Nearly 50 years after first stepping inside the office, Douglas County Public Defender Tom Riley continues to believe in the basic premise which brought him to the job.

“I’ve always kind of been someone who was interested in making sure that poor people got a fair shake,” Riley said.

Serving as the Douglas County Public Defender since first being elected in 1994, Riley has been honored by the Omaha Bar Association with its Robert M. Spire Achievement Award.

In addition to representing people having felony and misdemeanor charges, the public defender’s office is also responsible for handling mental health commitments, juvenile delinquency cases and representing people who are charged with failing to pay child support and risk jail time for it, as well as helping parents in juvenile court who are in danger of losing their parental rights.

While crime ebbs and goes, Riley said, his office handled more than 4,000 felonies, 10,000 misdemeanors and more than 2,000 juvenile delinquency cases in 2022.

“It’s a never ending job,” he said. “It’s not like building a house. You know, when it’s done, it’s done. The job is never done.”

Riley oversees a staff of about 55 lawyers, up from the 10-12 who worked there in 1975.

His staff’s workload is considerably more challenging than it was in the 1970s, he said. With technological developments including DNA and GPS, as well as dashboard and body cameras, attorneys have more information to research than before, when it was often just police reports, Riley said.

“What used to be reading one page police reports now turns into watching hours of video,” he said. “I’m not complaining about it, because that has proved to be effective. If a person is being interviewed, in the old days, when they weren’t recorded, and the client would lean over and say, ‘I didn’t tell him that.’ And they go up and say, ‘I didn’t say that.’ If the police officer said yes, he did, 99 percent of the time, the courts or juries believe the police.

“Now, if that happens, we put on the tape and watch it. And there’s really no dispute. These things have advanced the truth. But they also take a lot of time to uncover. So, you know, I’ve always said to myself, I don’t know how people can do these jobs in 40 hours. And now it’s even more true.”

As the county defender’s office has grown, it has stayed true to its mission of ensuring fair representation for the poor, which is consistently under attack, Riley said.

With appointments of law enforcement-supporting judges to the bench, especially at the appellate level, exceptions to the Fourth Amendment protection of search and seizure seem to be growing, such as harmless or inevitable discovery, he said.

“We have any number of other exceptions to the exclusion of evidence,” Riley said. “Obviously, there are people who feel that evidence should not be excluded, period. I’m of the opinion that if law enforcement violates the Fourth Amendment, the fruits of that violation should be excluded from evidence in court and when I first started, that was pretty much a solid rule.”

As he approaches five decades with the public defender’s office, Riley reflects on his path to serving the public. A Massachusetts native, he applied to three law schools – the University of Maine, Suffolk University in Boston and Creighton.

Not hearing from Suffolk, Riley accepted the opportunity to study at Creighton. Later, he learned of a paperwork mix-up at Suffolk and was accepted there. But, he stayed in Omaha.

Coming from a law enforcement family – his grandfather and father were both police officers – the Creighton University School of Law graduate spends most of his days managing the office’s staff, but he enters the courtroom on most murder cases – first and second degree, as well as manslaughter – something he’s specialized in since becoming the office’s chief deputy in 1983.

“For quite a while, it was pretty manageable,” Riley said. “I wasn’t stuck with 12 murder cases juggling at the same time. As time went on, that became impossible. And, you know, I still handle murder cases. I think I have five open murder cases right now. And we distribute the other homicides to the experienced lawyers in the office. And, you know, I would say most of the experienced lawyers here have at least one homicide open at any given time.”