Understanding the Burden of Legal Financial Obligations on Indigent Washingtonians

In criminal courts across the country, judges assess a variety of fines, fees and other legal financial obligations (LFOs) that many defendants struggle to pay. This paper examines the disproportionate burden that fine and fee assessment and collection practices impose on low-income, system-involved individuals, using administrative court data for criminal cases filed in Washington’s courts of limited jurisdiction between 2015 and 2020. The authors find that the majority of defendants do not or only partially pay their LFOs, but that these observations are more pronounced for indigent defendants. The authors also find that, of defendants who fully pay off their fines and fees, individuals with a public defender satisfy their debt after a greater number of days, as compared to individuals with private counsel. This is all in spite of public defender defendants generally being assessed smaller amounts in fines and fees at the outset. Additionally, the authors uncover that when defendants do pay off all of their fines and fees, they tend to do so on the day of assessment, with the likelihood of satisfying full payment generally decreasing as time goes on. These findings suggest that many people struggle with criminal justice debt, but that this problem disproportionately impacts indigent Washingtonians, subjecting them to a greater possibility of harm through the various methods of collections enforcement.

Examining the Type of Legal Representation and Its Influence on Disaggregated Dispositions in Juvenile Court

While prior studies of juvenile court outcomes have examined the impact of legal representation on out-of-home placement versus community sanctions, previous research has not fully explored the variation within sanctions that youth receive. The current study examines the influence of type of legal representation (public defender or private attorney) when predicting juvenile adjudications and dispositions. Using a sample of delinquent referrals from a Northeast state between 2009 and 2014, results showed that youth do receive different outcomes (e.g., probation, drug and alcohol treatment, accountability-oriented dispositions, etc.) based on the type of legal representation. The findings have important implications for juvenile court processing related to how courtroom actors impact case outcomes.

Da atuação da Defensoria Pública na judicialização da saúde: da necessidade de macrocontrole através da revisão judicial do gasto financeiro do ente político

Resumo: Este artigo tem por escopo abordar a atuação da Defensoria Pública na judicialização da saúde, com enfoque na atuação da instituição no controle orçamentário do ente público. Para tanto foi analisada a atuação da Defensoria Pública nas ações individuais e coletivas, foi abordada a possibilidade de atuação da Defensoria Pública no controle de contingenciamentos na orçamentários na área da saúde e, em sequência, foram analisadas duas ações civis públicas que visam referido controle. Por fim, concluiu-se pela necessidade de referida modalidade de controle pela Defensoria Pública no Brasil, notadamente porque é a instituição do sistema de justiça que tem maior contato com a parcela da população usuária do SUS e porque referido controle gera uma maior equidade quando da distribuição de recursos públicos na área de saúde.Palavras-chave: Defensoria Pública, saúde pública, controle financeiro. Abstract: This article intends to discuss the Public Defender’s office role in legal claims involving public health, focusing in the public budgetary control. To reach this, the article analyzed the Public Defender work in individual lawsuit and in collective actions, discussing the possibility of the Public Defender to file a lawsuit to control budget contingency of public health and, in sequence, analyzed two collective actions that intend to promote this control. Finally, it has been concluded that this kind of control by Brazilian Public Defender’s office is necessary, mainly because it’s the institution of justice system that has the major contact with the parcel of population that uses the public health system and because this kind of control grants major equity in the distribution of public health resources.Keywords: Public Defender’s office, public health, public finances control.

Making Gideon Count? Public Defender Resources and Felony Case Outcomes for Black, White, and Latinx Individuals

Although Gideon v. Wainright has provided indigent defendants potentially facing prison time the right to counsel, commentators and scholars have documented that the public defense system is vastly underfunded and currently in crisis. However, research has rarely examined how public defender resources impact case outcomes, and the research that does exist has yet, to my knowledge, examine how these resources impact racial disparities in case outcomes. By merging data from the Census of Public Defender Offices to data from the State Court Processing Statistics, I begin to fill this gap. Results from multivariate regression analyses with state-year fixed effects provide mixed evidence. Regardless of race, higher public defender and support staff caseloads tend to be associated with worse case outcomes. In the case of pretrial detention, I find that high public defender and support staff caseloads exacerbate Black-White disparities. With respect to sentence length, I find evidence that high public defender caseloads exacerbate Latinx-White disparities and some evidence that they mitigate Black-White disparities. In sum, these results provide strong support for the view that the public defender funding crisis harms indigent defendants regardless of race and mixed evidence regarding its impact on racial disparities in the criminal justice system.

Aktuální zpráva ke kontaktům dítěte v pěstounské péči s biologickou rodinou

In December 2020, authorities responsible for social and legal protection of children as well as non-government nonprofit organizations authorized to provide social and legal children protection received the “Recommendation of the Deputy of the Public Defender of Rights regarding contacts of children in foster care not only with their parents.” This recommendation immediately raised the response of foster parents, accompanying organizations, and some of the authorities of social and legal children protection. Active members of Section for the substitute family care with the Czech-Moravian psychological society issued a public statement to the aforementioned document in which they point out neglecting the interest of the child and appeal to take into consideration professional psychological findings and experience from practice. We reprint the full text of the statement here and we would appreciate it if this topic, presented on the E-psychologie, captured the attention of experts and raised a further discussion.

Gaining Access to Justice: A Subnational Study of the Public Defender’s Office in Mexico

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. Reform efforts included empowe¬ring the courts, granting political independence to the public prosecutor’s office, professionalizing the public defender offices and implementing the accusatory criminal system in justice-sector institutions. To what extent are the reforms tar¬geted at the public defender offices changing the way legal defense is provided? In this article, after discussing a theoretical framework that captures and opera¬tionalizes the concepts of a merit-based career system, an accusatory criminal justice system and effective legal representation, 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 affec¬ted the way legal counsel is provided at subnational public defender offices. To accomplish this, I provide both a de jure and de facto measures (indicators of reform implementation). To identify the de jure indicators, I consulted legal texts (constitutions and secondary laws), and to gauge how the de facto indi¬cators work, I relied on interviews with public defenders, reports and academic documents. I collected 50 interviews with public defense attorneys from three Mexican states: Baja California Sur, Jalisco and Nuevo León. Findings from these states suggest that as reform implementation advances, public defenders have more tools to offer legal representation; more specifically, they are better trained, in addition to having higher salaries, a lower caseload per defender and increased access to forensic services.

Debundling accountability: prosecutor and public defender elections in Florida

I explore the impact of public defender and prosecutor elections using caseload data from Florida. While most states within the US use popular elections to select and retain prosecutors, public defenders are typically appointed positions. Florida is novel in that for both positions, popular, partisan elections are used to select the office’s leader. I first document important distortions in pre-trial case handling. A public defender re-election is associated with an increase in the proportion of cases resolved via plea bargaining, while prosecutor re-elections are associated with less plea bargaining. At the trial phase, I present evidence that public defender re-elections are associated with a decrease in the proportion of jury trials that result in a conviction, while a prosecutor re-election coincides with an increase in the conviction rate. The results are consistent with voters holding both elected officials accountable for doing their job. Public defenders obtain plea bargains at a higher rate and secure acquittals for their clients when up for re-election. Prosecutors do not plea bargain as much and win at trial when up for re-election.