Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Valparaiso University Law Review

Publication Date

2005

Abstract

One way the states have purported to meet their constitutional obligation to provide counsel to poor people accused of crimes has been through court-appointed lawyers. However, the paltry compensation paid for these services has generally been inadequate to attract competent lawyers. In addition, judges have too often selected court appointed lawyers precisely because the lawyers are incompetent, and can be counted on to move the courts' calendars quickly by entering hasty guilty pleas in virtually all cases. In those few cases in which the accused insists on his right to trial by jury, the trials typically move rapidly because the court-appointed lawyers generally file no motions, conduct no investigations, and do little to impede the speedy disposal of the case from charge, to guilty verdict, to imprisonment.

The other means of providing lawyers to poor people has been through public defender and legal aid offices. There, the problem has been not so much the incompetence of the lawyers, but the fact that the offices typically are seriously underfunded. This has produced overloading of the individual lawyers with far more clients than any lawyer could competently represent.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.