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Two notable new policy papers on the failings of indigent defense systems

By Douglas A. Berman

This past week saw the release of two interesting and important new policy papers addressing indigent defense systems in the United States. One piece is this Issue Brief from the folks at the American Constitution Society authored by Erica Hashimoto and titled "Assessing the Indigent Defense System." This piece stresses "the importance of collecting data on representation rates in misdemeanor and felony cases" and discusses how to "use data to measure the quality of representation being provided to indigent defendants so that we can improve upon that representation."Another piece comes from the folks at the Cato Institute.  This policy paper is authored by Stephen Schulhofer and David Friedman, and it is titled "Reforming Indigent Defense: How Free Market Principles Can Help to Fix a Broken System...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on September 07, 2010 (boomark / email).