By Gillian Slee

Research shows that street-level bureaucrats rely on notions of deservingness to manage their caseloads. Accounts traditionally identify how workers use mainstream cues to categorize clients, but a growing literature calls for situated accounts of discretion. This study draws on fieldwork with public defenders to describe how institutional position and professional knowledge condition discretion. I analyze how the dynamics of representation inform defenders’ understandings of and advocacy for clients with varying criminal-legal backgrounds and needs. In this case study, defenders’ perceived strategic options penetrate their estimations of clients’ deservingness and drive their advocacy. Tailored representation elevates the needs of individuals without records and those with unremitting criminal-legal contact, helping attorneys manage their caseloads and advance their aspirations, but it produces uneven defense. I develop a role concept, “structural antagonist,” to signify and describe a uniquely situated street-level bureaucrat whose mandate includes both serving and straining the institution.

Social Service Review, volume 97, number 4, December 2023.

By James R. Acker, Bethany Backes, Catherine L. Bonventre, Eric Martin, Angela Moore,  Robert J. Norris,  Allison D. Redlich

This report contains three chapters: Chapter 1 reviews 100 years of scholarship on wrongful convictions, ranging from early case studies of exonerations to more recent scientific analyses of wrongful convictions. The review finds that knowledge about the prevalence and causes of these serious miscarriages of justice remains limited and mixed at best. Chapter 2 focuses on several “elephants in the courtroom” that have not garnered significant attention among wrongful conviction scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and activists. This section examines the deep linkages between race, society, the administration of justice, and wrongful convictions. Chapter 3 discusses the major themes that emerged during the listening sessions in an effort to better understand the problems victims and those who have been exonerated face during the review of post-conviction innocence claims and after the exoneration. The report concludes with policy recommendations to help address the most pressing issues.

This report builds on the listening sessions for victims or survivors of crimes that resulted in wrongful convictions during a three-day meeting hosted by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the Office for Victims of Crime, and external organizations. The three-day meeting allowed NIJ and its federal partners to hear directly from participants who had been victimized and revictimized due to errors of justice. On the third day, the federal observers met to discuss possible actions to be taken for research and practice. The report contains three chapters: Chapter 1 reviews 100 years of scholarship on wrongful convictions, ranging from early case studies of exonerations to more recent scientific analyses of wrongful convictions. The review finds that knowledge about the prevalence and causes of these serious miscarriages of justice remains limited and mixed at best. Chapter 2 focuses on several “elephants in the courtroom” that have not garnered significant attention among wrongful conviction scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and activists. This section examines the deep linkages between race, society, the administration of justice, and wrongful convictions. Chapter 3 discusses the major themes that emerged during the listening sessions in an effort to better understand the problems victims and those who have been exonerated face during the review of post-conviction innocence claims and after the exoneration. The report concludes with policy recommendations to help address the most pressing issues. 

Washington DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, 2023. 64p.

By Akhi Johnson, Stephen Roberts, Erin Ross, et al. 

The reform prosecution movement faces a critical moment. With the nationwide uptick in violent crime, reform prosecutors face unprecedented attacks: legislation to limit their discretion, politicians seeking to remove them from office, and demands for recall elections. The movement has weathered the storm, but reform prosecutors need continued support in pursuing agendas aligned with the communities that elected them, and the Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) is well positioned to help them do so. In 2017, Vera launched the Reshaping Prosecution initiative in response to a wave of reform prosecutors winning office across the country. Reform prosecutors ran campaigns promising a systemic approach to pursuing justice, and Reshaping Prosecution sought to help them transform those promises into measurable policy changes. Vera piloted an engagement with St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner and her office from 2017 to 2019 that contributed to significant gains for the city. Gleaning lessons learned from that pilot, Vera launched a request for proposal process to select new partners. Vera selected each office based on a vetting process that included the district attorney’s demonstrated commitment to pursuing reforms, community support for reform efforts, sufficient staff capacity to work with the Vera team, and adequate data systems to allow an analysis of office practices. After receiving 14 applications, Vera selected six partners: Boulder County, Colorado; Contra Costa County, California; DeKalb County, Georgia; Ingham County, Michigan; Ramsey County, Minnesota; and Suffolk County, Massachusetts. This report describes Vera’s partnerships with each jurisdiction to take a systemic approach to justice by examining racial disparities and collaborating with the offices and their communities to develop solutions. These partnerships faced significant challenges, beginning with the pandemic, which halted work in the early stages; the racial justice movement in the summer of 2020 and its unique impacts on each jurisdiction; and pushback from opponents of change.   

