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  California Public Defense Workloads and Staffing

  Malia N. Brink, Pamela R. Metzger, Andrew L.B. Davies, and Cynthia G. Lee
  September, 2025

  This report assesses the current workloads and staffing of California public defense providers. The report concludes that California’s public defense attorneys are almost universally burdened by workloads that far exceed nationally recommended standards. Additionally, compared to district attorneys’ offices in the same jurisdictions, public defender offices typically have 20-45% fewer attorneys.

  This report also details how public defense providers in California also lack the appropriate support staff – investigators, social workers, paralegals, and administrative assistants – necessary to efficiently and effectively represent their clients. At their current workload and staffing levels, public defense attorneys simply cannot do all that their job requires. As a result, public defense attorneys across California are forced to skip or delay critical work for some clients in order to focus on other clients’ cases. California’s less-populous, more rural counties, often have greater attorney vacancies, which exacerbate these problems.

  The obligation to provide constitutionally adequate public defense services lies with the state. California stands almost alone among states in failing both to create public defense standards and to provide sufficient funding to ensure that every accused person receives effective assistance of counsel. This report recommends that the state take immediate action to support county-based public defense systems and ensure that they can deliver the constitutionally-adequate representation that every Californian deserves.

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  If You Cannot Afford an Attorney, None Will Be Appointed for You: Exploring Rates Of Representation by Counsel in Texas Misdemeanor Courts

  Andrew L. B. Davies, Shelby Sirivore, and Victoria M. Smiegocki
  April, 2025

  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, we find non-representation rates were highest in the state’s poorest and most rural counties. But we also find 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.

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  Solving the Public Defense Crisis in Kansas

  Malia N. Brink and Pamela R. Metzger
  February, 2025

  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. According to the American Bar Association, there are an average of four attorneys per 1,000 people nationwide. However, only six of Kansas’s 105 counties have two or more attorneys per 1,000 people. In 44 counties, there is just one attorney or fewer per 1,000 residents. The situation is particularly worrisome in rural Kansas. In 2023, nearly half of Kansas’s population lived in rural counties, but 80% of its lawyers lived in its six largest counties. Two rural counties— Wichita County and Hodgeman County—had no attorneys at all.

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  Ending Arkansas’ First Appearance Crisis

  Malia N. Brink, Pamela R. Metzger, Claire Buetow, and Terrence Cain
  May, 2024

  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.

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  How to Solve the Initial Appearance Crisis

  Malia N. Brink, Pamela R. Metzger, and Jiacheng Yu
  May, 2023

  Across the United States, people are arrested and held behind bars for days, weeks, and sometimes even months, without ever seeing a judge or attorney. These 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.

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  Getting Gideon Right: Eligibility for Appointed Counsel in Texas Misdemeanor Cases

  Andrew L.B. Davies, Blane Skiles, Pamela R. Metzger, Janelle Gursoy, and Alex Romo
  April, 2022

  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.

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  Grading Injustice: Initial Appearance Report Cards

  Malia N. Brink, Jiacheng Yu, and Pamela R. Metzger
  September, 2022

  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 Ending Injustice: Solving the Initial Appearance Crisis, 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 Initial Appearance Report Cards 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.

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  Greening Criminal Legal Deserts in Rural Texas

  Pamela R. Metzger, Claire Buetow, Kristin Meeks, Blane Skiles, and Jiacheng Yu
  October, 2022

  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.

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  Budding Change

  Pamela R. Metzger, Victoria Smiegocki, and Kristin Meeks
  July, 2021

  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.

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  Ending Injustice: Solving the Initial Appearance Crisis

  Pamela R. Metzger, Janet C. Hoeffel, Kristin Meeks, and Sandra Sidi
  September, 2021

  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.

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  Fewer, Not Fairer

  Victoria Smiegocki, Pamela R. Metzger, and Andrew L.B. Davies
  November, 2021

  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.

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  Screening and Charging Practices of Three Mid-Sized Jurisdictions

  Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center
  February, 2021

  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.

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  The ABCs of Racial Disparity

  Pamela R. Metzger, Kristin Meeks, Victoria Smiegocki, and Kenitra Brown
  July, 2021

  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.

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  The Rural Texas Sheriff

  Andrew L.B. Davies, Valeria Liu, and Elisa Torossian
  April, 2021

  The Rural Texas Sheriff reports on a focus group conducted in conjunction with the Deason 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.

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  Criminal (Dis)Appearance

  Pamela R. Metzger and Janet C. Hoeffel
  January, 2020

  Across the United States, thousands of newly arrested people disappear. They languish behind bars for days, weeks, or even months without ever seeing a judge or an attorney. Yet, the Supreme Court requires more constitutional process for the seizure “of a refrigerator, the temporary suspension of a public school student, or the suspension of a driver’s license,” than it does for a person who has just been arrested. A new arrestee has no clearly established constitutional right to a prompt initial appearance procedure. As a result, there is no constitutional doctrine that guarantees her the right to appear promptly before a judge, to challenge the evidence that supports her arrest, to receive the prompt assistance of counsel, or to participate in an adversarial bail hearing.

