CIAO DATE: 10/2010

Reforming Indigent Defense: How Free Market Principles Can Help to Fix a Broken System

September 2010

The Cato Institute

Abstract

Criminal defense systems are in a state of perpetual crisis, routinely described as “scandalous.” Public defender offices around the country face crushing caseloads that necessarily compromise the quality of the legal representation they provide. The inadequacy of existing methods for serving the indigent is widely acknowledged, and President Obama has recently taken steps to give the problem a higher priority on the national agenda. Proposals for improvement commonly stress the need for more resources and, somewhat less often, the importance of giving indigent defense providers legal independence from the government that funds them. Yet virtually every suggestion for reform takes for granted the feature of the current American system that is most problematic and least defensible—the fact that the indigent defendant is never permitted to select the attorney who will represent him.

Resource link: Reforming Indigent Defense: How Free Market Principles Can Help to Fix a Broken System [PDF] - 534K