Law Commons^™

The Racial Reckoning Of Public Interest Law, Shaun Ossei-Owusu, Atinuke Adediran

All Faculty Scholarship

This Essay contends that segments of public interest law often get a pass on questions of race because it is a field of law that is genuinely concerned with marginalized communities. But the historical record, the dearth of empirical data on race, the homogeneity of the legal profession, and the recognition that no one is necessarily immune from racial biases all demand that the public interest bar reckon with its racial character. The racial oversights of public interest law can manifest themselves in hiring, staffing, organizational mission, leadership, and the actual delivery of legal services. We argue that a racial …

Defense Counsel And Public Defence, Eve Brensike Primus

Book Chapters

Public-defense delivery systems nationwide are grossly inadequate. Public defenders are forced to handle caseloads that no one could effectively manage. They often have no funding for investigation or expert assistance. They aren’t adequately trained, and there is little to no oversight of their work. In many jurisdictions, the public-defense function is not sufficiently independent of the judiciary or the elected branches to allow for zealous representation. The result is an assembly line into prison, mostly for poor people of color, with little check on the reliability or fairness of the process. Innocent people are convicted, precious resources are wasted, and …

What Gideon Did, Sara Mayeux

All Faculty Scholarship

Many accounts of Gideon v. Wainwright’s legacy focus on what Gideon did not do—its doctrinal and practical limits. For constitutional theorists, Gideon imposed a preexisting national consensus upon a few “outlier” states, and therefore did not represent a dramatic doctrinal shift. For criminal procedure scholars, advocates, and journalists, Gideon has failed, in practice, to guarantee meaningful legal help for poor people charged with crimes.

Drawing on original historical research, this Article instead chronicles what Gideon did—the doctrinal and institutional changes it inspired between 1963 and the early 1970s. Gideon shifted the legal profession’s policy consensus on indigent defense away from …

Officiating Removal, Leah Litman

Articles

For the last several years, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has quietly attempted to curtail capital defendants' representation in state postconviction proceedings. In 2011, various justices on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court began to call for federally funded community defender organizations to stop representing capital defendants in state postconviction proceedings. The justices argued, among other things, that the organizations' representation of capital defendants constituted impermissible federal interference with state governmental processes and burdened state judicial resources. The court also alleged the community defender organizations were in violation of federal statutes, which only authorized the organizations to assist state prisoners in federal, but …

Civil Challenges To The Use Of Low-Bid Contracts For Indigent Defense, Margaret H. Lemos

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, increasing attention has been directed to the problem of adequate representation for indigent criminal defendants. While overwhelming caseloads and inadequate funding plague indigent defense systems of all types, there is a growing consensus in the legal community that low-bid contract systems-under which the state or locality's indigent defense work is assigned to the attorney willing to accept the lowest fee-pose particularly serious obstacles to effective representation. In this Note, Margaret Lemos argues that the problems typical of indigent defense programs in general-and low-bid contract systems in particular-can and should be addressed through § 1983 civil actions alleging …

Defending The Poor, Bennett L. Gershman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Given the harsh reality that the quality of justice that people get in this country often depends on how much money they have , is our society's aspiration toward "equal justice" attainable? Probably not. A criminal defendant's poverty is not necessarily inconsistent with zealous advocacy. But whether lawyers for the poor adequately protect their clients' rights in criminal cases is the subject of ongoing debate.