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Criminal Neglect: Indigent Defense From A Legal Ethics Perspective Ethics Symposium What Do Clients Want: Practice Contexts, Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

Most criminal defendants in the United States cannot afford to pay for a lawyer's services, and as a result their lawyers are government funded. Unfortunately, some state and local governments drastically under-fund indigent defense services. Criminal defense lawyers serving in these jurisdictions typically carry grossly excessive caseloads and are therefore severely restricted in how much time they can devote to individual clients. Commentators have targeted the under-funding of indigent defense systems as a problem of criminal justice, constitutional law, and civil rights. That is certainly true, but the under-funding of indigent defense also raises a serious and inadequately recognized problem …