Over sixty years ago the US Supreme Court’s unanimous landmark ruling in Gideon v. Wainwright set the precedent for what’s become the most basic understanding of justice in the criminal legal system — the right to be represented by a free lawyer. Yet, sixty years later, we are still awaiting the fulfillment of the promise that this case set towards the path to justice.
Justice Hugo Black wrote in the Court’s opinion, “Reason and reflection require us to recognize that in our adversary system of criminal justice, any person haled into court, who is too poor to hire a lawyer, cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him.” Black added that a fair trial “cannot be realized if the poor man charged with crime has to face his accusers without a lawyer to assist him.” The problem is, the court never determined how this balance of justice would be achieved.
An estimated 80% of people cannot afford to hire an attorney. That means the responsibility for ensuring justice in the United States falls squarely on the shoulders of public defenders across the country — a responsibility that goes largely unappreciated and underfunded.
The U.S. spends more than $295 billion annually on the current approach to public safety: prisons, jails, parole, probation, policing and judicial and legal system costs — but only $4.5 billion of this for public defense. California’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office found that in 2018 alone, the state’s counties spent $2 billion on prosecution, an astounding 82% more than what was spent on public defenders. These funding gaps are not new. Rather, it is the norm, and spending on locking people up only continues to balloon. Over the past decade, the report found, “spending on district attorney offices has been consistently higher — and growing at a faster rate — than spending on indigent defense.”
Not only are public defenders drastically underfunded, they also have significantly larger caseloads with markedly less support to equitably defend their cases. It is no surprise that the Legislative Analyst’s Office report also found a similarly large gap in staffing. That same year in California, 2018, district attorney offices employed 10,500 people while public defender offices employed 4,305 people. This disparity in staffing results in overburdened caseloads leaving public defenders unable to dedicate as much time to defending their cases as their counterparts spend on building cases to prosecute.
Let’s put this into context and keep in mind that DAs don’t operate alone. Nearly every prosecution begins with the police responding to a crime, conducting an initial investigation, speaking to witnesses, collecting evidence and, ultimately, serving the prepared case on a silver platter to the district attorney to prosecute — all the while using the police’s budget to do so.
In contrast, public defenders start each case on the opposite end of the spectrum, essentially from scratch. They must speak to their clients to determine what happened in each case, review all the evidence, police reports and statements, inspect the crime scene, interview witnesses, and research case law to adequately defend their clients — essentially reinvestigating each case without the additional resources, support, or the budget of the prosecution.
Combine the underfunding and overworking of public defenders with decades of national policies that specifically target Black and brown people, e.g. the war on drugs and three strikes laws, and it is no surprise that our prisons are overcrowded, disproportionately with Black and brown people, creating the perfect recipe for the prison industrial complex to continue to profit off mass incarceration and further perpetuating the imbalance of justice.
The truth is, locking people up has essentially zero impact on crime rates. In fact, research has shown that incarceration does not actually deter crime, but rather, investing in stabilizing factors such as housing, employment, and healthcare access actually lowers crime rates.
Harvard Law Review found that holistic defense reduces the likelihood of a jail or prison sentence by 16% and expected sentence length by 24%. Over the 10-year study period, holistic defense in the Bronx resulted in nearly 1.1 million fewer days of punishment in a cage. Prioritizing the prevention of crime — rather than harmful, strictly punitive approaches such as incarceration — is true public safety in our communities.
The presumption of innocence is the fundamental right that everyone is innocent until proven guilty. How can we expect public defenders to uphold basic rights when prosecutors are provided all the support, resources and funding to build their cases while public defenders are overworked, under-resourced and underfunded? The answer is clear: we cannot expect or achieve justice without meaningfully and comprehensively investing in public defense.