The Indigent Defense Research Association

  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 exceed eventu

  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 publicly funded defend

  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 obligation to advise

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 psychological demands of working in a punitive sys

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 .  Reports DeNike, M. Equitable Defense: Holistic Defense for Court-Appointed Counsel Cases.    https://www.cjcj.org/media/equitable_defense.pdf A number of studies point to disparities in criminal justice outcomes based on whether indigent defendants are represented by a public defender or a court-appointed private attorney. As more and more public defender’s offices adopt holistic defense models, there is a danger that the gap in defense quality will further widen. Research on the effectiveness of holistic defense irrefutably establishes that the inclusion of social workers on defense teams results in more options for judges, less jail and prison time for defendants, and increased access to treatment. In San Francisco, t

Notable Recent Publications features the latest empirical research and data related to indigent defense. Contact IDRA if you have suggestions we should add to our list! Book Matthew J. Greife, Thwarting Death: A Legal Culture of Resistance Among Colorado Death Penalty Defense Lawyers . Springer. [From the website:] This book examines the lived experiences of death penalty defense lawyers and how they created a legal culture of resistance to the death penalty. It argues that an important social component of death penalty abolition in the state of Colorado was due to the efforts of capital defense attorneys. Specifically, it explores how the death penalty defense lawyers created and embraced a legal culture of resistance which compelled the attorneys to fight tenaciously in order to win life sentences for clients that had committed brutal homicides. A legal culture of resistance does not exist in a vacuum. Thwarting Death  traces the lived experience of 15 death penalty defense