The head of Nashville’s Public Defender’s Office talks development, expansion
Nashville native Martesha Johnson Moore has devoted her career to serving and representing indigent people. In 2018, she became the first African American and only second woman to be elected as Nashville’s Chief Public Defender.
Since 2009, she has served as a lawyer in the Nashville Public Defender’s Office, but said there was still an incredible learning curve after she was elected.
“I was doing direct representation and then, when I became the Chief Public Defender, that role flipped from direct representation to high-level administration,” she says.
One of the things Johnson said would have been helpful to know is how frustrating things sometimes can be, especially when she feels unheard.
“I represent people that are easily cast aside and not listened to, and so that can sometimes fall on my plate as well,” she says. “I knew that was going to be a challenging role. I don’t think I had any idea of just how challenging and how overwhelming it can be at times with all the various responsibilities.”
What does a chief public defender actually do?
I am the administrator for our office. The public defender’s office role is to represent people who are charged with crimes and cannot afford to hire a lawyer to represent them. In those situations, the court will appoint us because anybody who is charged with a crime is entitled to and has the right to a lawyer. My office, we are the entity that represents people who cannot afford to hire their own lawyer.
I am responsible for the hiring, recruiting, training and the development of lawyers and support staff in the office. I manage the overall budget of the Public Defender’s Office and advocate [for] what that really looks like. I do all of the meetings with the other stakeholders like the district attorney general, the sheriff, the judges, the mayor.
I also do direct assignments. I am responsible for putting the lawyers in the various courts and assigning them to their particular judge, managing their caseloads, hearing client concerns, and responding to [those concerns], and also maintaining our actual physical office building. So, I’m the one responsible for all things “public defender.”
How has your advocacy role changed over time?
It’s become a more global advocacy role. When I was doing direct representation, I was advocating for one client at a time. Now I am advocating for the entire client base of the Public Defender’s Office. But not only that, I’m advocating for other indigent people who find themselves in the criminal legal system. I’m speaking out against injustices that happen in our city and trying to be a strong voice for how we could create a more equitable, fair, and more humane legal system in Nashville.
What are some of your office’s achievements over the past few years that you would like to highlight?
I think our biggest achievements have been expansion. When I started as a public defender, we were already a wonderful office that was really trying to provide excellence and representation to our clients. [Now] we have completely expanded how we recruit and train people to work in our office. We have a full-time training director because we’re passionate about what it means to be excellent advocates. And that means we have to train and develop people to know what they need to do in order to meet that excellence requirement.
We’ve hired more people in the last six years than the entire time that I was a lawyer in the Public Defender’s Office. Each year, our budget has included positions in our office, and so we’ve been able to expand the offerings that we are able to provide to our clients.
We have a serious felony representation team. We have expanded our juvenile division to include young adults who are our kids but are facing adult charges. They are being transferred to the adult courts. We’ve expanded the team that will provide for them. We’ve expanded our client advocate team and our investigative team. We have expanded our lawyer team. We have more lawyers in the office now than we have had. We have expanded our intake team, the people that you see when you come in.
We have really become a sought-after public defender’s office. We know this because law schools tell us this. Students who apply to our office are saying the reputation of the Nashville Defender’s Office is that we are one of the leaders in the field and people want to work with us. We have many achievements from schools having us on their preferred list to receiving the Community Ambassador award from Gideon’s Promise, which is the premier organization that trains public defenders. I think with our partnerships and our passions and the way that we are trying to do this work, we are showing that we are committed to doing it at the highest level, and that’s the thing that I’m most proud of.
How many positions does the Public Defender’s Office have?
The office currently has 110 staff members. If our budget request is successful, we’ll have 12 more positions that have been granted to us in the mayor’s budget; so as long as that passes, our staffing will go up to 122 members of our team.
As the city grows, I assume you need more staff?
Absolutely. Workload is an extreme challenge. We at the Public Defender’s Office are here to represent people that can’t afford a lawyer. There are many indigent people in the criminal legal system. And unfortunately, even with our best efforts, we can’t represent every single person who was charged with a crime because we have to be mindful of our workloads. In order to provide excellent representations of people, we have to maintain workloads that are consistent with our ability to do that.
What happens when you cannot take any more cases?
If we have a conflict and our office cannot represent someone who is charged, then the courts will appoint another lawyer to represent them. That lawyer will not be a lawyer that works in the Public Defender’s Office, but a private defense attorney who takes appointed cases.
What are some of the biggest opportunities you see in Nashville to improve the justice system?
I think the biggest opportunities for us are around how we treat poor people in general in this city. That’s my client base, people who are indigent. I have found that humanity in society is really cruel to people who don’t have wealth.
Our biggest opportunity is to create a better justice system that isn’t cruel to poor people and works really hard to eliminate racism and bias and is not utilizing incarceration as an answer to some of our societal problems. For people who don’t have access to health care for mental health treatments or drug addiction or alcohol addiction, the jail oftentimes becomes the answer to all of that.
We have to reimagine what we think about incarceration because it really shouldn’t be that jail is the answer for everything. We have to be creative and bold and willing to think about justice differently than what we have historically done.
Is there anything specifically you focus on to achieve that goal of criminal justice reform?
I can’t think of a specific thing. That is the root of what we do every day. It is our work day-to-day in the courthouse that reflects that. [It includes] arguing for people to receive releases that don’t involve incarceration. It’s me at the executive level talking with the District Attorney and the Sheriff about ways that we think about how we are moving people through the system differently, trying to eliminate some of the overcrowding issues that exist in our jails. It’s me advocating to the Mayor about how we show what we care about in this city [by showing] what we spend our money on. And so, [we need to make] sure we are resourcing the Public Defender’s Office so that we’re not furthering the disparities that exist for people to have access to justice.
Nationwide, we hear a lot about criminalization of homelessness, and Tennessee was the first state to make camping on public property a felony. What is the role of your office in trying to assist people who are arrested mainly because they have no places to go?
The role of my office is to be on the front line with our clients who are experiencing homelessness and raise the alarm about how unjust it is to be incarcerating people, taking away their liberty, solely because they don’t have a place to sleep.
Spending all of those resources to incarcerate versus spending resources to build housing, to build places where they can go – this is fundamentally wrong. Our role in all of that is to fight about it and try to convince people of better options and better ways to treat our neighbors who don’t have a home.
The federal government is now constantly attacking any DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and justice approach. How does that impact your work?
Any state law or federal mandate has an impact on how we do our work. If sentencing passes an elimination of DEI law, which we have in this state, then I have to follow the law. That’s a part of what my role is, and it makes it difficult to recruit and retain the absolute best people to do this work because what we know is that when we embrace our differences and our diversity of mindset, our diversity of where we come from, our diversity of what we look like, we really build a community of thought that helps us be our best selves in our office.
We’ve always been committed to hiring the best people for the work, so I don’t think that’s going to change the way we approach this anyway, but I think we weaponized the term DEI so much that we really need to get back to the reality and that is [when we have] different people at the table, we can interact better. If everybody thinks alike, looks alike, walks alike, talks alike, then we don’t have the ability to effectuate change in the right ways.
Do the recent ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) activities at the state level trickle down to your office?
We represent people who are charged with crimes. We do that regardless of what their immigration status is. If somebody has been charged with a crime in Nashville, and they qualify for our services, we’re going to represent them.
The Supreme Court requires this to go one step further. Not only will we represent them in their criminal cases, we also have to know enough to be able to advise them about how their criminal charges will affect their ability to get any immigration status. We have a responsibility to people who are charged with crimes and have immigration concerns. We make sure we’re on top of that when we’re representing them. So that hasn’t changed for us.