All misdemeanor defendants in the United States have the right to be represented by a lawyer if they are facing the possibility of incarceration. Yet implementation of that right is often left to local policymakers, and rates of non-representation (defendants proceeding without lawyers) vary enormously. Through an examination of data from Texas counties in 2019, researchers found non-representation rates were highest in the state’s poorest and most rural counties. But they also found signs that local policy choices matter. Counties with public defender offices, and those with less restrictive policies on financial eligibility for indigent defense services, appointed lawyers to substantially more misdemeanor defendants, and had substantially lower non-representation rates as a result. State officials should encourage policy choices that can effectively uphold defendants’ constitutional rights and create more equitable access to counsel, no matter where a defendant happens to be prosecuted.

Kansas has a constitutional obligation to provide counsel to any arrested person who cannot afford to hire a private attorney. But attorney shortages in Kansas threaten this core constitutional right. While there is an average of four attorneys per 1,000 people nationwide, 99 of Kansas’s 105 counties have fewer than two attorneys per 1,000 people.
 
This dire attorney shortage has profound impact on Kansas’s public defense system. Kansas should take immediate steps to add public defense providers and support those already serving Kansas. This policy brief outlines research-bases solutions for Kansas to protect constitutional rights and strengthen public defense. By growing Kansas’s public defense system, funding financial incentives, supporting recruitment and retention programs, and creating new rural defender offices, the State can ensure a fair and functional justice system for all.

Arkansas law is clear: every arrested person has the right to an attorney’s help the first time they see a judge. But across the state, people often face a judge at first appearance without a lawyer by their side. Even worse, a shortage of attorneys means people sometimes wait months for a lawyer’s help. The Constitution promises that every person in jail will have access to the courts and to counsel. Yet far too often, Arkansas allows people to languish in jail alone, afraid, and undefended.

This policy brief outlines research-based solutions for Arkansas to honor the Constitution’s promises by guaranteeing counsel at first appearance, ensuring appointment of defense counsel within 72 hours of arrest, and adequately funding public defense. These reforms can end the first appearance crisis, reduce court backlogs, and ease jail overcrowding.

Initial appearance delays violate the United States Constitution’s promise that an arrested person—who is innocent unless proven guilty—will have prompt access to the courts, the assistance of counsel, and a fair and speedy trial.

These due process milestones begin at initial appearance: the first time an arrested person sees a judge about their case. At an initial appearance, the judge should inform an arrested person of the charges against them. The judge should also make an informed decision about whether, and under what conditions, to release a person from jail pending trial. The judge should hold this initial appearance promptly after arrest, and an attorney should advocate for the arrested person. Too often, none of these things happen.

This policy brief outlines five best legal practices for jurisdictions to honor the United States Constitution and protect the rights of all arrested people. In addition to detailing each best practice, the publication outlines strategies for success that jurisdictions can use when implementing these vital policies.

Rural criminal justice matters, and rural criminal justice innovations must be studied and celebrated. The Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center is pleased to join Rulo Strategies, LLC, and the National Center for State Courts, in publishing a report that highlights innovations in rural criminal legal systems across the United States. Like their urban and suburban peers, rural communities are concerned about criminal justice reform: they want safe streets, fair process, and equal justice. But for too long, funders, researchers, and justice innovators have focused on urban justice systems, largely ignoring the rural criminal justice experience. And when rural systems are studied, the attention usually falls on their deficits—not their strengths. But the smaller scale of rural justice systems means that they can be flexible and nimble justice innovators. As this report demonstrates, there are countless lessons to be learned from rural stakeholders in the criminal system.

Texas’ rural communities urgently need more prosecutors and public defense providers. On average, Texas’ most urban areas have 28 lawyers for every 100 criminal cases, but rural areas only have five. Many rural prosecutor’s offices cannot recruit and retain enough staff. The Constitution’s promise of equal justice for all remains unfulfilled. Rural Texans charged with misdemeanors are four times less likely to have a lawyer than urban defendants. In 2021, only 403 rural Texas lawyers accepted an appointment to represent an adult criminal defendant. In 65 rural counties, no lawyer accepted an appointment. And the problem is getting worse. Since 2015, Texas has lost one-quarter of its rural defense lawyers. Many of them retired and have not been replaced.

This policy brief outlines three solutions to recruit more criminal lawyers to serve rural Texans: Educational pipelines, financial incentives, and rural public defender offices. Rural Texans deserve the same constitutional protections as their urban and suburban counterparts. With strong recruitment strategies, targeted incentive programs, and new rural defender offices, Texas can green its criminal law deserts. 

