The Indigent Defense Research Association

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.
ArticlesDerwyn Bunton, "Rising from Katrina’s Ashes but Still in Crisis: Public Defense in New Orleans." 32(1), New England Journal of Public Policy, 11 pp. 
"New Orleans’ nickname “Big Easy” was based on the “anything goes” perception of the city. Feeding this perception was a sense of lawlessness, that New Orleans was a place where the rules changed depending on who you were and who you knew. So when Hurricane Katrina hit the city in August 2005 and tossed everything around—flooding mansions and missions, damaging the Superdome and supermarkets—the storm challenged old perceptions and presented unique challenges. Katrina made at least one thing clear: New Orleans could no longer wait for change, pretend nothing h…

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.
ReportBrian J. Ostrom and Jordan Bowman, Examining the Effectiveness of Indigent Defense Team Services: A Multisite Evaluation of Holistic Defense in Practice, Project Summary.
[From the Executive Summary:] The National Center for State Courts (NCSC) evaluated the implementation of holistic defense practices at three public defender offices: the Department of Public Advocacy in Bowling Green, Kentucky; the Hennepin County Public Defender in Minneapolis, Minnesota; and the Rhode Island Public Defender in Providence County, Rhode Island. The primary objectives of the project were to examine (1) how indigent defense providers have implemented the principles of holistic defense in practice, (2) how holistic defense practices vary …

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.
ArticlesJ. Forbes Farmer, Analyzing and Confronting Managerial Impediments to the Pursuit of Social Justice by Human Service Agencies, Journal of Sociology and Social Work, Vol 7/2.
"Mismanagement and unethical behavior are addressed in this article through the presentation of three fact-based cases written by the author to be used in undergraduate or graduate college classes in sociology, social work or human services that cover such topics as management, probation, homeless shelters and generalist social work agencies. The actions of human service staffers and management are supposed to be professionally constrained by the NASW Code of Ethics. How should a social worker respond when he/she sees a conflict that involves…

This year the American Society of Criminology meeting will be in Washington D.C. Nov 18-21, and IDRA will be holding our Seventh National Convening on Research and Data in Indigent Defense. We're pleased to announce a call for presentations for this unique event.

Call for Presentations
Seventh Annual National Convening on 
Research and Data in Indigent Defense, The American Society of Criminology Annual Meeting

As in previous years, we will host panels of presentations from IDRA members. Panels are 80 minutes long and typically have three presentations followed by Q&A, though exact format is flexible. You should feel free to submit entire panels, or single presentations, which we will organize into panels of three. The ASC meeting ‘hosts’ us – which means that they place our panels on the program of their larger meeting, but arrange them in a ‘track’, scheduled sequentially in the same room. We won’t know the exact room number or schedule for the panels until late summe…

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.
Articles Justin D. Levinson, Robert J. Smith, Koichi Hioki. Race and Retribution: An Empirical Study of Implicit Bias and Punishment in America. Vol 53, U. C. Davis Law Review, pp. 839-891.
"The study we present in this Article demonstrates that the core support for retribution’s use has been shaken by implicit racial bias. Our national empirical study, conducted with over 500 jury-eligible citizens, shows that race cannot be separated from the concept of retribution itself. The study finds, for example, that Americans automatically associate the concepts of payback and retribution with Black and the concepts of mercy and leniency with White. Furthermore, the study showed that the level of a person’s retribution-race implic…

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.
Articles Kelsey S. Henderson & Reveka V. Shteynberg, "Plea decision-making: the influence of attorney expertise, trustworthiness, and recommendation." Psychology, Crime & Law.
Attorney recommendations influence defendant plea decisions; and the degree of influence likely rests on the perceived trustworthiness and level of expertise of the attorney (factors of source credibility). We explored attorney source credibility factors and how these characteristics influence defendants’ plea decision-making. MTurk participants read a hypothetical plea scenario and were asked to imagine themselves as the defendant in a DWI/DUI case making a plea decision; in the scenario, we manipulated the defense attorney’s lev…