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Adopted in February 2002, the American Bar Association's Ten Principles of a Public Defense Delivery System distill the existing voluminous ABA standards for public defense systems to their most basic elements, which officials and policymakers can readily review and apply. In the words of the ABA Standing Committee on Legal Aid and Indigent Defendants, the Ten Principles “constitute the fundamental criteria to be met for a public defense delivery system to deliver effective and efficient, high quality, ethical, conflict-free representation to accused persons who cannot afford to hire an attorney.” Our nation’s chief law enforcement officer, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, has called the ABA Ten Principles the “building blocks” of a functioning public defense system.
All who work in public defense know there is a problem -- we call it the "indigent defense crisis." In 2002, NLADA established the Justice Standards, Evaluation and Research Initiative (JSERI) in order to concretely evaluate the depth and breadth of both successes and difficulties in indigent defense representation throughout the country, providing a measurement of public defense services against national standards. JSERI's protocol for evaluation of any system combines a review of the jurisdiction's budgetary, caseload, and organizational information with site visits to observe courtroom practice and interviews of all key criminal justice system stakeholders and policymakers.
Gideon Alert: Prof. Lefstein points way to securing reasonable caseloads
“Our nation’s public defense systems in state courts, with few exceptions, should be a source of great embarrassment for all of us: judges, bar associations, lawyers, public officials, and all other citizens,” states former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and former United States District Court Judge, William Sessions, in the foreword to Professor Norm Lefstein’s new book, Securing Reasonable Caseloads: Ethics and Law in Public Defense. The source of that embarrassment is the simple fact that, across much of the country, indigent defendants count themselves among one of several hundred who are all vying for the attention of a single lawyer -- a lawyer who lacks the time, resources, and independence to adequately advocate on their behalf. States neglect to provide any type of meaningful supervision or accountability for the representation provided by these overworked public defense lawyers. And, far too often these public attorneys are beholden to the trial judge or the county administration for their pay check, creating a direct conflict between the lawyer’s own personal financial well-being and his ethical duty to advocate solely on behalf of his client. As Judge Sessions notes, “[t]his undisputed and sad state of affairs undermines, indeed vitiates, respect for the rule of law both here at home and abroad and makes a statement to the world about who we are as a people and a society, a statement that we must no longer tolerate.”
This paper discusses the judicial underpinnings of the ABA Ten Principles and shows that the Principles are the foundational standards that describe the obligations of indigent defense systems in terms no one could misunderstand, providing guideposts for assessing the reasonable performance of those systems.
Items contained in the NLADA Library do not and are not meant to constitute advice of any kind. Content in the NLADA Library is contributed by users. If you believe this material infringes your or any other person’s copyright or if you feel that the material is inappropriate, please report this to NLADA Staff by clicking below.
This is an excel spreadsheet that lists standards relating to criminal justice and indigent defense, at the national, state, and local levels. It is fairly complete at the national level. It is incomplete at the state and local levels.
Items contained in the NLADA Library do not and are not meant to constitute advice of any kind. Content in the NLADA Library is contributed by users. If you believe this material infringes your or any other person’s copyright or if you feel that the material is inappropriate, please report this to NLADA Staff by clicking below.
AG asks Black Journalists to keep focusing on indigent defense deficiencies
Addressing the annual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists, on August 4, 2011, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder highlighted the Department of Justice’s recent successes, while also calling upon reporters to keep looking at deficiencies in the delivery of right to counsel services.
Justice Policy Institute releases report on the Right to Counsel
The Justice Policy Institute has released a report linking states' struggles to provide effective right to counsel services with excessive corrections costs. The report, System Overload: The Costs of Under-Resourcing Public Defense, highlights the impact of overwhelmed public defense systems and "how the busting-at-the-seams systems affect state and county budgets, the lives of those behind bars, the impact on their families, and the challenges of re-entering communities after serving time."
The American Bar Association (ABA) and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) are designing and implementing a pilot Public Defender Fellowship Program (PDFP) aimed at advancing best practices in indigent defense representation.
New leader sworn in to run DOJ Access to Justice Initiative
On June 2, 2011, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Mark Childress was sworn in to replace Prof. Lawrence Tribe as senior counselor of DOJ's Access to Justice Initiative. This announcement comes nearly six months after Professor Tribe stepped down from the post due to health reasons. Prof. Tribe said of Childress, "I'm sure he'll roll up his sleeves and make a huge difference to ordinary people." The DOJ press release includes many of Childress' previous accomplishments and positions both in and out of government, which can be found here.