National Public Defense Workload Study

Résumé du livre

Public defense attorneys with excessive caseloads cannot give appropriate time and attention to each client. Excessive caseloads violate ethics rules and inevitably cause harm. Overburdened attorneys are forced to choose cases or activities to focus on, such that many cases are resolved without appropriate diligence. A justice system burdened by triage risks unreliability, denying all people who rely on it--victims, witnesses, defendants, and their families and communities--efficient, equal, and accurate justice. Ethics rules require lawyers to limit their workloads to ensure competent representation. But what should those limits be? Clear standards for public defense workloads are essential to policymakers' ability to fund and staff the defense function at appropriate levels, to public defense authorities' ability to conduct appropriate oversight, and to attorneys' ability to provide their clients with reasonably effective assistance of counsel pursuant to prevailing professional norms as guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. To create new national public defense workload standards, researchers conducted a comprehensive review and analysis of 17 state-level public defense workload studies conducted between 2005 and 2022 and then employed the Delphi method to facilitate the efforts of a panel of 33 expert criminal defense attorneys from across the country to come to a consensus on the average amount of time needed to provide constitutionally appropriate representation in an array of adult criminal cases.