New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2023. 40p.

By  Alissa Pollitz Worden, Kaitlin Moloney, et al.

New York’s groundbreaking 2019 bail reforms aimed to curtail pretrial detention, diminish the role of finances in release decisions, and tackle racial disparities in pretrial outcomes. This study is the first to examine pretrial decision-making in New York’s under-examined Town & Village Justice Courts, addressing a knowledge gap in public understanding and serving as a companion to related research on the topic. This report was authored by DCJ’s partners at The John F. Finn Institute for Public Safety.

1.     Increased Pretrial Release Under Bail Reform:

• Higher percentage of Justice Court cases released without bail for misdemeanors (82% in 2018 vs. 93% in 2021) and nonviolent felonies (59% in 2018 vs. 71% in 2021).

2.     Absence of Racial Disparities in Release Rates:

• Release rates were similar across racial and ethnic groups throughout the study period (both pre- and post-reform).

3.     No Progress Towards Affordable Bail:

• Bail amounts did not become more affordable, and people did not become more likely to post bail, after the reforms went into effect (echoing prior Data Collaborative for Justice research on City and District Courts across the State).

4.     Justice Courts vs. City Courts from the Same Counties:

• Justice Courts released people at higher rates than City Courts both pre- and post-reform. By 2021, less than 7% of people charged with misdemeanors were detained in the Justice Courts compared to 11% in urban City Courts and 13% in small City Courts from the same counties.

Albany, NY:  John F. Finn Institute for Public Safety, Inc., 2024. 41p.

By Julius Yam 

Authoritarianism has significant implications for how judges should discharge their duties. How should judges committed to constitutionalism conduct themselves when under authoritarian pressure? To answer this question,the article proposes a two-step adjudicative framework, documents a variety of judicial strategies, and proposes how principles and strategies can and should be incorporated into the framework in different scenarios. The first step of the adjudicative framework involves judges identifying the ‘formal legal position’ while blindfolding themselves to extra-legal factors (such as potential authoritarian backlash). In the second step, depending on the level of risk incurred by maintaining the formal legal position, judges should lift the blindfold to check whether, and if so how, the formal legal position should be supplemented with or adjusted by judicial strategies. Through this analysis, the article offers a guide to judicial reasoning under authoritarianism 

Modern Law Review Limited.(2023) 00(0) MLR 

By U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance

This article provides details about Louisiana’s Orleans Reentry Court Program (ORCP), which originated in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola from a desire to equip inmates with vocational, educational, and other skills that could lead to gainful employment and reduce the likelihood of recidivism. The document describes the requirements of the in-jail portion, which involves participants being mentored by other inmates, typically those who are serving life sentences; it also provides details of the probation portion of ORCP. The document notes that after ORCP had been established, one of the program founders recognized that participants suffering from opioid use disorder were lacking the necessary services to maintain their recovery and successfully complete the program. In order to address that, Orleans Parish Criminal District Court applied for and received a fiscal year 2018 Comprehensive Opioid Abuse Program grant, which introduced an enhanced substance abuse treatment aspect, including medication-assisted treatment (MAT) services, and more wraparound case management services into the existing reentry court model. The discussion of lessons learned reviews what Comprehensive Opioid, Stimulant, and Substance Abuse Program (COSSAP) covers, and the importance of strategically leveraging available resources.

Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance, 2020. 4p.

