"The right to be heard would be, in many cases, of little avail if it did not comprehend the right to be heard by counsel. Even the intelligent and educated layman has small and sometimes no skill in the science of law. If charged with crime, he is incapable, generally, of determining for himself whether the indictment is good or bad. He is unfamiliar with the rules of evidence. Left without the aid of counsel he may be put on trial without a proper charge, and convicted upon incompetent evidence, or evidence irrelevant to the issue or otherwise inadmissible. He lacks both the skill and knowledge adequately to prepare his defense, even though he have a perfect one. He requires the guiding hand of counsel at every step in the proceedings against him. Without it, though he be not guilty, he faces the danger of conviction because he does not know how to establish his innocence."

California: In California, all trial-level indigent defense services are funded at the county-level. Because there are counties in the state that have better economic outlooks and choose to properly fund indigent defense services, the adequacy of defense services is dependent on the jurisdiction in which your crime is alleged to have occurred. For information on disparity of resources and the failures of the state to adequately protect the right to counsel, see: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Assistance, Contracting for Indigent Defense Services: A Special Report, April 2000 - NCJ181160 at www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/bja/181160.pdf ("In 1997 and 1998, a rural county in California agreed to pay a low-bid contractor slightly more than $400,000 a year to represent half of the county's indigent defendants." The contractor employed two associate attorneys but no paralegals or investigators. Together the three attorneys handled over 5,000 cases per year. To make a profit, the contractor had to spend as little time as possible per case.); National Legal Aid & Defender Association, Evaluation Report & Recommendations, Riverside County Public Defender, December 2000 (In Riverside County, more than 12,000 people pled guilty to misdemeanor offenses without a lawyer to counsel them about the potential life-altering consequences of their guilty pleas. People entered guilty pleas not necessarily because they were guilty, but to get out of jail and to get out of the system.) Other: National Legal Aid & Defender Association, Evaluation Report & Recommendations, San Bernardino County Public Defender, November 2001. National Legal Aid & Defender Association, A Pilot Assessment of the Offices of the Public Defender, Santa Clara County California (San Jose), December 2003.

Mississippi: The Mississippi legislature created a statewide, district-based public defender system that mirrored the system for prosecutors in the state, but never funded it. The legislation was eventually repealed, leaving many counties to rely, once again, on flat-fee contracting. Poor defendants in Mississippi are receiving legal representation that falls far below constitutional standards, according to NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. (LDF), Assembly Line Justice Mississippi's Indigent Defense Crisis, March 2003. The report details numerous problems, including: excessively long pre-trial detention; lengthy delays in appointment of counsel; excessive caseloads; no investigations; poor clients saddled with excessive fines and fees; clients misinformed about terms of plea agreements. A new report shows the economic savings of implementing a statewide, state-funded indigent defense system. See: NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. (LDF), Economic Losses and the Public System of Indigent Defense: Empirical Evidence on Pre-Sentencing Behavior from Mississippi, March 2004.

Nevada: Counties throughout the state of Nevada have been cited for assigning attorneys to serious felony and murder cases for which the attorneys are not qualified. Most recently, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals allowed a person who was found to be innocent and released from death row after 14 years to sue the Clark County (Las Vegas) public defender administrator for appointing an attorney just out of law school who had never handled a murder case to represent him on capital charges. See: Miranda v. Clark County, 279 F.3d 1102, 1112 (9th Cir. 2002). A report for the Nevada Supreme Court Implementation Committee for the Elimination of Racial, Gender and Economic Bias in the Criminal Justice System under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Justice and the American Bar Association found that the state public defender is in crisis and that the quality of justice is jeopardized by the system's lack of independence from undue political influence. The lack of standards threatens the quality of justice delivered to the poor. See: The Spangenberg Group, Indigent Defense Services in the State of Nevada: Findings and Recommendations, December 2003. A study specifically on Clark County (Las Vegas) found caseloads there to be in serious breach of nationally recognized workload standards. Juvenile representation was found to be beyond the point of crisis and requiring of immediate attention to avert constitutional challenges of ineffective assistance of counsel. See: National Legal Aid & Defender Association, Evaluation of the Public Defender Office: Clark County, Nevada, March 2003.

Texas: In December 2000, Texas Appleseed Fair Defense Project released a major report on indigent defense practices in that state. (For more information please see: The Fair Defense Report - available on-line at: www.equaljusticecenter.org/Fair%20Defense%20Reference%20Report.pdf.) The 28 findings include: A complete absence of standards and quality among the counties; few mechanisms in place to guarantee accountability; wide and uncontrolled discretion on the part of judges over the appointment of defense counsel; the potential for conflicts; delay in the appointment of counsel soon after arrest is a pervasive and serious problem; and, a lack of enough funding to ensure adequate representation. The Texas Legislature responded by passing the Fair Defense Act, which disseminates state money to counties that meet certain standards. It is an important first step in the reform process, though many of the issues highlighted in the report remain.

