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Indigen Defense in South Carolina

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Ishmael Tate reports, "Indigent legal defense system to get overhaul," in the Rock Hill Herald. South Carolina's patchwork system that provides attorneys to defendants who can't afford them is undergoing a multimillion-dollar transformation -- one that advocates say is long overdue. More than eight in 10 of nearly 126,000 cases heard in the state's general sessions courts last year involved defendants unable to afford a lawyer, according to the S.C. Administrative Office of the Courts. In some rural counties, the percentage of defendants represented by public defenders is as high as 95 percent, said Patton Adams, executive director of the S.C. Commission on Indigent Defense. Indigent defense is important because each person charged with a crime has the constitutional right to adequate representation...continue to full post

Full post as published by StandDown Texas Project on May 12, 2008 (boomark / email).