UPDATES & ANALYSIS

Slim Supreme Court majority allows public defender to withdraw from representing indigent defendant

by Rox Laird | February 9, 2026

Trial courts have a duty under the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to assure that a criminal defendant who cannot afford to hire a lawyer is provided one at the State’s expense. To comply with that constitutional mandate, Iowa created the Office of State Public Defender (SPD) to employ attorneys to provide indigent defense or to contract with attorneys in private practice willing to take on those criminal cases.

What happens when no public defenders or attorneys in private practice are able to take on an indigent defense case? That happened in Scott County in 2024, when Miguel Puentes, head of the local public defender office in Davenport, moved to withdraw from six appointments made by the district court to represent indigent defendants in six separate cases, saying the office’s attorneys were experiencing a “temporary overload” of cases and were “ethically unable” to accept the assignments.

Having no other attorneys available, the district court denied the public defender’s motion to withdraw and ordered Puentes himself to take on the cases.

That, a deeply divided Iowa Supreme Court held in a Jan. 30 decision, exceeded the district court’s authority. Although a slim 4-3 majority of the Court resolved the immediate question of whether a trial court must accept without question a public defender’s withdrawal from a criminal case, it left open the long-term question of what alternatives exist for providing constitutionally required indigent defense when no willing lawyers are available.

The decision for the majority was written by Justice Dana Oxley and joined by Justices Christopher McDonald, Matthew McDermott and David May. Justice Thomas Waterman filed a dissenting opinion joined by Chief Justice Susan Christensen and Justice Edward Mansfield. Justice Mansfield filed a separate dissent joined by Chief Justice Christensen and Justice Waterman.

Prior to creation of the Office of State Public Defender, Iowa relied on lawyers in private practice to represent indigent defendants. By the late 1970s, the Court said in a 1979 decision, “the burden of representing indigents [had fallen] upon a small segment of the bar, rather than all lawyers, as was originally intended.”

Today, the Court said, Iowa is facing an “indigent defense crisis” due to a growing shortage of attorneys available to represent indigent defendants. “According to the Legislative Services Agency, the number of private attorneys willing to contract with the SPD over the last decade has fallen by half—from 1,018 in 2015 to approximately 500 in 2024.”

The Office of Public Defender was created by the Iowa Legislature in 1981 pursuant to Iowa Code Chapter 13B, which provides for the agency in the executive branch and the director to be appointed by the governor. The statute authorizes creation of offices of local public defenders, such as Davenport’s, under the state office’s umbrella.

Section 13B.9(4)(a) provides, in part, that if the local public defender is unable to handle a case because of a “temporary overload of cases, the local public defender shall return the case to the court. If the case is returned and the state public defender has filed a successor designation, the court shall appoint the successor designee. If there is no successor designee on file, the court shall make the appointment pursuant to section 815.10.”

Under that section, the court “shall” appoint an attorney who contracts with the state public defender to represent indigent defendants, and if no contract attorney is available, the court may appoint a noncontract attorney. Because none of those alternatives was available in this instance, the district court rejected the Davenport Public Defender’s withdrawal from the six cases.

The Iowa Supreme Court, however, said the Davenport Public Defender satisfied his burden under the statute by returning the six cases to the district court because due to a temporary overload of cases, but the district court exceeded its authority by refusing to accept the return of the six cases.

Although Justice Waterman said in his dissenting opinion that the local public defender should be required to present detailed evidence to the district court regarding the temporary overload, Justice Oxley wrote in response that without standards to measure that evidence, “district court judges would quickly turn into micromanagers of the local public defender office in their county. The general assembly has instead given that responsibility to the executive branch.”

By leaving it to the local public defender to make the factual determination of what amounts to an overload, she wrote, “we thread the constitutional needle and avoid treading into areas left to the political branches of government. To hold otherwise would require district courts to dig into the details of a local public defender office in determining what level of caseload was sufficiently onerous to be considered a ‘temporary overload,’ potentially encroaching upon its personnel and hiring decisions.”

Finally, the Court said that while it recognized that the Davenport Public Defender’s office is not sufficiently staffed to represent the six indigent defendants, and there are a dwindling number of lawyers across the state willing to serve as contract attorneys, that does not suggest the district court should have appointed unwilling attorneys to take on the six cases.

“This decision does not address what must happen moving forward in the proceedings for the six affected defendants to avoid violating their constitutional rights to counsel,” Justice Oxley wrote. “The district court will either find attorneys to appoint or face the potential of allowing criminal cases to be dismissed for lack of constitutionally mandated appointed counsel.”

Justice Waterman raised numerous objections to the majority opinion in his lengthy dissent, saying he would affirm the district court’s denial of the public defender’s withdrawal from the six criminal cases. He said the district court had discretion to ask the Public Defender for more information about its alleged temporary overload and the Public Defender had the burden to prove it is temporarily overloaded by making detailed justification to the court for withdrawing as counsel.

Instead, he wrote, the majority cedes the district court’s responsibilities and allows the State Public Defender to decide the overload question unilaterally.

Justice Waterman wrote that the majority wrongly focused on the Davenport public defender’s office in isolation because staff attorneys in other local public defender offices in eastern Iowa could have been assigned to handle the Scott County cases.

“The district court acted within its discretion when it declined to find that a single sentence in each motion about a claimed overload met the SPD’s burden of proof,” Justice Waterman wrote. “Moreover, Puentes’s statement lacked any information about the SPD’s number of staff attorneys, its cases per attorney, the hours its attorneys worked, or any comparison with prior workloads—any of which might have helped to establish the claimed overload.”

Writing in a separate dissent supporting Justice Waterman’s arguments, Justice Mansfield added that the majority’s separation-of-powers concerns are “misguided and overblown.” Iowa courts have a constitutional obligation to assure that criminal defendants receive adequate representation. “Fulfilling that obligation does not encroach on the executive branch’s role; it’s part of the judiciary’s job,” he wrote.

Finally, Justice Mansfield said he is not reassured by the majority’s explanation that the Court’s decision does not mean unwilling private attorneys will be forced to represent criminal defendants at the low hourly rates allowed by Iowa law. That option is within district courts’ discretion under Iowa Code Section 815.10(3), which says if no contract attorney is available to represent an indigent defendant, the court may appoint a noncontract attorney.

The Office of State Public Defender has pre-filed a bill for the current legislative session that, if enacted, would require district courts to appoint unwilling attorneys by changing the “may” in Iowa Code section 815.10(3) to “shall.”

“If this bill became law, there would obviously be much to sort out. But it’s important to appreciate the magnitude of what the SPD is proposing,” he wrote. “The state government would be forcing individuals to provide services to the state on terms they are not voluntarily willing to accept. Consider where this could lead. If lawyers were first, who would be next? Would the state government do the same with Medicaid, mandating that unwilling physicians and dentists accept Medicaid patients at whatever reimbursement rate the state government chose to offer?”

Tags: Iowa Supreme Court 2025-26