The Indigent Defense Research Association

Notable Recent Publications features the latest empirical research and data related to indigent/public defense. If you have suggestions, ideas for work that should be included, or trouble accessing any of the articles featured, please write to Venita Embry at  vembry@rti.org .     Articles Pruitt, L. R., Sherman, J., & Schwartz, J. (2025). Legal Deserts and Spatial Injustice: A Study of Criminal Legal Systems in Rural Washington. https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/PruittShermanSchwartzYLJForumEssay_y5zjdvjy.pdf While shortcomings in indigent defense nationally are well documented, this Essay reveals what those deficits look like in rural contexts in which the constitutionally mandated service is provided by attorneys who are not only harried and overworked, but who also may be inexperienced and working with scant oversight as contractors. The Essay also highlights new challenges arising from the fact that contract attorneys doing this work increasingly live far ...

  Notable Recent Publications features the latest empirical research and data related to indigent/public defense. If you have suggestions, ideas for work that should be included, or trouble accessing any of the articles featured, please write to Venita Embry at  vembry@rti.org .     Articles Lindsay Bing, Carmen Gutierrez, Who gets a second chance? Compliance, classification, and criminal conviction,  Social Forces , 2025 ,  https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaf021 Felony conviction carries lifelong consequences that impact civic, economic, and social rights and opportunities, yet not everyone who is found guilty of a felony will bear the mark of conviction. Deferred adjudication is an increasingly popular intervention that offers legally guilty defendants protection from the mark of conviction conditional on the completion of community supervision. By conditioning conviction on discretionary assessments of compliance, rather than legal establishment o...

Notable Recent Publications features the latest empirical research and data related to indigent/public defense. If you have suggestions, ideas for work that should be included, or trouble accessing any of the articles featured, please write to Venita Embry at  vembry@rti.org .    *New Articles and Reports* Bing, L., Goldstein, R., Ho, H., Pager, D., & Western, B. (2024). The long-term impact of debt relief for indigent defendants in a misdemeanor court.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ,  121 (51), e2415066121. US courts regularly assess fines, fees, and costs against criminal defendants. Court-related debt can cause continuing court involvement and incarceration, not because of new crimes, but because of unpaid financial obligations. We conducted an experiment with 606 people found guilty of misdemeanors in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma. Study participants were randomly selected to receive relief from all current and prior fines and fees asses...

Notable Recent Publications features the latest empirical research and data related to indigent/public defense. If you have suggestions, ideas for work that should be included, or trouble accessing any of the articles featured, please write to Venita Embry at  vembry@rti.org .    Howey, W., Kathan, S., Jaggers, J. W., & Cambron, C. (2024). Complexities of appellate law: Experiences and perspectives of Utah indigent appellate attorneys. Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice & Criminology.  https://doi.org/10.21428/88de04a1.a294e101 Indigent appellate attorneys experience high stress due to their unique roles and responsibilities. Very little scientific research examines the lives and experiences of attorneys in the workplace. Characterizing and describing the variety of complexities and challenges Utah appellate attorneys face within their work provides information towards filling the profession’s gaps, stressors, and occupational needs. A sample of five U...

  Notable Recent Publications features the latest empirical research and data related to indigent defense. If you have suggestions, ideas for work that should be included, or trouble accessing any of the articles featured, please write to Venita Embry at  vembry@rti.org .  Articles David Abrams, Viet Nguyen, Aurélie Ouss, and Julia Reinhold, “A (Plea) Offer You Can Refuse” Plea bargaining is ubiquitous in the US justice system, yet lack of data on rejected plea offers limits analyses. Addressing this gap, we compile a dataset including all initial plea offers—accepted and rejected—from 23,000 felony cases in Philadelphia, enabling us to analyze the interplay between plea offers, defendant decisions, and case outcomes. Our analysis yields three significant insights. First, even after controlling for detailed case observables, initial plea offers are longer for Black defendants, especially for those in jail pretrial. Second, initial plea offers that are rejected tend to...

  Notable Recent Publications features the latest empirical research and data related to indigent defense. If you have suggestions, ideas for work that should be included, or trouble accessing any of the articles featured, please write to Venita Embry at  vembry@rti.org .  Articles Duhart Clarke, S. E., Zottola, S. A., McKinsey, E., Kurtz, B., Shao, T. T., Morrissey, B., & Desmarais, S. L. (2024). Indigent Injustice: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of People’s Criminal Legal Outcomes.  Critical Criminology , 1-41. The United States Constitution guarantees every citizen access to counsel to fundamentally preserve the right to a fair trial. Over two-thirds of criminal defendants lack the resources to secure an attorney and are thereby deemed indigent by the court. The dearth of generalizable data for indigent defendant outcomes leads legal scholars to cite the pragmatic and theoretical mechanisms for evaluating the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of pub...