By Christopher M. Bellas

This Article features the many factors that influence jurors' decision making in trials involving police use of excessive force. First, there is a discussion of what exactly police use of force is and how much exists. Second, there is a review of the relevant case law regarding police use of force that focuses primarily on the doctrine of qualified immunity (a code that affords police protection from being sued, most often under 18 U.S.C. § 1983). Third, in those rare police use of excessive force trials, the final decision regarding the liability of the defendant most often rests with a jury. Because the Sixth and Seventh Amendments to the U.S. Constitution states one is to be tried by a jury of one's peers, which comes from the community, I investigate the importance of community relations with the criminal justice system, in particular policing, and how these relationships shape a potential jury pool. Finally, I assess the psychology behind juror decision making and its impact in police use of force trials regarding the psychological schema already impressed on jurors prior to rendering verdicts or that could color or negate their interpretation of the evidence presented at trial.

73(3) Case W. Rsrv. L. Rev. 895 (2023)

By Lisa Bailey Vavonese and Alysha Hall

Are public defenders the answer hiding in plain sight? Imagine that you are arrested and charged with a crime. You likely have a picture in your mind of how your first interactions with the police, your attorney, and the judge should go— interactions that are fair and just and protect your rights. The picture we paint next is that story. It is simple yet, to many, unfamiliar. We could have told the version that is true for so many people charged with a crime—a story of injustice and unfairness, a story so familiar it feels unchangeable. Instead, what follows is a thought experiment, a sadly unrepresentative one.  

New York: Center for Justice Innovation, 2023. 34p.

By National Institute of Justice, Office for Access to Justice

"Two-thirds of states (34) do not have full statewide oversight of public defense, meaning they do not set standards or monitor whether people receive counsel in all cases where they have a right to it."

In collaboration with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office for Access to Justice (ATJ), the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) sponsored a report on public defense system models in recognition of the 60th anniversary of Gideon v. Wainwright, which established the right to counsel to indigent persons charged with felonies in state courts. Researchers conducted a national scan of the public defense service models used in state, local, and tribal adult, trial-level, criminal cases. The report addresses the prevalence of different models, factors contributing to how jurisdictions select models, and variations in outcomes associated with each model. The report found that 16 states have a commission and/or statewide defender program overseeing public defense services, while in 34 there are gaps in state oversight. States need a mechanism for monitoring and supporting access to quality public defense counsel. States also need to ensure that the people overseeing and administering public defense do not have professional conflicts of interest. Finally, defender systems need meaningful input on practice and policy from people who have been represented by public defenders or been impacted by the criminal justice system. Recent reform efforts have resulted in more states creating oversight commissions and shifting to greater use of state funds to provide access to quality counsel and public defense delivery methods. Experts recommend states collect data on the percentage of people who enter uncounseled guilty pleas and on defendant characteristics not limited to race and ethnicity to ascertain whether equitable access to counsel is available. Findings are based on interviews with experts and a review and synthesis of publicly available material; the report is a national and current scan of public defense models and is intended to complement research based on more rigorous statistical surveys and program evaluations that may be dated or limited in coverage of jurisdictions. 

Washington, DC: U.S. National Institute of Justice, 2023. 87p.

By Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Mission in Kosovo
Since 1999, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (“OSCE”) Mission in Kosovo has held a pivotal role in monitoring the justice system in Kosovo for compliance with fair trial and international human rights standards. Trial monitoring is conducted by OSCE personnel in courts across Kosovo, focusing on identifying systemic issues affecting the justice system. The OSCE is concerned that the Kosovo judicial system is not adequately exercising its criminal calendaring authority. The caseload challenges facing the Basic Courts of Kosovo are staggering. During the first three months of 2023, the Basic Courts presided over 46,852 criminal cases: of those 40,707 were inherited and 6,145 cases were newly filed.1 However, only 5,833 cases were resolved leaving 41,019 pending at the end of the three month reporting period. Despite these circumstances, courts2 regularly fail to schedule criminal trials on consecutive or uninterrupted days. This practice exacerbates court backlogs, is an inefficient use of judicial resources, and ultimately creates a barrier to justice. This report analyzes the issue of criminal case backlogs and delays, which is a widespread problem in Kosovo that negatively affects access to justice and the efficient administration of justice. Specifically, the report focuses on how systemic criminal case management practices relating to scheduling trials over a prolonged period of time aggravate criminal case backlogs. The report is based on the direct field monitoring conducted by OSCE staff of criminal hearings observed in 2023. Its purpose is to make actionable recommendations to the relevant judicial system actors in order to improve criminal case management at the trial stage.
Vienna: OSCE, 2023. 16p.