Arrested people across the United States often wait in jail for days, weeks, or even months before seeing a judge or meeting an attorney. In November 2021, the Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center published, a comprehensive report about this ongoing crisis in pre-trial due process. That report described the devastating consequences of delayed and uncounseled initial appearances.

Now, these  offer a closer look at the laws governing post-arrest procedures in each U.S. state, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. While the Deason Center’s previous report provided an overview of the initial appearance crisis nationwide, the Initial Appearance Report Cards are a rigorous assessment of the laws in almost every jurisdiction in the country. These report cards reveal enormous gaps in the legal protections accorded to people accused of crimes, illuminating both the scope of the initial appearance crisis and our urgent need to solve it. 

In Gideon v. Wainwright, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the government must provide a criminal defense lawyer for any accused person who cannot afford one. But for too many people, Gideon's promise remains unfulfilled. In Texas, there are no statewide guidelines about who is entitled to a court-appointed lawyer. Instead, counties create their own rules that create serious gaps in constitutional protection. Getting Gideon Right investigates the financial standards that determine an accused person's eligibility for appointed counsel in Texas county courts. The report reveals a patchwork of county court policies that are both complex and severe.

In 2019, police across Dallas County asked the District Attorney to prosecute fewer marijuana cases than the year before. This report examines whether the racial disparity in those cases improved at the same time. Fewer, Not Fairer shows that while the number of referrals declined, police were still more likely to refer a Black person for marijuana prosecution than a non-Black person. However, some cities achieved more fairness when their police departments almost entirely stopped requesting marijuana prosecutions altogether.

Most Americans expect that if they are arrested, they will quickly appear before a judge, learn about the charges, and have an attorney assigned to defend them. The reality is vastly different. After arrest, a person can wait in jail for days, weeks, or even months before seeing a judge or meeting an attorney. This report chronicles the resulting initial appearance crisis and highlights its devastating consequences. More importantly, it provides policymakers and advocates with actionable recommendations.

Criminal defendants unable to afford an attorney are entitled to one for free in the United States, but how and when they obtain access to that lawyer is another question. We examine judicial attitudes and behavior in granting access to counsel in areas where logistics are particularly forbidding. Based on survey responses from 1,091 magistrate judges presiding in lower criminal courts in suburban and rural jurisdictions in upstate New York, we describe both the procedures used to determine defendants’ financial eligibility for free counsel, and the logistical challenges that surround securing the physical presence of a lawyer at the first appearance in court. We find that judges strongly favor counsel’s presence in order to maintain courtroom efficiency, and sometimes depart from strict interpretation of financial eligibility guidelines to ensure representation. We introduce
the concept of the “procedurally precautious judge” to describe the way these respondents carefully preserve the appearance of integrity in court operations even while availability of counsel for defendants is limited.

Budding Change explores what happened when Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot (DA Creuzot) radically changed his office’s policies about the prosecution of first-time misdemeanor marijuana cases. The report concludes that DA Creuzot’s 2019 policies were associated with significant reductions in police enforcement of marijuana misdemeanor laws. As a result, marijuana screening caseloads within the District Attorney’s Office declined substantially. Budding Change shows that prosecutorial policies can have a profound impact on policing behaviors.

Data show that Black and White people use marijuana at roughly equal rates. Yet in 2018, in six of Dallas County's biggest cities, Black people were vastly overrepresented in the enforcement of low-level drug crimes. With a look at enforcement trends before the election of District Attorney John Creuzot, this study launches a series of reports about how his reforms have impacted Dallas County.

The STAR Criminal Justice Bibliography is a rich resource for STAR practitioners, policymakers, and communities. Updated annually, the bibliography provides a helpful summary of scholarship that addresses STAR criminal legal systems. The bibliography emphasizes research that can be readily translated into actionable reform by STAR lawyers, communities, and justice-impacted individuals. Topics of special interest include public defense innovations, technological adaptations, and juvenile justice and reentry programs that are tailored to the unique characteristics of STAR systems.

The Rural Texas Sheriff reports on a focus group conducted in conjunction with the Center's 2019 Rural Criminal Justice Summit. The report places rural Texas sheriffs and their agencies in a national context. It also offers insight into the focus group's perceptions of rural law enforcement and jail management. With first-hand accounts of these sheriffs’ experiences, the report offers a compelling look at the personal and professional lives of Texas’ rural sheriffs.

How will the COVID-19 pandemic impact indigent defense budgets in the United States? During times of fiscal stress, redistributive policies—policies that use taxpayer funds to support people who pay little or no taxes—are particularly susceptible to spending cuts. However, during the Great Recession of 2007-2009, Texas' indigent defense spending was generally stable, even in the hardest-hit counties.

