COVID Outbreak Created A Public Defenders Crisis

Via America’s Lawyer: Public defenders are lifelines for countless Americans with limited resources. Yet these unsung heroes have been overworked and underpaid for far too long. As millions of people continue to suffer financial hardship due to the pandemic, is accessible legal counsel still a guarantee? Mike Papantonio is joined by Founder of Gideon’s Promise Jonathan Rapping to explain the critical underfunding of these last lines of legal defense.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Public defenders are lifelines for countless Americans with limited resources, but these unsung heroes have been overworked, they've been underpaid for far too long. As millions of people continue to suffer financial hardship due to the pandemic, it makes legal counsel almost unaccessible. Jonathan Rapping is the author of Gideon's Promise a public defender movement to transform criminal justice. He's also the founder of Gideon's Promise organization, and he joins me now to talk about it. Jonathan, first of all, thank you for the work you're doing out there. There aren't a lot of, there, there are not a lot of folks doing that. Tell us how your organization got it's start and what it provides. Why, why is it so important to Americans?

Yeah, Mike, and thank you so much for having me and giving us space to talk about this. I, there are a handful of public defender offices in the nation that have the resources and support necessary to give people on the margins representation when they're charged with a crime, I started in one of those offices, and then after a decade, I moved to the South to do work in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana. And it was my introduction to what justice looks like for most people who don't have means in America. I started meeting these young, passionate public defenders who came out of law school and they wanted to help give people justice. And they came into systems that just beat the passion out of them, that it accepted injustice as the norm. And within a few years, they'd, they would either quit or they would become part of the problem. They would be part of a processing conveyor belt. And so Gideon's Promise started as an organization to give training and support to public defenders in places that are most dysfunctional.

Jonathan, you know, we all know the sixth amendment, it provides that every American is guaranteed the right to counsel under the constitution. But the unfortunate truth is millions of people simply can't afford representation they need. And the problem is it seems to me, one of the biggest problems you're faced with, is every time a budget needs to be cut, they cut it here because it's easy on the chopping block. Nobody gets mad. If you're, if you're close on a budget cut, take it away from the people that are defending, that are involved with criminal justice process, the public defenders. Talk about how this influences verdicts all over the country.

Absolutely. So when you say verdicts, that assumes that there are trials and the reality is in our criminal justice system, less than 5% of the cases end up even going to trial. The system has become so overwhelmed and so under-resourced that prosecutors have found ways to use tools at their disposal to coerce people into giving up their right to trial and to pleading guilty. Prosecutors do that every day by holding people, asking people be held pretrial, who are presumed innocent on money bonds they can't afford by what's called stacking charges, overcharging people to make the cost of going to trial unbearable, by asking for draconian sentences with mandatory minimums. And without public defenders who are there to resist prosecutors at every step of that process, prosecutors are able to simply process people through the system and coerce guilty pleas.

No real justice. I was looking at statistics in Missouri, the Missouri process, the Missouri public defender last year handled 80,000 cases.

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