If you’re a Utahn facing criminal charges and can’t afford to hire an attorney, it’s likely you’ll be assigned a public defender who is overworked and underpaid — and state officials know it.
Now, the governor is trying to help solve this problem by more than quadrupling the funding for a state organization that oversees Utah’s public defender services.
Gov. Gary Herbert earmarked $5 million in ongoing funding for Utah’s Indigent Defense Commission, created in 2016 to tackle a series of problems that places Utah’s system behind those in the vast majority of states.
The commission, which currently has a $1.