Making Gideon Count? Public Defender Resources and Felony Case Outcomes for Black, White, and Latinx Individuals

• Published date: 01 October 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/21533687211006456
• Author: Aaron Gottlieb
• Date: 01 October 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Making Gideon Count? Public

Defender Resources and

Felony Case Outcomes for

Black, White, and Latinx

Individuals

Aaron Gottlieb

1

Abstract

Although Gideon v. Wainright has provided indigent defendants potentially facing prison

time the right to counsel, commentators and scholars have documented that the

public defense system is vastly underfunded and currently in crisis. However, research

has rarely examined how public defender resources impact case outcomes, and the

research that does exist has yet, to my knowledge, examine how these resources

impact racial disparities in case outcomes. By merging data from the Census of Public

Defender Offices to data from the State Court Processing Statistics, I begin to fill this

gap. Results from multivariate regression analyses with state-year fixed effects provide

mixed evidence. Regardless of race, higher public defender and support staff caseloads

tend to be associated with worse case outcomes. In the case of pretrial detention, I

find that high public defender and support staff caseloads exacerbate Black-White

disparities. With respect to sentence length, I find evidence that high public defen-

der caseloads exacerbate Latinx-White disparities and some evidence that they

mitigate Black-White disparities. In sum, these results provide strong support for the

view that the public defender funding crisis harms indigent defendants regardless of

race and mixed evidence regarding its impact on racial disparities in the criminal justice

system.

Keywords

public defense, race and courts, race and sentencing, pretrial process, African/Black

Americans, race/ethnicity, Latino/Hispanic Americans, White Americans

1

Jane Addams College of Social Work, University of Illinois at Chicago, IL, USA

Corresponding Author:

Aaron Gottlieb, Jane Addams College of Social Work, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1040 West Harrison

Street, Chicago, IL 60607, USA.

Email: agott19@uic.edu

Race and Justice

ªThe Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/21533687211006456

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2023, Vol. 13(4) 506–\ 529

Introduction

Although state and local governments have been required to provide attorneys to

individuals who cannot afford one and are facing prison time since Gideon v.

Wainright (1963), consistent underfunding of indigent defense has regularly led to

excessive caseloads that hinder the quality of representation (Lefstein & Spangenberg,

2009; Pfaff, 2017; Taylor, 2011). For instance, in almost three-quarters of county

public defender offices, attorney caseloads are greater than the maximum recom-

mended, and less than two-thirds employ investigators (Farole, & Langton, 2010). The

lack of resources is especially problematic because approximately 80%of defendants

are indigent (Harlow, 2000). Given that Black and Latinx defendants are dis-

proportionately indigent, high caseloads for public defenders and their support staff

has the potential to increase racial disparities in the criminal justice system if high

caseloads hinder outcomes for Black and Latinx Americans and do so to a greater or

similar extent than for White Americans (Marcus, 1994).

The underfunding of public defense has been well-documented, and the situa-

tion is viewed by many experts and commentators as a crisis (Carroll, 2015;

Laughland, 2016; Lefstein & Spangenberg, 2009; Primus, 2010). Despite this

concern, research has rarely examined the impact of public defender resources on

case outcomes (see Gottlieb & Arnold, in press; Iyengar, 2007, for exceptions),

and no studies to my knowledge have examined whether public defender resources

impact racial disparities in case outcomes. Understanding the impact of public

defender resources on racial disparities in sentencing is critical because the U.S.

criminal justice system is not only unique in its scope but is also notable for its

substantial racial disparities, with Black and Latinx adults at much greater risk of

incarceration than White adults (Alexander, 2012; Western, 2006). In this study, I

begin to fill this gap by examining whether there are racial differences in the

extent to which public defender and support staff caseloads are associated with

pretrial detention, being sentenced to incarceration, and incarceration sentence

length for felony defendants. To do so, I created a novel data set, merging data

from the Census of Public Defender Offices (CPDO) to data from the State Court

Processing Statistics (SCPS). Results from multivariate regression analyses with

state-year fixed effects provide mixed evidence. Regardless of race, higher public

defender and support staff caseloads tend to be associated with worse case out-

comes. In the case of pretrial detention, Black defendants appear to be harmed

significantly more than White defendants when public defender and support staff

caseloads are high. With respect to sentence length, I find evidence that Latinx

defendants are especially harmed by high public defender caseloads, but some

evidence that Black defendants are less negatively impacted by this than White

defendants. Taken together, these results provide strong support for the view that

the public defender crisis harms indigent defendants and some support for the

perspective that it exacerbates racial disparities in the criminal justice system for

certain outcomes.

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Gottlieb