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 .  Articles  Hannah Haksgaard, " Court-Appointment Compensation and Rural Access to Justice ."14 University of St. Thomas Journal of Law & Public Policy , 88.  "Hourly rates paid to court-appointed lawyers impact access to justice. Court-appointed lawyers provide necessary counsel in civil and criminal cases, yet hourly rates in many jurisdictions are so low that many lawyers cannot afford to take court-appointed cases. This article argues that low hourly rates cause problems: namely, appointed lawyers will be insufficient in number, inaccessible to their clients, and sometimes even ineffective. These problems are heightened in rural America where they are compounded by the geography of distance and the rural la

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 Mally Shechory Bitton & Anat Mashiach, " From Their Angle: A Look at the Emotional World of Defense Attorneys Who Represent Sex Offenders ." International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology . "Fifteen defense attorneys working for the Public Defender’s Office in Israel were interviewed using a semi-structured interview. The findings indicated two major issues related to defense attorney perception of their work: (1) the distinctiveness of representing sex offenders due to their unique characteristics and (2) the emotional impact of working with sex offenders." Gustavo Fondevila and Miguel Quintana-Navarrete, Pre-trial detention and legal defence in Latin America

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 Azul A. Aguiar-Aguilar Gaining Access to Justice: A Subnational Study of Public Defender Offices in Mexico . Mexican Law Review, New Series . XIII-2. pp. 35-62.  "With the transition to democracy, Latin American countries have embarked on implementing judicial reforms to redesign justice-sector institutions and build up the rule of law in the region.... I examine the extent to which the changes of transitioning from an inquisitorial to an adversarial system and from a non-merit-based career system to a merit-based career system have affected the way legal counsel is provided at subnational public defender offices.... I collected 50 interviews with public defense attorneys from three Mexican states: Baj

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 Joseph J. Avery, Jordan Starck, Yiqiao Zhong, Jonathan D. Avery, and Joel Cooper Is your own team against you? Implicit bias and interpersonal regard in criminal defense , Journal of Social Psychology. "Racial disparities in conviction and incarceration have been lamentable features of legal systems for a long time. Research has addressed the attitudes and decisions of police, prosecutors, jurors, and judges in contributing to these disparities, but very little attention has been paid to defendants’ own team members—i.e., criminal defense attorneys. Researchers have specifically identified this as a “scholarly gap”. To address this, we conducted an empirical study of criminal defense attorneys practicing in

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 Bernardo Oliveira Buta, Adalmir de Oliveira Gomes & Carolina Menezes Lima, Proposal of a Performance Index for the Public Defender's Office , 16 Revista Direito GV . 1. "The Public Defender's Office is essential for the Justice System functioning, so that evaluating the performance of this organization is fundamental to improving the provision of justice services in the country. This article aims to propose and test an index of performance for the Brazilian Federal Public Defender's Office [DPU]. The data were collected through interviews with defenders and managers and on secondary official bases of the organization and analyzed through content analysis and exploratory and confirmatory factoria

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 Andrew Davies, Victoria Smiegocki and Hannah Hall, The Court is in Recession: On the Implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic for Indigent Defense Spending. Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law. "What is the likely effect of the recession brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic on indigent defense budgets in the United States? To look forward, we look backward. We examine data on county-level spending on indigent defense in Texas during the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Redistributive policies – those which use tax payer funds to support individuals who themselves pay little or no tax – are particularly susceptible to cuts during times of fiscal stress. Yet our analysis shows indigent defense policy, measured in terms of