27 votes

Study shows US public defenders have significantly more clients than they can adequately represent

Posted by boxer_dogs_dance
Tags: usa, law, criminal justice, public defenders, studies, author.emily hamer, source.stltoday
https://www.stltoday.com/news/nation-world/crime-courts/public-defenders-attorneys-dangerously-overworked/article_5a63628b-63d0-56dc-bc91-ce908820ac75.html

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Title
Public defenders work 3 times too many cases, milestone study and new data show
Authors
EMILY HAMER, LEE ENTERPRISES' PUBLIC SERVICE JOURNALISM TEAM
Published
Sep 12 2023
Word count
2037 words

6 comments

  1. unkz
    Link
    While this may be the first national level study, these are hardly groundbreaking results. We have known for a long time about this — the overworked public defender is a staple trope of television...

    While this may be the first national level study, these are hardly groundbreaking results. We have known for a long time about this — the overworked public defender is a staple trope of television and movies.

    Here’s an excellent article from the New York Times that gets into several state level studies that found the same thing, and spotlights some particularly egregious examples, with some lawyers handling several hundred cases.

    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/31/us/public-defender-case-loads.html

    12 votes
  2. Halfdan
    Link
    I remember reading the prison novel The Mars Room (2018) where one of the themes were the uselessness of public defenders. From the novel:

    I remember reading the prison novel The Mars Room (2018) where one of the themes were the uselessness of public defenders. From the novel:

    From that day forward, on every occasion that I was forced to spend in court, the prosecutors were consistently the most competent-looking people in the courtroom. They were handsome and slick and tidy and organized, with tailored clothes and expensive leather briefcases. The public defenders, meanwhile, were recognizable on account of their bad posture, their ill-fitting suits and scuffed shoes. The women wore their hair in short, ugly, practical cuts. The men had various styles or non-styles of long hair, and every one of them was guilty of exceeding width limits on their ties. The buttons on their shirts dangled, ready to fall off. The prosecutors all looked like rich, well-rested Republicans, while the public defenders were overworked do-gooders who arrived out of breath, late to court, dropping loose papers that already had the waffle marks of shoe prints on them from having been dropped before. Me, Johnson, everyone here with state counsel, I felt like we were screwed, just absolutely screwed.

    7 votes
  3. [4]
    GoodhartMusic
    Link
    Perhaps a concrete study like this would be useful during appeals, though it would be hard to argue as a lawyer your inability to effectively defend a client.

    Perhaps a concrete study like this would be useful during appeals, though it would be hard to argue as a lawyer your inability to effectively defend a client.

    1 vote
    1. [3]
      boxer_dogs_dance
      (edited )
      Link Parent
      Ineffective assistance of counsel is actually a legal claim that courts take seriously and sometimes rule in favor of the criminal defendant. However the examples I have seen where the court...

      Ineffective assistance of counsel is actually a legal claim that courts take seriously and sometimes rule in favor of the criminal defendant. However the examples I have seen where the court upheld the claim and ruled for defendant involve extreme behavior like being drunk in court.

      https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/ineffective_assistance_of_counsel

      6 votes
      1. [2]
        patience_limited
        Link Parent
        Back in my paralegal days, I spent a fair amount of time sitting around courtrooms, and occasionally saw judges punishing civil plaintiffs and criminal defendants for their counsels' misbehavior....

        Back in my paralegal days, I spent a fair amount of time sitting around courtrooms, and occasionally saw judges punishing civil plaintiffs and criminal defendants for their counsels' misbehavior. Fines, rulings excluding exculpatory or probative evidence, rejecting time served to reduce sentences, whatever the judges felt like they could dispense with minimal risk of appeals. People with public defenders were the usual recipients of these measures because their assigned counselors were overworked, incompetent, or both, and appeal was vanishingly unlikely. [The attorney I worked with was so chronically late to hearings that our clients were sometimes on the receiving end of these petty, mean judges' rulings.]

        It's not just attorneys failing to provide adequate representation, it's a whole system designed to maximize punishments in the guise of justice.

        8 votes
        1. Habituallytired
          Link Parent
          This is what I’ve also seen from my time working in legal (I'm not a lawyer, I don't pretend to be a lawyer, I work with lawyers though). It's such a terrible skew to punish those who are already...

          This is what I’ve also seen from my time working in legal (I'm not a lawyer, I don't pretend to be a lawyer, I work with lawyers though). It's such a terrible skew to punish those who are already incredibly poor and are often incarcerated for being poor (even if that's not the actual point of incarceration).

          5 votes