Washington: The urgency of the indigent defense crisis in the State of Washington was brought to life in a very recent series by the Seattle Times. The series highlights the prevalence of flat-fee contracting and corresponding high caseloads and inadequate funding. (The complete indigent defense series is available on-line at: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/local/unequaldefense/stories/one/; http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/local/unequaldefense/stories/two/; and, http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/local/unequaldefense/stories/three/).

• Public defender offices with employees on salary (most urban areas of the country have public defenders)
• Court-appointed private attorneys, who are assigned by a judge to provide defense services either from a list maintained by the courts or through some other system
• Contracts with individual attorneys, firms or nonprofit corporations that provide some or all of a jurisdiction's indigent defense services

• Fourteen of the 22 states funding 100 percent of all indigent defense services (64 percent).⁵
• Three of the six states that fund 75 percent have statewide commissions,⁶ though two of the states that do not (Florida and Tennessee) have elected public defenders answerable to their constituencies.⁷
• Nine remaining states have an indigent defense commission that serves a limited role. These include five states (Indiana, Georgia, Louisiana, Ohio and Texas) that have a statewide commission, which reimburses counties for a portion of their indigent defense costs based (in most cases) on the counties' meeting commission-set standards. Four states (California, Illinois, Michigan, and Montana) have indigent defense commissions overseeing the state appellate defender or habeas resource center, although trial-level in these states remain a county obligation.

Maine: Though 100 percent state-funded, Maine has no statewide organization to oversee indigent defense services at all. On October 22, 2003, the New England Juvenile Defender Center and the American Bar Association released a report entitled Maine: An Assessment of Access to Counsel and Quality Representation in Delinquency Proceedings. The assessment found that current laws and practices have the effect of denying children access to competent counsel at critical stages of the proceedings. Over the past five years, there has only been three hours of training offered to attorneys representing kids in delinquency proceedings. The lack of adequate funding, training, supervision or caseload standards also affects adult representation.

North Dakota: In 2003, the North Dakota legislature directed its legislative council to study the state's method of providing indigent defense services and the desirability of creating a statewide public defender system. North Dakota subsequently retained the services of The Spangenberg Group under the auspices of the American Bar Association. In January 2004, the ABA report, Review of Indigent Defense Services in North Dakota was published. The report found the North Dakota indigent defense system to be "wrought with many serious problems" and in danger of "failing to fulfill its constitutional obligations" under Gideon. The report strongly urges the state to create a statewide public defender system to correct numerous problems with the prevailing flat-fee contract system. First, the current system has a "pervasive absence of independence for the defense function from the judiciary," including direct oversight of budgetary expenses and trial-related expenses (experts, investigations, etc.). The contracts fail to comply with national standards related to caseload, attorney qualification, attorney performance and training.

Virginia: In January 2004, the American Bar Association released a report produced by The Spangenberg Group that found Virginia's indigent defense system to be so deeply flawed that it "fails to provide indigent defendants the guarantees of effective assistance of counsel required by federal and state law." The report identifies two primary causes for the failure: inadequate resources and a lack of an oversight structure. The report calls on the state to adopt performance and qualification standards that address workload limits, training requirements, professional independence and other areas to ensure effective and meaningful representation. (See: A Comprehensive Review of Indigent Defense in Virginia at: www.abanet.org/legalservices/downloads/sclaid/indigentdefense/va-report2004.pdf.)

• 88 percent of Americans believe that the quality of justice a person receives should not be determined by how much money he or she has.
• 64 percent of Americans support having the government use tax dollars to provide lawyers for people accused of crimes who cannot afford a lawyer.
• 88 percent support giving public defenders and prosecutors the same resources per case, with nearly two-thirds (64 percent) favoring this strongly.
• 94 percent believe it is important for low-income defendants to be represented by attorneys with small enough caseloads to provide the time necessary to prepare a defense (57 percent say it should be guaranteed).
• 94 percent of Americans believe it is important for low-income people accused of crimes to have resources to obtain DNA testing (68 percent say it should be guaranteed).
• 91 percent believe it is important for low-income persons to be provided resources to hire investigators to check evidence and find witnesses (57 percent say it should be guaranteed).
• 71 percent believe that each state should establish a public defenders' office with full-time attorneys, rather than relying on court-appointed private lawyers to represent the accused.