By Adam I. Biener  

  Introduction The Association of Prosecuting Attorneys (APA), a non-profit organization composed of US prosecutors, conducted a survey to understand the prevalence of and factors associated with case backlogs. Backlogs occur when a large number of cases are pending before the court for a longer period than typically experienced and/or a period longer than prescribed by the court. In a survey of 50 of the largest prosecutors’ offices conducted by APA in 2020, 14 responding offices reported just under 9,000 cases awaiting trial on average. 1 Following court disruptions due to COVID-19, there was an average increase of 5,565 cases per office, a 62% increase. Case backlogs can occur when the caseload per individual prosecuting attorney rises holding all other productive capability constant. In practice, the level of staffing (measured by caseload per attorney) is extremely varied.2 Further, models of prosecution vary across offices3 and different models can require a different mix of attorney specialties.4 Despite this complexity, office staffing is very idiosyncratic and not often tied to per attorney caseloads1, which can result in significant and potentially burdensome individual caseloads.3 Excessive caseloads for individual attorneys can result in longer case processing time, a greater risk for decision-making errors, increased plea bargains and dismissals, career burnout, and employee turnover. 6 Funding shocks have likely exacerbated the size of individual attorney caseloads over the past 20 years. The great recession following the financial crisis in 2008 reduced state budgets, employment, and payroll, shrinking the resources available to meet staffing and resource requests from prosecutors’ offices,5 leading to rising prosecutor workloads and stagnating or shrinking budgets.6 The expectations of prosecutors and their obligations when working cases have evolved significantly since 2007 due to changing legal requirements and new technologies. Victims’ rights laws, which require additional engagement with victims, increase the amount of time spent on person-involved cases (e.g. CA Prop 9 in 20087 ). There are presently Open Discovery laws in 46 states, up from roughly a third of states in 2004, 8 that increase the requirements for timely evidence collection. Body-worn cameras have become more commonplace for law enforcement, as nearly 50% of 15,238 general-purpose law enforcement agencies had body-worn cameras in 2016.9 Video evidence generated by body-worn cameras are more labor-intensive to review, extending the amount of labor hours required to prepare a case. Additionally, the demand for specialized attorneys to review cases as part of conviction review/integrity units, 10 while improving the equitable administration of justice, can potentially strain limited staffing resources. All of these staffing and resource constraints were tested during the COVID-19 pandemic, which put unusual demands on offices to continue their essential functions despite health concerns and court closures. While many offices were able to adopt new technologies to maintain their functioning, these pivots did not alleviate the rising caseloads and work burdens on individual prosecutors

Washington, DC: The Association of Prosecuting Attorneys (APA) , 2024. 19p.

By Meredith Rossner and Helen Taylor

Restorative justice is an idea and a practice that has had a significant impact on criminology over the past four decades and has proliferated throughout the criminal justice system. Yet from the beginning of this movement, there have been worries that the mainstreaming of restorative justice will lead to its dilution, or even corruption, and undermine its transformative potential. Developing alongside the growing institutionalization of restorative justice has been a transformative justice movement that has arisen from larger movements for racial and gender justice, drawing on similar foundational values to restorative justice. This review interrogates the relationship between restorative and transformative justice by examining a flourishing of ideas and experiments at the margins of the restorative justice movement in three key areas—responses to racial injustice, sexual violence, and environmental harm—and finds that restorative justice has the capacity to work at multiple levels to respond to harm, transform relationships, and prevent future injustices.

Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 7, Page 357 - 381

By Valerie Jenness and Alexis Rowland

A growing body of research reveals that transgender people are disproportionately in contact with the criminal legal system, wherein they experience considerable discrimination, violence, and other harms. To better understand transgender people's involvement in this system, this article synthesizes research from criminology, transgender studies, and related fields as well as empirical findings produced outside of academe, to conceptualize a “transgender criminal legal system nexus.” This article examines historical and contemporary criminalization of transgender people; differential system contact and attendant experiences associated with police contact, judicial decision-making, and incarceration; and pathways to system involvement for transgender people. The analytic focus is on cultural logics related to institutionalized conceptualizations of gender, discriminatory people-processing in various domains of the criminal legal system, and institutionally produced disparities for transgender people involved in the criminal legal system, especially transgender women of color. The article concludes with a discussion of directions for future research, including a focus on administrative violence, organizational sorting, intersectionality, and measurement challenges.

Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 7, Page 283 - 309

By Hedwig Lee

I describe how cultural and structural racism operate the entire contemporary American criminal justice system via five features: devaluation of certain human lives, ubiquitous adaptation, networked structure, perceived neutrality, and temporal amnesia. I draw from specific historical and contemporary examples in policing, courts, and corrections to further emphasize the foundational nature of racism and its role in shaping racial/ethnic inequities not just in relationship to criminal justice outcomes but also in relationship to health, economic, and social well-being.

Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 7, Page 233 - 255

By Rainer Forst

Over the past 15 years, Rainer Forst has developed a fundamental research programme within the tradition of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. The core of this programme is a moral account of the basic right of justification that humans owe to one another as rational beings. This account is put to work by Forst in articulating - both historically and philosophically - the contexts and form of justice and of toleration. The result is a powerful theoretical framework within which to address issues such as transnational justice and multicultural toleration. In this volume, Forst sets out his ideas in an extended essay, which is responded to be influential interlocutors including: Andrea Sangiovanni, Amy Allen, Kevin Olson, Anthony Laden, Eva Erman and Simon Caney. The volume concludes with Forst's response to his interlocutors.

London: Bloomsbury Academic,  2014.  249p.

By Harry Annison, Lol Burke, Nicola Carr, Matthew Millings, Gwen Robinson, Eleanor Surridge

This paper provides insights into the predominant styles of political reasoning in England and Wales that inform penal policy reform. It does so in relation to a particular development that constitutes a dramatic, perhaps even unique, wholesale reversal of a previously introduced market-based criminal justice delivery model. This is the ‘unification’ of probation services in England and Wales, which unwound the consequential privatization reforms introduced less than a decade earlier. This paper draws on in-depth interviews with senior policy makers to present a narrative reconstruction of the unification of probation services in England and Wales. Analogies with desistance literature are drawn upon in order to encapsulate the tensions posed for policy makers as they sought to enact this penal policy reform.

United Kingdom, British Journal of Criminology. Oct 2023, 18pg

By Sarah Waite

This article examines women’s experiences of moving from a closed to an open prison in England. Transition to an open prison is often viewed in a positive, reformist light and although androcentric auto-ethnographical work has demonstrated challenges associated with this pivot when serving a long-term sentence, much less is known about the experiences of women. Using interview discussions, this article draws upon the concept of transcarceral habitus to examine experiences of transfer and adaptation to the open prison within the broader context of the lives of criminalised women. By extending our understanding of the women’s open prison as a site of punishment and recognising the connections and pluralities of women’s carceral experiences, this article seeks to disrupt unhelpful binaries that legitimise the incarceration of women and the open prison estate.

