The Indigent Defense Research Association

Notable Recent Publications features the latest empirical research and data related to indigent/public defense. If you have suggestions, ideas for work that should be included, or trouble accessing any of the articles featured, please write to Venita Embry at  vembry@rti.org .    *New Articles and Reports* Bing, L., Goldstein, R., Ho, H., Pager, D., & Western, B. (2024). The long-term impact of debt relief for indigent defendants in a misdemeanor court.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ,  121 (51), e2415066121. US courts regularly assess fines, fees, and costs against criminal defendants. Court-related debt can cause continuing court involvement and incarceration, not because of new crimes, but because of unpaid financial obligations. We conducted an experiment with 606 people found guilty of misdemeanors in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma. Study participants were randomly selected to receive relief from all current and prior fines and fees asses...

Notable Recent Publications features the latest empirical research and data related to indigent/public defense. If you have suggestions, ideas for work that should be included, or trouble accessing any of the articles featured, please write to Venita Embry at  vembry@rti.org .    Howey, W., Kathan, S., Jaggers, J. W., & Cambron, C. (2024). Complexities of appellate law: Experiences and perspectives of Utah indigent appellate attorneys. Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice & Criminology.  https://doi.org/10.21428/88de04a1.a294e101 Indigent appellate attorneys experience high stress due to their unique roles and responsibilities. Very little scientific research examines the lives and experiences of attorneys in the workplace. Characterizing and describing the variety of complexities and challenges Utah appellate attorneys face within their work provides information towards filling the profession’s gaps, stressors, and occupational needs. A sample of five U...

  Notable Recent Publications features the latest empirical research and data related to indigent defense. If you have suggestions, ideas for work that should be included, or trouble accessing any of the articles featured, please write to Venita Embry at  vembry@rti.org .  Articles David Abrams, Viet Nguyen, Aurélie Ouss, and Julia Reinhold, “A (Plea) Offer You Can Refuse” Plea bargaining is ubiquitous in the US justice system, yet lack of data on rejected plea offers limits analyses. Addressing this gap, we compile a dataset including all initial plea offers—accepted and rejected—from 23,000 felony cases in Philadelphia, enabling us to analyze the interplay between plea offers, defendant decisions, and case outcomes. Our analysis yields three significant insights. First, even after controlling for detailed case observables, initial plea offers are longer for Black defendants, especially for those in jail pretrial. Second, initial plea offers that are rejected tend to...

  Notable Recent Publications features the latest empirical research and data related to indigent defense. If you have suggestions, ideas for work that should be included, or trouble accessing any of the articles featured, please write to Venita Embry at  vembry@rti.org .  Articles Duhart Clarke, S. E., Zottola, S. A., McKinsey, E., Kurtz, B., Shao, T. T., Morrissey, B., & Desmarais, S. L. (2024). Indigent Injustice: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of People’s Criminal Legal Outcomes.  Critical Criminology , 1-41. The United States Constitution guarantees every citizen access to counsel to fundamentally preserve the right to a fair trial. Over two-thirds of criminal defendants lack the resources to secure an attorney and are thereby deemed indigent by the court. The dearth of generalizable data for indigent defendant outcomes leads legal scholars to cite the pragmatic and theoretical mechanisms for evaluating the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of pub...

  Notable Recent Publications features the latest empirical research and data related to indigent defense. If you have suggestions, ideas for work that should be included, or trouble accessing any of the articles featured, please write to Venita Embry at   vembry@rti.org .  Recordings of IDRA Spring 2024 Virtual Conference The recordings of all of the recorded panels from the Virtual Conference May 1 st through 3 rd are now available in a playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-x1JglqDoemjDH0Gm793eitWekd-Fb2O Not all panels were recorded depending on panelist’s preferences, but all the others are included in this playlist.  Articles Mikaela Wolf-Sorokin, Liz Bradley & Whitney Viets, Padilla’s Broken Promise: Pennsylvania Case Study, 26 U. Pa. J. Const. L. 1046 (2024). Available at https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/jcl/vol26/iss4/4/ In 2010, the Supreme Court held in Padilla v. Kentucky that criminal defense attorneys have a constitutional o...

Notable Recent Publications features the latest empirical research and data related to indigent defense. If you have suggestions, ideas for work that should be included, or trouble accessing any of the articles featured, please write to Venita Embry at   vembry@rti.org .  Articles Baćak, V., Lageson, S., & Powell, K. (2024). The Stress of Injustice: Public Defenders and the Frontline of American Inequality. Social Forces .   Available for download:  link . Fairness in the criminal legal system is unattainable without effective legal representation of indigent defendants, yet we know little about the experience of attorneys who do this critical work. Using semi-structured interviews, our study investigated occupational stress in a sample of 78 attorneys representing indigent clients across the United States. We show how the chronic stressors experienced at work culminate in what we define as the stress of injustice: the social and psycho...