Public defense in this country is in crisis, due largely to chronic underfunding of public defense systems. In FY 2012, the last year for which data is available, states spent $2.2 billion on indigent defense services nationwide.[1] Although a direct comparison between public defense services and prosecution services cannot be made for various reasons,[2] it is worth noting that the budgets of state prosecution offices nationwide approach $6 billion.[3] The crisis in public defense is well-documented, and the consequences – excessive caseloads or restriction of services, constructive and actual denial of counsel, and rising incarceration costs – are dire.[4] The long term solution hinges upon fomenting a culture of support for public defense. As NACDL noted in its 2012 report, National Indigent Defense Reform: The Solution is Multifaceted, “Many meaningful reforms can only be accomplished by reaching outside the defense bar for assistance from others within or outside of the criminal justice system.”[5] With that in mind, NACDL hopes to reach outside the defense bar to provide additional support to the BJA-led Right to Counsel National Campaign, or R2C Initiative.
The only way to procure and maintain adequate funding for public defense is to develop and entrench broad public support for this fundamental constitutional right. This necessarily involves broad outreach and a coordinated public education effort to explain the importance of having fully-resourced qualified attorneys both as a matter of fiscal prudence and fundamental justice. BJA’s R2C Initiative has developed a foundation for an action agenda that can transform public perceptions. It is essential to build on that foundation by taking the messaging lessons learned from that project directly to the stakeholders in various jurisdictions who can make the right to counsel a priority. To that end, NACDL plans to undertake the folllowing Right to Counsel Collaboration Initiatives.
i. Stakeholder meetings
In coordination with the R2C planning Committee, NACDL will convene a Consulting Council of influential criminal justice stakeholders drawn from the attendees of the initial R2C convening in November 2015 for a day-long meeting at NACDL’s office in Washington, D.C. to discuss strategies and objectives to promote the R2C Initiative. The Consulting Council will include individuals from multiple areas of the criminal justice system, including judges, prosecutors, and police, to consider how to best approach these groups to propel the R2C Initiative’s efforts. NACDL will hold three one-day meetings, the formats and locations of which will be decided in cooperation with the Consulting Council and the R2C planning committee, to build relationships among criminal justice stakeholder groups and discuss the importance of the Sixth Amendment and ways that each group can positively impact the right to counsel in their own communities and among their peer groups. One meeting will be with law enforcement officers, one with judges (in cooperation with the American Judges Association), and the third will be decided at a later date. Topics will include education and media outreach informed by the results of the Right to Counsel National Campaign’s focus groups and surveys regarding effective messaging. Each meeting will have a defined agenda and concrete targeted outcomes tailored to the meeting’s participants. The ultimate goals of the meetings are to improve working relationships between various criminal justice constituencies and find solutions to systemic issues that impact fairness and due process, such as failure to provide counsel, waiver of counsel, arbitrary and unreasonably high money bail, pleas at arraignment, one-time-only plea offers, language and cultural issues, and collateral consequences.
Consulting Council members and NACDL project staff will work with attendees as needed after the meetings to aid in messaging and reform efforts, such as providing assistance with drafting and placement of opinion editorials. Council members and staff will conduct outreach to follow up with attendees after three and six months to monitor activities and progress. NACDL will create a website to aggregate relevant news stories, share helpful resources (organized into libraries by subject and/or jurisdiction), and provide updates via a blog format highlighting progress made by meeting attendees. If needed and appropriate, NACDL will arrange follow-up telephone conferences to encourage attendees to build off of each other’s progress.
ii. Communications support
To further the goals of the R2C Initiative, NACDL will continue to work with the R2C communications team to roll out effective messaging tools for stakeholders and others. NACDL will continue to publish newsletters for R2C, maintain the R2C Facebook and Twitter accounts, and maintain the external R2C website (http://www.rtcnationalcampaign.org/) as it has previously done under a subgrant from the American University Justice Programs Office. Under NACDL’s leadership, the number of individuals following R2C on Facebook has increased from 58 at inception to nearly 300 as of mid-July, and the number of Twitter followers now approaches 200. During June 2016, the R2C Facebook page reached approximately 10,650 users. Twitter impressions for the same month totaled approximately 12,200. The R2C website has over 2,300 page views since its creation less than a year ago.
NACDL will also continue to manage media contacts and draft and disseminate news releases and other communications as necessary. To help reach broad audiences, NACDL will expand its communications work to include more multimedia and graphics that will appeal to the general public. Specifically, NACDL will record and disseminate podcasts with thought-leaders in the area of the right to counsel and public defense reform, create at least one short video to highlight the importance of the right to counsel and/or showcase reform efforts, and develop graphics or memes for use on social media to advance the cause of public defense funding and the right to counsel.
[1] Erinn Herberman, Ph.D., and Tracey Kyckelhahn, Ph.D., Special Report: State Government Indigent Defense Expenditures, FY 2008–2012 – Updated (U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics) available at http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/sgide0812.pdf.
[2] See, e.g., Phyllis E. Mann, Understanding the comparison of budgets for prosecutors and budgets for public defense, National Legal Aid and Defender Association (2011), available at http://www.nlada.net/library/article/na_understandingbudgetsforprosanddefs.
[3] Steven W. Perry and Duren Banks, 2007 National Census of State Court Prosecutors, Prosecutors in State Courts,
2007 - Statistical Tables (U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics) available at http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/psc07st.pdf. The most recent data available is 2007.
[4] See, e.g., Justice Policy Institute, System Overload: The Costs of Under-Resourcing Public Defense (July 2011) available at http://www.justicepolicy.org/uploads/justicepolicy/documents/system_overload_final.pdf.
[5] Nat’l Assoc. Crim. Def. Lawyers, National Indigent Defense Reform: The Solution is Multifaceted (2012) at 24.