Expanded Criminal Defense Lawyering

Abstract

This review collects and critiques the academic literature on criminal defense lawyering, with an emphasis on empirical work. Research on criminal defense attorneys in the United States has traditionally emphasized scarcity of resources: too many people facing criminal charges who are “too poor to pay” for counsel and not enough funding to pay for the constitutionally mandated lawyers. Scholars have focused on the capacity of different delivery systems, such as public defender offices, to change the ultimate outcomes in criminal cases within their tight budgetary constraints. Over the decades, however, theoretical understandings of the defense attorney's work have expanded to include client interests outside the criminal courtroom, reaching the broader social conditions connected to the alleged criminal act. Researchers have responded by asking a broader range of questions about the effectiveness of defense counsel outside the courtroom and by using improved data to study the effectiveness of lawyers at discrete procedural stages. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 6 is January 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Collateral Consequences and Criminal Justice Reform: Successes and Challenges

“…Private and public defense attorneys, defendants' primary sources of information, play crucial roles (Pinard 2004;Smyth 2011;Johnson 2017). Vastly improved knowledge about collateral consequences is essential to provision of an integrated, holistic, and creative defense (Wright 2011;Johnson 2017;Wright and Roberts 2023). That is why the NICCC project was initiated by the ABA primarily "to help defense attorneys provide more informed counsel to clients and to inform charging and plea offer decisions of prosecutors" (ABA 2015).…”