From Gideon v. Wainright to Public Defenders Today
Sixty years ago, a poor man from Florida without formal legal training wrote a handwritten letter to the Supreme Court in his prison cell, asking the Court to investigate the state of Florida’s violation of his right to counsel. The Court reviewed his case and decided subsequently in the landmark ruling, Gideon v. Wainwright: that all individuals who couldn’t afford a lawyer must receive the support of appointed legal counsel from the court for every stage of the criminal procedure at no cost to the defendant.
Gideon reaffirmed the right to counsel in the Sixth Amendment, developing a new profession of public defenders and reinforcing the legal morale that equal representation lays the foundation for judicial equity.
Compared to wealthy defendants, indigent defendants, that is, people who live below the poverty line or are unable to pay court fees, are more likely to be racial minorities and are less likely to understand how the criminal-legal system works or know precedent cases relevant to their situation. Without the ability to hire a private lawyer and own deficient legal knowledge, they would thus be less capable of defending themselves in front of judges and prosecutors. Should a public defender not be offered to them, indigent criminal defendants may receive court-assigned counsel or be forced to represent themselves. Either way, many studies show the consequences are the same – higher bail, longer sentences, and harsher convictions.
Four years after Gideon, the right to counsel was extended to juvenile defendants and a decade after that, to misdemeanor cases. Sixty years afterward, society has not fulfilled Gideon’s vision that all indigent defendants received support from the government in court proceedings. With one in five defendants being indigent, the need for public defenders is at an unseen high level. Nationwide, public defenders are both understaffed and under-compensated, resulting nearly half of public defenders’ clients are unrepresented at their initial appearance in federal courts across Southern Florida, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Utah.
As the second-largest office in the nation, the Cook County Public Defenders’ Office faces these issues to a degree higher than the national average. Notably, they experience a disproportionate case-to-defense attorney ratio, low wages, and scant resources. These problems create an uneasy relationship between the public defenders and the clients they represent. Organizations including Injustice Watch, Prison Policy Initiative, and Brennan Center for Justice recommend Illinois to establish a supervisory body in the state and work together with other legal actors to address these issues.
Problems Faced By Cook County Public Defenders
Overwhelming Caseload
Public defenders often handle hundreds of cases simultaneously, the investigation time of each shrinking down to as little as one minute on average. Depending on the charge severity, the adequate amount of time that should be spent on each felony case is estimated to be 41 hours or more. In another spectrum, the National Legal Aid and Defender Association recommended public defenders work on a maximum of 150 felony and 400 misdemeanor cases per year. Cook County Public Defender’s Office has “over 500 attorneys and 171 additional staff members”. With one of the largest caseloads in the country, however, the office is still operating at a deficient capacity. As a 2008 litigation revealed, “[t]he caseloads of the Defender’s Office exceed national standards in excess of 60 percent in felony courtrooms and 400 percent in misdemeanor courtrooms.”
As a result of their overwhelming workloads, public defenders often did not assist their clients to the best of their ability, creating serious consequences. Research linked excessive public defender workloads to a range of negative criminal-legal outcomes, such as longer jail or prison time and a higher likelihood of being detained pretrial. One study found that with an additional 100 caseloads for public defenders, the probability of defendants being detained pre-trial went up by 74 percent and their sentence length rose by 90 percent.
Unsatisfactory Salary
Compared to its counterpart in courts - prosecutors, public defenders receive fewer resources and are compensated less for their work, despite having larger workloads. A Brennan Center for Justice report listed that a junior public defender in the Fourth Judicial District of Florida earned 10,000 a year less than a prosecutor in the same district with the same experience level. The gap was 15,000 in Colorado’s First Judicial District. Florida and Colorado are only the tip of the iceberg of the salary differences in the criminal-legal space. In the federal system, The Criminal Justice Act Review Committee report also discovered that the average hourly pay rate for panel defense attorneys in 2017 was lower than the standard set by the Congress over half a century ago in the Criminal Justice Act (CJA), causing the leaving of experienced defense lawyers. The effect of lower-than-standard pay rates for CJA panel attorneys was exacerbated in cities where the living costs are high, but the salary does not inflate with the expense.
The exact earning data for Cook County public defenders and county public prosecutors are unknown, but Chicago-wide, public defenders on average earned 7,000 less than for prosecutors. The alarming salary gap is partly because the county’s board funds the two offices unequally. In 2021, for example, the Public Defender’s Office budget of 80 million was only approximately one-half of the budget for the county’s prosecutor counterpart of 176 million. Furthermore, county prosecutors received additional public and private grants for a total of 39 million, whereas the public defender’s office received under a million. The underfunding situation means public defenders have fewer resources and acquire lower salaries, which also leads to a low retention rate furthering the staff shortage. Whereas this is also true for the county’s prosecutors, the concerningly large funding divergence makes it especially hard to retain good public defenders.
Weak Client Relationship
As the person representing the indigent defendant in court, building a trusted relationship with the client would ensure smooth collaboration at multiple critical stages, such as initial appearance, detention hearing, and trial. Yet, it’s common for people to perceive that public defenders are untrustworthy or incompetent. This comes from a few beliefs that people commonly hold, most of which are mistaken: public defenders work for the system instead of for them, they possess worse skills than private attorneys because they are offered for free (and free means cheap), and they possess less adequate resources than private attorneys. These critiques are not entirely unjustified, as the relationship-building issue often goes hand-in-hand with other problems, such as high caseload, understaffing, and insufficient resources.
What the State of Illinois Can Do
To combat problems of high workload, unsatisfying salary, unequal resources (compared to prosecutors), and the subsequent relationship-building difficulty, we must take steps to empower public defenders. While this can potentially take on many routes, a statewide agency is the most imperative and promising thing the state of Illinois should do. The new body would be responsible for reviewing the current operations and developing guidelines to improve and bolster effective public defense. In policy terms, this means “a statewide commission could recommend that the legislature set aside state funding for public defender’s offices, or cap the amount that counties have to pay for indigent defense, with additional funds for improvements subsidized by the state.” Prison Policy Initiative highlighted that such a commission must enjoy a degree of independence to resist political pressures and judicial obstructions. Without this kind of freedom, the commission will become unstable in the long term and its recommendations will not be enforced.
Building alliances with reform-minded prosecutors can also benefit public defenders, who were created to be prosecutors' counterparts but wield drastically less power. This power dynamic makes it difficult for both parties to collaborate, but not impossible. In the example of the pay parity movement, which matters because how well the position is paid often decides its retainment rate, prosecutors aligned with public defenders to bargain for equal salaries with other attorneys. The alliance often attracts greater media and public attention, therefore, is more likely to reach the goal than single initiatives from either side. Most recently, this movement happened in New York and led to actions from the mayor who claimed to raise the city public defenders’ pay within the next four years. For Illinois, the state must realize the important role public defenders play in the judicial process and educate prosecutors to be supporters of public defender empowerment.
When the nation is able to protect public defenders with more reasonable standards and stronger regulations, public defenders can fully help indigent defendants by spending a decent amount of time on each case and building positive, trusting relationships with their clients. Until then, Gideon’s promise can not be truly fulfilled.
$\underline{\small\text{From the author: I want to thank editors from Chicago Policy Review for their editing works on this piece.}}$