The Indigent Defense Research Association

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Notable Recent Publications - April, 2022

Notable Recent Publications features the latest empirical research and data related to indigent defense. Should you have suggestions, ideas for work that should be included, or trouble accessing any of the articles featured, please write to albdavies@smu.edu . Books Felice Batlan and Marianne Vasara-Aaltonen (eds.) Histories of Legal Aid: A Comparative and International Perspective . (Palgrave-Macmillan). [From the website:] "This book focuses on the history of the provision of legal aid and legal assistance to the poor in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in eight different countries. It is the first such book to bring together historical work on legal aid in a comparative perspective, and allows readers to analogise and contrast historical narratives about free legal aid across countries. Legal aid developed as a result of industrialisation, urbanization, immigration, the rise of philanthropy, and what were viewed as new legal problems. Closely related, wa

Notable Recent Publications - March, 2022

Notable Recent Publications features the latest empirical research and data related to indigent defense. Should you have suggestions, ideas for work that should be included, or trouble accessing any of the articles featured, please write to albdavies@smu.edu . Books Catherine Young and Wendy Packman , The Wounded Attorney: How Psychological Disorders Impact Attorneys . Rowman & Littlefield. [From the publisher's website:] "In The Wounded Attorney, Catherine Young and Wendy Packman provide keen insight and commentary into how psychological disorders manifest in attorneys. Attorneys experience an alarming rate of mental health challenges, yet mental health and substance abuse issues often go unnoticed by colleagues and are unacknowledged by attorneys themselves. As both attorneys and psychologists, the uniquely qualified Young and Packman explore how mental health issues appear in the legal profession. The authors urge for an overhaul of the current framework o

Notable Recent Publications - February, 2022

Notable Recent Publications features the latest empirical research and data related to indigent defense. Should you have suggestions, ideas for work that should be included, or trouble accessing any of the articles featured, please write to albdavies@smu.edu Journal Articles Nicole Gonzalez van Cleve, Due Process & the Theater of Racial Degradation: The Evolving Notion of Pretrial Punishment in the Criminal Courts Daedelus , 151(1), Winter, 2022, 135-152. Most theorists assume that the criminal courts are neutral arbiters of justice, protected by the Constitution, the rule of law, and court records. This essay challenges those assumptions and examines the courts as a place of punitive excess and the normalization of racial abuse and punishment. The essay explains the historic origins of these trends and examines how the categories of “hardened” and “marginal” defendants began to assume racialized meanings with the emergence of mass incarceration.

Notable Recent Publications - January, 2022

Notable Recent Publications features the latest empirical research and data related to indigent defense. Should you have suggestions, ideas for work that should be included, or trouble accessing any of the articles featured, please write to albdavies@smu.edu Journal Articles Heather Pruss, M. Sandys & S. M. Walsh, “Listen, Hear my Side, Back Me up”: What Clients Want from Public Defenders. Justice System Journal. The current study was designed to understand what persons represented by public defenders want from their attorney and how they hope or aspire to interact with their attorney. The results of a thematic analysis of qualitative responses to those inquiries, from 120 people represented by a rural public defender agency, are presented in this article. Though extant literature in this area is scant, the findings here largely echo those prior works: participants articulated a desire for attorneys who effectively communicate, thoroughly investigate,

Notable Recent Publications - December, 2021

Notable Recent Publications features the latest empirical research and data related to indigent defense. Should you have suggestions, ideas for work that should be included, or trouble accessing any of the articles featured, please write to albdavies@smu.edu Journal Article Rebecca Wexler, Privacy Asymmetries: Access to Data in Criminal Defense Investigations , 68 UCLA Law Review , 212. "'[P]rivacy asymmetries'... are privacy statutes that permit courts to order disclosures of sensitive information when requested by law enforcement, but not when requested by criminal defense counsel.... [S]electively suppressing defense investigations means selectively suppressing evidence of innocence. Privacy asymmetries...risk unnecessary harms to criminal defendants, as well as to the truth-seeking process of the judiciary, by advantaging the search for evidence of guilt over that for evidence of innocence... [T]hese harms will only increase in the digital

Notable Recent Publications - November, 2021

Notable Recent Publications features the latest empirical research and data related to indigent defense. Should you have suggestions, ideas for work that should be included, or trouble accessing any of the articles featured, please write to albdavies@smu.edu Journal Articles Annabelle Frazier and Joseph E. Gonzales, Studying sequential processes of criminal defendant decision-making using a choose-your-own-adventure research paradigm . Psychology, Crime and Law. "In this paper, we describe the development and initial testing of...a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure (CYOA) experiment depicting the entire legal process, in the context of a campus sexual assault allegation. Using data from 154 predominantly white (75%), college-age (M = 23.43, SD = 2.3), heterosexual (71%) male participant-defendants, we evaluate the advantages of the paradigm in capturing the complexity of the legal process, while generating strong participant immersion. Bayesian SEM analyses indicated interrelat