shift. The roughly $4 million collected through the state fee before its sunset accounted for less than 3% of the office’s budget in fiscal year 2023 and did not flow directly to the office, which had staff devoted to chasing defendants’ unpaid debts.
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