  Amidst our national conversation about the need for criminal justice reform, this Article is the first scholarly work to address the initial appearance crisis. Part I of the Article describes the epidemic of detention-without-process that plagues our criminal justice system. Part II explores the legal landscape that produced this crisis. It 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. Part III marshals substantive and procedural due process doctrines that can vindicate the constitutional right to a prompt and thorough initial appearance procedure. Part IV proposes an agenda for research and reform of early-stage criminal proceedings.

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  Early Intervention by Counsel: A Multi-Site Evaluation of the Presence of Counsel at Defendants’ First Appearances in Court

  Alisa Pollitz Worden, Andrew L. B. Davies, Reveka V. Shteynberg, and Kirstin A. Morgan
  April, 2020

  Over the past decade, some states have sought to ensure that defendants are provided counsel at their first appearance in court (CAFA). The rationale for this effort is that having an attorney present at the first court hearing, which is often arraignment, will result in judges releasing more low-risk defendants on recognizance or on lower bails. Early access to legal counsel might also result in better prospects for diversion from prosecution, charge reductions before conviction, and less punitive sentences. The CAFA initiatives in the upstate New York counties have been funded by state grants to indigent defense providers. The participating counties are jurisdictions with practical, administrative, political, and geographic challenges in implementing CAFA. The current evaluation focused on 1) the effectiveness of administrators in implementing CAFA programs; 2) whether the adoption of CAFA produced the predicted impacts on judges pretrial decisions and case outcomes; and 3) any effects CAFA had on features of the criminal process, the duration of cases to disposition, and aggregate impact on pretrial detention costs compared with the cost of providing attorneys to defendants. Interviews and courtroom observations indicated that the presence of attorneys was seldom linked to challenges to accusatory instruments or arguments for immediate dismissal; however, when attorneys stood by defendants, they channeled their statements, coaxed information about family members and community ties, deflected premature denials or apologies about the arrest incident, and often established a quick connection to screening for indigent defense eligibility, pretrial services, and the beginning of a paper trail for the attorney in the case. 5 tables, 11 figures, and 5 tables

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  Greening the Desert

  Pamela R. Metzger, Kristin Meeks, and Jessica Pishko
  September, 2020

  Greening the Desert brings a criminal justice lens to the phenomenon of legal deserts in small, tribal, and rural (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.

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  Introduction to Special Issue: New Developments in Public Defense Research

  Janet Moore and Andrew L. B. Davies
  January, 2020

  This special issue focuses on interdisciplinary research in public defense. Seven papers represent a diverse group of scholars in an understudied field. Two overarching themes emerge. The first theme, “System Interventions: Evaluating Programs and Identifying Opportunities,” includes three studies of innovative policies and practices. Two evaluate new resource injections that support, respectively, social work-initiated holistic defense and counsel at first appearance. The third examines state sentencing schemes to identify opportunities for emphasizing defendant assets instead of deficits. The second theme, “Understanding Decision Makers,” includes four papers drawing on qualitative data regarding juvenile resentencing and reentry, defendant views of attorney–client communication, defender motivations for remaining in the profession, and manager perspectives on likely effects of caseload reductions. 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.

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  The Impact of Counsel at First Appearance on Pretrial Release in Felony Arraignments: The Case of Rural Jurisdictions

  Alyssa Pollitz Worden, Reveka V. Shteynberg, Kirstin A. Morgan, and Andrew L. B. Davies
  January, 2020

  This article examines the impact of early provision of counsel on judges’ pretrial release and bail decisions in two rural counties in upstate New York, in cases involving felony charges. This study builds upon previously reported research on misdemeanor cases. We note that although the stakes are higher in felony cases, few studies have investigated the dynamics of first appearance decisions at either level. We investigate the hypotheses that when defendants are represented by attorneys at their first appearances in court, (a) judges are more inclined to release on recognizance or under supervision, (b) judges impose less restrictive bail amounts, and (c) as a consequence, defendants spend less time detained prior to disposition. We find mixed support for these hypotheses, although some evidence that counsel at first appearance (CAFA) produces the expected outcomes. We conclude that the implementation of programs intended to ensure CAFA may be tempered by courthouse cultures, and that future research on court reform should include the study of rural jurisdictions.

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  Unique New York? Theorizing the Impact of Resources on the Quality of Defense Representation in a Deviant State

  Andrew L. B. Davies, Giza Lopez, and Alyssa Clark
  January, 2019

  Litigation in New York State has resulted in the allocation of substantial new funding to limit indigent defense caseloads and improve representation provided to criminal defendants. Funding injections have rarely been studied in defense, however, so it is not clear what will be the effects of the new resources. Defense critics expect their impact to be transformative, but empirical scholarship is more pessimistic. We sort between these perspectives using exploratory interviews with the individuals most critical to the planned reforms: executive-level chief public defenders. Conceptualizing defense service quality in terms of “public value,” we find points of deviation from both the optimistic and pessimistic accounts. New York is a “deviant case,” we argue, which can be used to break new theoretical and empirical ground around the question of how resources impact defense service quality.