IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/13187.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

An Analysis of the Performance of Federal Indigent Defense Counsel

Author

Listed:
  • Radha Iyengar

Abstract

The right to an equal and fair trial regardless of wealth is a hallmark of American jurisprudence. To ensure this right, the government pays attorneys to represent financially needy clients. In the U.S. federal court system, indigent defendants are represented by either public defenders who are salaried employees of the court or private attorneys, known as Criminal Justice Act (CJA) attorneys, who are compensated on an hourly basis. This study measures differences in performance of these types of attorneys and explores some potential causes for these differences. Exploiting the use of random case assignment between the two types of attorneys, an analysis of federal criminal case level data from 1997-2001 from 51 districts indicates that public defenders perform significantly better than CJA panel attorneys in terms of lower conviction rates and sentence lengths. An analysis of data from three districts linking attorney experience, wages, law school quality and average caseload suggests that these variables account for over half of the overall difference in performance. These systematic differences in performance disproportionately affect minority and immigrant communities and as such may constitute a civil rights violation under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

Suggested Citation

  • Radha Iyengar, 2007. "An Analysis of the Performance of Federal Indigent Defense Counsel," NBER Working Papers 13187, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:13187
    Note: LS
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w13187.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Leonardo Felli & Leeat Yariv & Allan Collard-Wexler & Mariagiovanna Baccara, 2010. "Gender and Racial Biases: Evidence from Child Adoption," 2010 Meeting Papers 273, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    2. Amanda Agan & Matthew Freedman & Emily Owens, 2021. "Is Your Lawyer a Lemon? Incentives and Selection in the Public Provision of Criminal Defense," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 103(2), pages 294-309, May.
    3. Behrang Kamali-Shahdadi, 2015. "Matching with Moral Hazard: Assigning Attorneys to Indigent Defendants," PIER Working Paper Archive 15-029, Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania, revised 02 Sep 2015.
    4. Sharma, Madhuri & Stolzenberg, Lisa & D'Alessio, Stewart J., 2022. "Evaluating the cumulative impact of indigent defense attorneys on criminal justice outcomes," Journal of Criminal Justice, Elsevier, vol. 81(C).
    5. Sieg, Holger & Wang, Yu, 2018. "The impact of student debt on education, career, and marriage choices of female lawyers," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 109(C), pages 124-147.
    6. Holger Sieg & Yu Wang, 2017. "The Impact of Student Debt on Education, Career, and Marriage Choices of Female Lawyers," NBER Working Papers 23453, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H4 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods
    • J3 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs
    • K4 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:13187. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.