LEWISTON — As Maine continues to grapple with a chronic shortage of private lawyers able to represent indigent criminal defendants facing jail time, public defender offices are popping up to fill the gap, including one in Lewiston.

On Thursday, 8th District Court Judge Andrew Robinson reviewed the cases of five indigent defendants who have been sitting in Androscoggin County Jail in Auburn — some for longer than a month — waiting for lawyers to take their cases.

Robinson repeatedly told defendants via videoconference to the jail that, although they were eligible for court-appointed legal counsel, the court was unable to locate a lawyer to represent them.

Robinson declared in each of those five cases that the defendant’s Sixth Amendment rights had been violated.

Jesse James Ian Archer is hoping to step into that legal breach.

Archer was tapped to head up a new Maine Public Defender Office in Lewiston, directly across from the courthouse where Robinson was citing violations of defendants’ constitutional rights.

Archer said Friday the goal of that office is to help resolve the issue by picking up the cases of roughly one-third of indigent defendants entitled to legal representation because they face possible incarceration.

He said he hopes to hire five additional lawyers, two paralegals, an office manager and two private investigators.

The office is scheduled to open on Sept. 3, but Archer said it likely will take longer to ramp up to full staffing.

Attorneys will represent indigent criminal defendants in Androscoggin, Franklin and Oxford counties.

Archer began practicing law in 2016 with a local law firm, but left a year later to focus solely on criminal defense.

Since then, he has represented indigent defendants on legal matters ranging in severity from misdemeanors to homicides.

He said the new office presents an opportunity he couldn’t pass up.

“I think I can make a bigger difference,” Archer said, in a criminal justice system that the Maine Supreme Judicial Court has said was in a state of “constitutional crisis.”

In addition to a shortage of private criminal defense attorneys available to take on indigent defendant’s cases, Archer said he believes too many criminal cases that aren’t necessary are being filed by prosecutors, contributing to the courts’ backlogs.

Maine was the only state that had relied in the past solely on private criminal defense attorneys to be court-appointed to represent indigent defendants.

As the rosters for those private lawyers shrunk, their hourly rate of pay was boosted in an effort to bolster their ranks.

But that effort didn’t prove enough to restore the rosters of private lawyers to the point of being able to represent all indigent defendants sitting in jail with no legal representation.

One of those defendants in the county jail in Auburn who appeared before Judge Robinson on Thursday had been arrested in June and had appeared in court more than a half-dozen times since then, each time without a lawyer appointed to take his case.

A judge at an earlier hearing had deemed that defendant’s Sixth Amendment rights to have been violated, yet he remained behind bars Thursday, still with no attorney.

Jim Billings, executive director of the Maine Commission on Public Defense Services, said the soon-to-open Lewiston office will be the fifth in the state.

A group of roving criminal defense attorneys that traveled throughout northern Maine and as far south as Bangor were hired by the state in the fall of 2022, he said.

They had no central office.

The shortage of rostered private criminal defense lawyers had started as a rural occurrence, but has since spread to Maine’s cities, Billings said.

When state funding became available last summer, a brick-and-mortar was slated to open in Augusta, he said.

Similar to the proposed staffing for Lewiston, the Augusta office has five attorneys, he said, and has been running at full capacity since earlier this year.

In recent months, there have been no indigent criminal defendants stuck in jail in Kennebec County without a court-appointed attorney, Billings said.

Funding for offices in Bangor and Caribou was solidified last spring, followed by the go-ahead this summer for offices in Ellsworth and Lewiston that will bring the total number up to five.

Plans for offices in Cumberland County and York County are in the works, he said.

The overall goal is to have the public defender offices pick up roughly one-third of the indigent criminal defense cases to supplement the rosters, he said.

Unlike the rostered private attorneys, public defenders won’t be directly assigned to specific cases by judges. That will be the role of Archer and the lead lawyers running the other public defender offices, he said.

Putting that control in the hands of the public defender offices will enable them to limit their caseloads to manageable volumes, Billings said.

Otherwise, “that is something that would kill this before it even gets off the ground,” he said.