Defender Track – The Leadership Challenge of Change and Reform

Defenders leaders are charged with providing quality counsel and representation for indigent defendants. Shrinking state and local budgets complicate the perennial challenge of securing resources and public support. The additional challenge of grappling with the impending and significant demographic changes in the overall leadership structure of the indigent defense underscores the imperative of leadership development within the public defender community. This changing of the guard underscores the importance of attracting, selecting and developing defenders with the passion for maintaining the highest quality of representation and advocacy.

Strengthening public defender leadership is an essential element of a multi-pronged strategy for building and maintaining effective public defense systems. Strong forces stand in the way of developing a leadership perspective in the work of indigent defense. Most public-defender programs and appointed counsel systems are not only underfunded and overextended; they are also vulnerable to political attack.

All of this is occurring at a time when we recognize that recidivism and societal re-entry are issues demanding leadership from the public defender community. How will we respond to the wave of returning veterans many of whom may become clients? Is providing services and advocacy under the community defender model an improvement on the traditional manner of providing defender services or a dilution of our primary mission? Can we perform our core mission without grappling with the question of racial justice?

The current challenges underscore the need to grapple with the political, criminal justice, and managerial dimensions of defender leadership.