The report's author analyzed nearly 1 million criminal court dockets covering a period of six years and concluded that there should be about 1,200 public defenders employed in county courthouses across the state.
Pennsylvania has an insufficient number of public defenders in nearly every county, according to a new report from a University of Pennsylvania law professor, hampering the state’s ability to fulfill its Constitutional obligation to provide adequate representation for criminal defendants who can’t afford a lawyer.
The report’s release this week came as budget discussions are underway in legislative halls across Pennsylvania, and as agencies — including defenders’ offices — seek to lobby officials for funding. Keisha Hudson, the city’s chief defender, said Philadelphia received about $144,000 from the state’s new funding pool, which the office is looking into using for attorney training. She said she’s unaware of any chief defender in the state saying they received enough money to hire additional attorneys, and she plans to ask City Council for an additional $15 million for her office’s budget in the next fiscal year.
Heaton calculated an ideal staffing level for each county based on its caseloads and case types from the dockets, then compared those figures to the real number of attorneys in each office. Even after adjusting some underlying assumptions, he wrote, “we can have a high degree of confidence that current public defender staffing levels are constitutionally inadequate” in three-quarters of the state’s public defender offices.The report had some limitations, which it acknowledges.
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