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 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 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

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 Alyssa M. Clark, Andrew L. B. Davies & Karise M. Curtis. Access to Counsel for Defendants in Lower Criminal Courts . Justice System Journal . Criminal defendants unable to afford an attorney are entitled to one for free in the United States, but how and when they obtain access to that lawyer is another question. We examine judicial attitudes and behavior in granting access to counsel in areas where logistics are particularly forbidding. Based on survey responses from 1,091 magistrate judges presiding in lower criminal courts in suburban and rural jurisdictions in upstate New York, we describe both the procedures used to determine defendants’ financial eligibility for free counsel, and the logisti

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 Amina Azhar-Grahama, Carina Gallo. Reimagining public defense advocacy in times of Covid-19: lessons from a task force . Vol 33/1 Current Issues in Criminal Justice.   In March 2020, the Contra Costa Public Defenders Association (CCPDA) established a task force to counter the injustices and dangers experienced by clients in custody during the Covid-19 pandemic. The purpose of this commentary is to describe the background and work of the task force, discuss the lessons learned and finally, to identify opportunities for reshaping the criminal justice landscape. In response to the humanitarian crisis in jail, the task force fought for systematic reform, including decarceration. However, while faced with increasingly diver

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 Stanislaw Burdziej, Keith Guzik, and Bartosz Pilitowski, "Fairness at Trial: The Impact of Procedural Justice and Other Experiential Factors on Criminal Defendants’ Perceptions of Court Legitimacy in Poland," 44/2, Law and Social Inquiry , 359-390.  A large body of research supports the procedural justice hypothesis that quality of treatment matters more than outcomes for institutional legitimacy. How fairness matters across legal institutions and geographic settings remains an open question, however. This article uses a survey of criminal defendants to test the factors associated with perceived legitimacy of courts in Poland, a country whose judiciary is currently subject to intense political contestat

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