The young man in the orange jail jumpsuit came out from a side door one recent Friday morning and stood as instructed behind the glass partition that separates inmates from the judge and support staff inside Courtroom 101 at the Ramsey County Law Enforcement Center.

An aside right now: If I were ever to screw up and appear before a judge, this would be the place I would choose. It is much wider and at least twice as large as most of the dark-wood-paneled and poorly lit courtrooms over at the main courthouse on Kellogg Avenue and Fourth Street.

Awash in light oak paneling, the room is also airier, brighter and more technologically equipped with desktops, laptops, recording devices and a large TV screen to the left of the judge’s chair that displays the names of defendants undergoing first arraignments or bail custody hearings for non-felony cases.

But back to the young man wearing the orange-is-the-new-black outfit. He was busted by St. Paul cops on a disorderly conduct charge after they spotted him “brawling” with another man at the intersection of University Avenue and Albert Street.

Katie Conners, the court-appointed public defender, tried to convince Judge Adam Yang that the man deserves conditional release from custody.

“Mr. C (name withheld) was a little bit out of control,” Conners tells Yang, adding that the man her client fought with was a good friend of his but that on that day, things got a little heated between the two.

Yang decides to impose sentence: 30 days in jail, although 28 of them are stayed if Mr. C keeps his nose clean during his one year of probation. He was credited with the two days already in custody, had the $50 public-defender fee waived but will be required to pay the $86 surcharge and other court and administrative fees.

“Good luck to you, Mr. C,” Yang said as the man walked back through the side door where he came from.

There would be 21 more names on that TV monitor, and all but two would be represented by Conners or another colleague at some point by virtue of their indigent status.

What transpired on this morning was a sad parade of regular folks and some clearly troubled souls facing charges of DWI, simple theft, trespassing, misdemeanor domestic and property crimes. Some would take Conners’ advice and agree to undergo court-ordered chemical or mental health assessments in lieu of posting bail they cannot afford.

Others went back into custody to await another hearing or were released outright with conditions. A few, like the woman who stole a $75 purse from the J.C. Penney store at Maplewood Mall, walked out cussing a bit after learning that although the judge had released her on her own recognizance, she would still be held in custody on another case in another county.

“Y’all don’t know (expletive deleted),” she angrily yelled out.

Until that morning, Conners had never met any of her court-appointed clients. That’s the normal routine. She arrived about 90 minutes before the hearings commenced to sit down with as many as she could in a back room. Still, she had about 10 minutes or less to learn about their cases, their history, other pending cases or mitigating circumstances to help her better advocate for them.

Nearly four hours later, past lunch time, after the last hearing had been resolved, I asked Conners whether what I observed could be aptly described as assembly-line, meat-grinder justice.

“Absolutely,” the affable mother of two said. “Well, it can be. It doesn’t serve the clients because I have my agenda when I go in there to get this done as quickly as we can and do the best job I can. And they’ve got this issue going on over here and this issue going on over there …

“It does feel assembly-line-ish sometimes and I don’t feel I can get to know this person in five or 10 minutes, so I do the best I can,” she added.

Overworked. Underpaid. Unappreciated in some quarters. That unfortunately has been the lot of many public defenders here and across the nation. If the criminal justice system is, as some describe it, a three-legged stool, it’s the legal-aid section of the criminal defense leg that historically has been the most wobbly and unsteady, through no fault of its own.

“More than a half-century after the Supreme Court ruled in Gideon Vs. Wainright that every individual accused of a crime is entitled to a lawyer regardless of whether he or she can afford it, the system of legal aid continues to be in ‘crisis’ around the country,” noted a recent study by New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice.

Unsustainable caseloads and stark disparities in support resources and salaries between legal aid attorneys and prosecutors contribute mightily to that overwhelmed public defender crisis, the report said.

It cited research that found only 27 percent of county-based and 21 percent of state-based public-defender offices have enough attorneys to adequately handle their caseloads.

Ramsey County’s public defender office, like many other such state-funded offices in Minnesota, is better resourced than, say, New Orleans’, where until recently a single public defender handled roughly 19,000 misdemeanor cases in a year — translating into seven minutes per client, the report noted.

Still, the same challenges — caseload and pay and resource disparities — exist here. The most recent Legislative Auditor’s report on the state of the public-defense system found that workloads were too high, “affecting both the ability of public defenders to represent clients and the operation of state courts.”

After years of a pay freeze, the state Legislature approved a budget this year that calls for modest pay increases and includes $3 million to hire new attorneys and support staff statewide.