United Kingdom, Howard Journal of Crime and Criminal Justice. Oct. 2023, 16pg

By Heather Harris, with research support from Thomas Sloan

Adopting untested policies helped California courts resolve criminal charges safely amid a public health crisis. Of the main policies, only remote hearings have endured—and their future is uncertain. Assembly Bill 199 allows California courts to conduct most criminal hearings remotely only through 2023.

This report chronicles how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the courts in 2020, describes policy responses, and assesses the impact of remote hearing policies on conviction and sentencing outcomes within six months of arrest.

Pandemic conditions challenged the courts’ capacity to resolve cases. An estimated 55,000 criminal cases that would have completed within six months remained unresolved at the end of 2020.→

Courts acted swiftly to adapt to pandemic conditions. Three main strategies included modifying pretrial release to reduce jail populations, permitting remote hearings, and extending case timelines.→

Uneven adoption of policies, coupled with geographic differences in where people live, meant that Black and Latino defendants had greater potential than people of other races to experience pandemic policies.→

Remote hearing policies reinforced pandemic trends for lower conviction rates, but counteracted trends in sentencing. When remote hearing policies were in place, rates of conviction within six months of arrest fell, with outcomes for white, Latino, and Black people driving this result. Misdemeanor convictions were less likely to lead to jail and more likely to receive noncustodial sentences such as probation and money sanctions, mainly for white, Latino, and Black people. Felony convictions were less likely to result in prison and more likely to lead to jail, and outcomes for Black people dominated this result.→

Remote hearing policies contributed to racial differences in criminal case outcomes. Inequity in conviction and jail sentence rates narrowed between white and Latino defendants and between white and Black defendants. By contrast, racial inequity widened in the likelihood of being sentenced to money sanctions and probation.→

Arguably, whether a criminal proceeding is conducted virtually or in person should not influence whether a person is convicted or how they are sentenced; yet remote hearing policies have affected both. Before Assembly Bill 199 expires, policymakers will need to determine whether these outcomes are desirable and how to factor them into decisions about whether to allow criminal cases to proceed remotely.

San Francisco: Public Policy Institute of California, 2023.

