Indiana prosecutors wrestle with staffing crunch

Hoosiers driving past the Clark County Prosecutor’s Office on any given evening or hour are likely to spot a deputy prosecutor’s truck parked outside.

Prosecutor Jeremy Mull says his 15 attorneys are working round-the-clock to manage a caseload that’s large enough for 30 attorneys.

“You have deputies who come to work and have just an almost impossible task with the number of cases that are assigned to them,” Mull told The Indiana Lawyer.

“We’re really putting a lot of them in impossible positions, you know, expecting appropriate resolutions to the crime, and yet not giving the staffing or the assistance needed to really make that happen in a practical way,” he added.

Mull’s concerns aren’t isolated.

It’s no secret that Indiana has an attorney shortage. But the sector of the law that stands as the primary enforcer of criminal matters has 30% fewer prosecuting attorneys than it needs, according to the Indiana Prosecuting Attorneys Council.

According to a 2025 analysis report from the Association of Indiana Prosecuting Attorneys and Waggoner, Irwin, Scheele & Associates Inc., a Muncie-based consulting firm, nearly 80 of Indiana’s 91 counties were short of the number of prosecutors they needed.

According to the report, Allen County currently has about 34 prosecuting attorneys but needs 37 more — a recommended 109% increase.

Floyd County, which has a population of roughly 82,000 people, has seven attorneys but needs 17 — a nearly 150% increase.

And Vanderburgh County currently has 20 prosecutors and needs about 58 — a 190% increase.

Behind the scenes

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted much of the state’s caseload management system, but Mull said there has been improvement in recent years.

Even so, he said, with that his deputy prosecutors are “still saddled with a huge backlog of cases in many of the courts.”

“We have some deputies that have several hundred cases active in their respective caseload assignments,” he said, adding that many of them date to 2018 and 2019.

“All of the deputies are working very hard to, you know, work those cases, to try to get appropriate convictions and sentences on them,” he said. “But it just becomes more challenging with the passage of time.”

Courtney Curtis, the assistant executive director for the Indiana Prosecuting Attorneys Council, said that on a statewide basis, there seems to be a leveling out of caseload backlogs, but she also emphasized that a prosecutor’s caseload does not necessarily equate with their workload — there’s much more going on behind the scenes.

“We don’t file everything,” she said.

Prosecutors spend a lot of time and resources evaluating whether a case is worth taking on, which can take up a big chunk of time, Curtis said.

For example, Mull explained that a prosecutor might spend two weeks reviewing a shooting but ultimately not file a charge.

“That would never get reflected as a filed case,” he said.

It also takes much longer to prepare for trial now than it used to, Curtis said, partly because of the increasing complexity of cases due to technological and scientific advancements, such as evaluating body camera footage and DNA testing.

“Our work is getting harder, and it takes more time,” Curtis said.

Legislative efforts

Both Curtis and Mull are encouraging other branches of the state to get involved, particularly the General Assembly.

“The rule of law is the foundation — the foundation of what this country and the state is built upon, and you have to have it,” Mull said. “It is an investment worth making.”

Some in the Indiana House of Representatives have spent the past couple of years trying to get more funding for county prosecutors. Notable bills included 2025’s House Bill 1006 and 2026’s House Bill 1344.

HEA 1006, as it was introduced by Fishers Republican Rep. Chris Jeter, would have established a reimbursement fund, in which voluntary, participating counties would be eligible for a state match if they met certain criteria, according to Jeter.

But because the state faced significant budget concerns, Jeter told The Lawyer, the Legislature axed several new spending measures, including his proposal.

The Legislature sent the legislation, which in its final form established a prosecutor review board but did not create the prosecutor fund, to Gov. Braun’s desk, and he signed it into law.

So this year, Jeter and Rep. Greg Steurwald, R-Avon, worked together on new legislation, HB 1344, which would have continued their previous attempt to get funding by establishing the public prosecution fund and a prosecuting attorney court fee, which Jeter said was estimated to raise about $15 million to $20 million.

Ultimately, the measure failed to advance out of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Although he says he and some of his colleagues will keep trying, Jeter is not very confident a prosecutor fund will receive appropriations.

“There just seems to be a really, sort of deep-seated policy disagreement between the House and Senate,” Jeter said.

He says the Senate views prosecutor funding as a county expense, while he considers it a state responsibility, since prosecutors enforce state-passed laws.

Jeter said if the Legislature were to appropriate funds to help prosecutors across the state, then there would be a tremendous impact on public safety.

Indiana Supreme Court Chief Justice Loretta Rush emphasized the power of the purse in addressing the attorney shortage in an interview with The Lawyer last week, but she also noted the court’s limitations in the matter.

“They [the Legislature] make those policy decisions,” she said. “What we can do is just, you know, spotlight.”

Clark County Prosecutor Mull said it is his hope that the General Assembly will pass a prosecutor funding bill so they can hire more attorneys to appropriately resolve their caseload.

“We need that desperately,” he said.

In the meantime: Encouragement

Even though Mull’s team is understaffed, the Clark County Prosecutor’s Office has managed to recently close a significant number of cases compared with previous years. In 2024, the office saw 7,600 new criminal cases filed but disposed of nearly 8,900, according to Indiana trial court statistics. In 2020, there were 6,070 new filings but 4,700 disposed cases.

How has the office been able to close so many more cases in just a few years? According to Mull, it’s through hard work.

“I mean, they care,” he said. “They don’t do it for the money. They do it because they want to keep people safe and get justice for victims.”

Chief Justice Rush says being a public servant offers something more valuable than money: it’s being a protector of the community.

“It’s more than just a job,” she said.•