“While I am very grateful for the salary increase and staffing increases, we still have a long way to go to operate at national guideline standards as far as case assignments, and, additionally, starting salary, movement on salary steps and salary parity with the prosecuting offices needs to continue to be seriously addressed throughout the state,“ William Ward, the state’s chief public defender, explained in an email.

The workload has also increased in recent years due to more DNA forensics cases and clients with mental health issues. Another increasing time burden is having enough server space to download, store and review hours and hours of police body-worn camera footage.

“A lawyer here downloaded body-camera footage from 47 links in a felony case,” said James Fleming, Ramsey County’s chief public defender.

Fleming noted that the $7.05 million in state funds he gets pays for 39 1/2 full time lawyers, about 16 part-time, five paralegals, four case dispositional advisers, four investigators, an office manager and soon to be seven administrative assistants, two of whom will be devoted to the body-camera footage issue to help the lawyers.

His office goes up against a larger and better-funded county attorney staff, the city attorney office, and as well as four law firms that handle prosecutions for 15 suburban cities that include Roseville, Maplewood and White Bear Lake. He added that he enthusiastically supports alternative sentencing and juvenile diversion pilot projects taking place with county prosecutors that hopefully will more effectively resolve cases.

He hopes that promising criminal justice reform measures and initiatives will help alleviate the clogged court calendar schedule, which he believes is a major cause for the caseload backups.

Though the challenges are still there and still taxing, he speaks about the people in his office like a proud papa.

“They collectively help each other out, and there’s an energy here that’s unlike any office I’ve had,” he said last week. “It’s a privilege to work with these folks.”

Conners, a 12-year veteran, saw the steady exodus of colleagues to better paying law firms and other positions during the pay freeze. She still had more than $100,000 in law school debt and knows others with twice that much. She and her husband, who works at the Department of Revenue, live in a modest home in St. Paul’s Midway area. They write children’s books on the side. They own just one car to save a few bucks. She wishes the couple could afford to open college savings plan accounts for two kids ages 10 and 7.

She was so burned out one year that she took a month off.

Where? To Rio?

“No,” she chuckled. “I just stayed home to reset.”

Conners is a member of Public Defense Zen, a closed Facebook support group of public defenders nationwide.

She doubled down. Inspired by the St. Paul crime lab scandal a few years ago, she made it a point to learn as much about DNA forensics as she could to better represent clients. There were times she paid for training sessions out of her own pocket.

Why not leave? For the same reasons she was attracted to public defense following law school.

“I wanted to help people. I wanted my job to be something that has purpose. I believe strongly in protecting the Constitution,” she told me. “This is my life’s work. But it’s hard.”

Same goes for Deron Carrington, 33, a Johnson High School and Valparaiso University Law School grad and only child who was raised by a “tiger mom” single parent on Third Street and White Bear Avenue on St. Paul’s East Side.

I tagged along with Carrington one afternoon at the main courthouse. The three-year veteran has had days similar to Conners’. There was one day when he handled three felony cases simultaneously in three different courtrooms on different floors.

On this afternoon, he had two sentencings and another pretrial hearing before Judge Judith Tilsen in one of those darkly lit, clean-but-dated small courtrooms I described earlier.

One of his clients this day, Montrell Harris, took part in a home invasion where a 12-year-old girl was threatened with a sexual assault, and was also busted after trying to hold up a pharmacy months later last year during which he pointed a gun at a person’s head.

Harris pleaded guilty to the charges and asked for a reduced prison term. Carrington notes that Harris’ 18-year-old brother was killed during a robbery, that he was kicked out of his home and that he also struggled with a heroin addiction. He adds that Harris has “found God in jail” and counsels other inmates.

Harris “has experienced an incredible amount of adversity,” Carrington told Tilsen, adding that Harris might benefit from treatment at Teen Challenge to help him get back on track.

“I cannot imagine now taking part in something so horrible,” Harris told the judge. “I want to be someone who helps, not hurts.”

Tilsen was not moved. She sentenced Harris to an 88-month prison term. Carrington places case file paperwork in his backpack and walks the few blocks back to his office after the hearings. Other cases await.

If people think his job is trying to get defendants off at any cost, they are grossly mistaken, he tells me.

“First and foremost, our job is to represent them to the best of your ability … and to make sure their rights are not violated,” he said on the way to the courthouse.

He’s a hometown boy and has no plans to leave the office for a better-paying job.

“I enjoy being here and leaving a footprint in my city and helping people who don’t have access to a private attorney,” he said.

Equal justice under the law requires that third leg to be as stable and sturdy as the ones holding up the prosecutors and the judges.