By Sixth Amendment Center and The Defender Initiative

In 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court declared in Gideon v. Wainwright that it is an “obvious truth” that anyone accused of a crime who cannot afford the cost of a lawyer “cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him.” In the intervening 58 years, the U.S. Supreme Court has clarified that the Sixth Amendment right to counsel means every person who is accused of a crime is entitled to have an attorney provided at government expense to defend him in all federal and state courts whenever that person is facing the potential loss of his liberty and is unable to afford his own attorney. Moreover, the appointed lawyer needs to be more than merely a warm body with a bar card. The attorney must also be effective, the U.S. Supreme Court said again in United States v. Cronic in 1984, subjecting the prosecution’s case to “the crucible of meaningful adversarial testing.” Under Gideon, the Sixth Amendment right to effective counsel is an obligation of the states under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The State of Illinois delegates to its county boards and circuit court judges most of its constitutional obligation to ensure the provision of effective assistance of counsel to indigent criminal defendants in the trial courts. Yet the state does not have any oversight structure by which to know whether each county’s indigent defense system has a sufficient number of attorneys with the necessary time, training, and resources to provide effective assistance of counsel at every critical stage of a criminal case for each and every indigent defendant. This is the first of three findings of this report. As explained in chapter I, this report is the result of a statewide evaluation of the provision of the right to counsel in adult criminal cases at the trial level, conducted at the request of the Illinois Supreme Court. Through data collection and analysis, interviews with criminal justice stakeholders, and courtroom observations, the evaluation assessed indigent defense services against national standards and Sixth Amendment caselaw that establish the hallmarks of a structurally sound indigent representation system, which include the early appointment of qualified and trained attorneys, who have sufficient time and resources to provide effective representation under independent supervision. The absence of any of these factors can show that a system is presumptively providing ineffective assistance of counsel. This evaluation focuses closely on the practices of nine counties – Champaign, Cook, DuPage, Gallatin, Hardin, LaSalle, Mercer, Schuyler, and Stephenson – which taken together illustrate the wide variations among Illinois county governments and courts in their efforts to fulfill the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The State of Illinois delegates to its counties and trial court judges the responsibility for providing and overseeing attorneys to effectively represent indigent defendants, and it delegates to its counties nearly all of the responsibility for funding the right to counsel of indigent defendants. When a state chooses to delegate its federal constitutional responsibilities to its local governments and courts, the state must guarantee not only that these local bodies are capable of providing effective representation but also that they are in fact doing so. Yet Illinois is one of just seven states that do not have any state commission, state agency, or state officer with oversight of any aspect of trial-level indigent representation services in adult criminal cases. Chapter II details the framework that Illinois has established for its county-level criminal justice systems and how that framework has been implemented in the nine sample counties. The indigent defense systems in the nine representative counties of this evaluation vary greatly. With 102 counties in the state, it is likely that any or all of those counties present even greater variations in their indigent defense systems. Without oversight, the State of Illinois cannot accurately say how many people or cases, and of what case types, require appointed counsel nor by whom the representation is being provided, if at all, and the State of Illinois cannot know how much the provision of indigent representation should cost nor how to provide it effectively in all 102 counties. Instead, policy decisions about indigent defense systems are left to anecdote, speculation, and potentially even bias. Chapters III through VII comprise the substantive assessment, which relate the basis of our second and third findings: The state’s limited framework for how county boards and circuit court judges are to establish and implement the indigent defense system in each county institutionalizes political and judicial interference with the appointed attorneys’ independence to act in the stated legal interests of their indigent clients. This lack of independence causes systemic conflicts of interest that interfere with the provision of effective assistance of counsel. 3. The indigent defense systems established in Illinois’ counties lack oversight and accountability that can result in a constructive denial of the right to counsel to at least some indigent defendants, and in some instances can result in the actual denial of the right to counsel to at least some indigent defendants. An indigent defense system’s effectiveness must be measured by the representation it provides to its appointed clients. The U.S. Supreme Court explained in Cronic that “[t]he right to the effective assistance of counsel” means that the defense must put the prosecution’s case through the “crucible of meaningful adversarial testing.” For this to occur, U.S. Supreme Court case law provides that an indigent person must be represented by a qualified and trained attorney, who is appointed early in the case, and who has sufficient time and resources to provide effective representation under independent supervision.

Boston: Sixth Amendment Center, 2021. 181p.

By Russell M. Gold and Kay L. Levine

For decades police and prosecutors have controlled the public narrative about criminal law—littering the news landscape with salacious stories of violent crimes while ignoring the more mundane but far more prevalent minor cases that clog the court dockets. Defenders, faced with overwhelming caseloads and fear that speaking out may harm their clients, have largely ceded the opportunity to offer a counternarrative based on what they see every day. Defenders tell each other about overuse of pretrial detention, intensive pressure to plead guilty, overzealous prosecutors, cycles of violence, and rampant constitutional violations— all of which inflict severe harm on defendants and their loved ones. But defenders rarely show the public the world they inhabit.

That approach hasn’t stopped the carceral state from ballooning over the past fifty years; public defense budgets remain paltry, and clients suffer from too much law and too little justice in a system that disregards and dehumanizes them. This Article encourages defenders to go on the offensive, to seek transformative change toward a more just legal system. It builds on the social media literature to analyze how defenders can strategically use social networking sites to add their expertise to ongoing public debates about crime and criminal justice policy. As a few existing efforts suggest, social media enables defenders to widely share the routine injustices they observe and to engage with local grassroots organizations to build coalitions. Defenders’ strategic use of social media won’t change policies overnight, but we are hopeful that it will augment public support for defenders and their clients and build power to transform the criminal legal landscape over decades.

Gold, Russell M. and Levine, Kay L., The Public Voice of the Defender (July 14, 2023). 75 Alabama Law Review (Forthcoming), U of Alabama Legal Studies Research Paper #4416723, Emory Legal Studies Research Paper No. 23-4,