Monopsony Problems with Court-Appointed Counsel

• Author: Dru Stevenson
• Position: Professor of Law and Hutchins Research Professor, South Texas College of Law
• Pages: 2273-2297

2273

Monopsony Problems with Court-

Appointed Counsel

Dru Stevenson

INTRODUCTION .................................................................................... 2274

I. MONOPSONY ........................................................................................ 2276

A. THE MIRROR OF MONOPOLY .......................................................... 2276

B. POTENTIAL EFFECTS OF MONOPSONY .............................................. 2280

C. POLARIZATION IN QUALITY ............................................................. 2280

D. DEPENDENCE AND CAREER RUTS ..................................................... 2281

E. MONOPSONY REDUCES THE NUMBER OF SERVICE PROVIDERS,

LEADING TO SHORTAGES ................................................................ 2282

F. BILATERAL MONOPOLY .................................................................. 2284

G. INEVITABLE CONSEQUENCES ............................................................ 2284

II. GIDEON PROBLEMS AND PROPOSALS ..................................................... 2286

A. EX ANTE REMEDIES ....................................................................... 2287

B. EX POST SOLUTIONS ...................................................................... 2289

III. RELATIVE MERITS OF INDIGENT-DEFENSE SYSTEMS ............................. 2290

A. THREE APPROACHES ...................................................................... 2291

B. COMPARISON AND ANALYSIS ........................................................... 2293

IV. CONCLUSION ....................................................................................... 2297

 Professor of Law and Hutchins Research Professor, South Texas College of Law. Many

thanks to the organizers of the Iowa Law Review Symposium for their impressive work, efforts in

this symposium, and their subsequent publication of the essays. Special thanks also go to

research assistants Kerri Dobbins, Rachel Strickland, and Nick Frame for their invaluable help.

2274 IOWA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 99:2273

INTRODUCTION

Gideon v. Wainwright altered the legal landscape by mandating state-

funded defense counsel for indigent defendants.1 The benefits of this

approach are obvious—strengthening of Sixth Amendment protections,

increased fairness in criminal proceedings, greater accuracy in

determinations of guilt or innocence, and more orderly trials and appeals.

Yet persistent failures beset the system, including the surprisingly low fees paid

to appointed counsel, uneven and unpredictable quality of representation,

unrealistic workloads for counsel, and perverse incentives for quick

capitulation during plea bargaining.2

Underlying these problems is the fact that the government is the

purchaser for nearly all indigent-defense counsel services; it is a monopsony

(single payer) scenario, from the standpoint of economic analysis.3 In

economic theory, certain problems typically attend monopsony

arrangements. As the monopsonist buyer dictates below-market prices, it sets

off a cascade of perverse effects. Sellers4 have high incentive to cut corners

or cheat to accept the low rates. Screening effects polarize the quality of

sellers—the best are super-efficient and can accept the low rates, while

others are disproportionately unsuccessful and desperate enough to accept

any price the monopsonist offers. Sellers become pathologically dependent

on the monopsonist and are therefore prone to getting in a rut. A

monopsonist can eventually bankrupt many of the providers, leading to

shortages of the service in question. Finally, monopsony arrangements are

prone to become bilateral monopolies, as buyers can get lazy about

monitoring the quality of the service provider and neglect switching to

better providers.

Many of these stereotypical monopsony problems plague the defense

bar, especially in locales that use appointed-counsel lists.5 Expected

consequences of the monopsony problem include uneven quality of

representation, excessive plea-bargaining, shortage of available defense

1. Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963).

2. See H eidi Reamer Anderson, Funding Gideon’s Promise by Viewing Excessive Caseloads a s

Unethical Conflicts of Interest, 39 HASTINGS CONST. L.Q. 421 (2012); Laura I. Appleman, The

Ethics of Indigent Criminal Representation: Has New York Failed the Promise of Gideon? 16 PROF. LAW.,

no. 4, 2005, at 2; Tracey L. Meares, What’s Wrong With Gideon, 70 U. CHI. L. REV. 215 (2003);

Panel, Gideon at 40: Facing the Crisis, Fulfilling the Promise, 41 AM. CRIM. L. REV. 135 (2004).

3. See generally ROGER D. BLAIR & JEFFREY L. HARRISON, MONOPSONY IN LAW AND

ECONOMICS (Cambridge 2010); ALAN MANNING, MONOPSONY IN MOTION: IMPERFECT

COMPETITION IN LABOR MARKETS (2003); J. Thomas Rosch, Monopsony and the Meaning of

“Consumer Welfare”: A Closer Look at Weyerhaeuser, 2007 COLUM. BUS. L. REV. 353.

4. This Essay uses the terms “seller” and “service provider” to refer to indigent defense

attorneys. Seller refers to the more general class of victims in a monopsony. “Service providers”

are a subset of that category—namely, people selling services.

5.

The problem is less acute in locales with public defenders’ offices, as the lawyers can

engage in collective bargaining to mitigate the monopsony problem.