NCJ Number
142165
Journal
Criminal Justice Volume: 8 Issue: 1 Dated: (Spring 1993) Pages: 41-43
Date Published
1993
Length
3 pages
Annotation
The American Bar Association's Criminal Justice Section's Ad Hoc Committee on Indigent Defense Crisis has challenged the validity and generalizability of the National Center for State Courts' study entitled "Indigent Defenders: Get the Job Done and Done Well."
Abstract
The 1992 National Center for State Courts' study by Roger A. Hanson examined the indigent defense systems in nine communities. The study compared the performance of public defense attorneys with that of privately retained attorneys handling the same kinds of criminal defense cases. It concluded that public defense counsel in the nine jurisdictions are as effective as privately retained counsel. it also concluded that the public defenders were reasonably close in salaries, administrative support, and training when compared to the prosecutor's office, although they lacked parity in the areas of expert witnesses and investigators. After a review of this study, the Ad Hoc Committee on Indigent Defense Crisis concluded that the literature review of Hanson's study is substantially incomplete, selective, and unbalanced. It also found that the sample sites were not selected randomly and did not represent the three systems of indigent defense across the country (public defender, assigned counsel, and contract systems). The Ad Hoc Committee concluded as well that the combining of data from sites obscured important differences that should be taken into account. Also, the researchers are deemed by the committee to have failed in some instances to provide detailed site information that would negate their analysis. Finally, although the study cautions that the conclusions drawn refer only to the sites studied, in its conclusions it proceeds to make general statements about the work of indigent defenders.