Understanding how prosecutors make their screening and charging decisions is essential to criminal legal reform. This preview report is the first in a series of publications that explores the screening and charging practices of prosecutors in three mid-sized jurisdictions. Through an innovative mixed-methods empirical study, the series provides a holistic account of prosecutors’ charging practices.

The COVID-19 pandemic is imposing typically rural practice constraints on the United States’ urban and suburban criminal court systems. This “ruralization” of criminal practice offers a window into the challenges and opportunities that inhere in rural systems. But for decades, lawmakers, researchers, reformers, and philanthropists have overlooked, undertheorized, and underfunded rural criminal legal systems—and have done so at great peril. Rural systems have decades of experience navigating (geographically) distanced criminal practice. By ignoring these rural practice adaptations, we have missed critical opportunities to learn about successful adaptations to distance-constrained criminal practice.

Greening the Desert brings a criminal justice lens to the phenomenon of STAR legal deserts—vast areas with few, if any, practicing attorneys. This one-pager highlights key strategies to green these criminal law deserts. The full Greening the Desert report offers detailed examples and case studies that describe successful implementation of strategies to recruit, train, and retain STAR justice practitioners. An explores the national landscape and chronicles how two STAR criminal lawyers found their way to rural practice.

Greening the Desert brings a criminal justice lens to the phenomenon of legal deserts in STAR communities—vast areas with few, if any, practicing attorneys. The report explores STAR criminal justice communities and describes strategies and initiatives to green these criminal law deserts. Using case studies, the report offers concrete examples of successful innovations. It also includes cautionary notes about risks that may arise with the implementation of strategies to recruit, train, and retain STAR practitioners. A companion   explores the national landscape and chronicles how two STAR criminal lawyers found their way to rural practice.

This is the final report of an NIJ-funded evaluation of the impact of counsel at first appearance (CAFA) in Upstate New York. The evaluation demonstrates that CAFA changed bail practices in several jurisdictions. Before the CAFA program, criminal defendants were unrepresented when their bail was set. After  CAFA, the frequency with which defendants were required to post bail declined, as did the amount of bail that was demanded. Ancillary observations suggest CAFA may also increase access to counsel, expedite case dispositions, and produce cost savings.

Amid the national conversation about criminal legal reform, this article is the first scholarly work to address the initial appearance crisis. Criminal (Dis)Appearance describes an epidemic of detention-without-process and explores the legal landscape that produced it. The article describes the Supreme Court's commitment to a narrow Fourth Amendment jurisprudence and critiques the Court's rejection of early-stage criminal due process rights. The authors explain how substantive and procedural due process establish the right to a prompt and thorough initial appearance.

This article describes forthcoming reforms to indigent defense systems in the state of New York and interviews state leaders about their expectations of those reforms. Conceptualizing defense service quality in terms of “public value,” we offer new theoretical and empirical strategies to explore how increasing resources impact the quality of defense services.  The article lays the groundwork for an assessment of the reforms' impact and identifies key metrics to track. This is the first publication of the Deason Center’s Gauging Improvement in Defense Efforts and Outcomes in New York (GIDEON) project.

This is the foreword to a collection of empirical research about public defense, published under the auspices of the Indigent Defense Research Association (IDRA). Two overarching themes emerge. The first theme, “System Interventions: Evaluating Programs and Identifying Opportunities,” includes three studies of innovative policies and practices. The second theme, “Understanding Decision Makers,” includes four papers drawing on qualitative data. As a collection, these papers bridge gaps between theory and practice, offer new insight into public defense as a critical component of criminal legal systems, and identify new avenues for future research.

This article assesses the impact of counsel at first appearance (CAFA) on bail outcomes in two rural upstate New York counties. The authors investigate three hypotheses about what occurs a defendant has counsel at their first appearances in court: (1) judges are more inclined to release a defendant on personal recognizance or under supervision, and (2) judges impose lower bail amounts, and (3) as a consequence, defendants spend less time detained before disposition. The authors find mixed support for these hypotheses, although some evidence that CAFA produces the expected outcomes. The authors conclude that the implementation of CAFA programs may be tempered by courthouse cultures and urge that future research on court reform include rural jurisdictions.

The Sixth Amendment right to counsel is a continuing challenge in rural areas. This Article  describes an exploratory analysis of Texas data about rural and urban access to counsel, including rules governing the eligibility for appointed counsel services and the appointment-of-counsel rate. The authors report that appointment-of-counsel rates were significantly lower in rural counties.  Low lawyer populations were associated with especially low levels of access to counsel.  In contrast, the presence of an organized defense provider was associated with significantly higher rates of access to counsel.