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 exceed eventu
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 publicly funded defend