New RAND study finds public defenders overworked and proposes “new national public defense workload standards”

As reported in this Law360 article, “public defenders face extremely heavy workloads that prevent them from providing effective legal representation to people accused of crimes, according to a new study published Tuesday.”  Here is more:

The National Public Defense Workload Study, which looked at the 50-year-old guidelines that are used to estimate the maximum number of cases that defense attorneys should handle, found that the commonly used standards are out of date and inapplicable today, in part because cases now tend to involve complex forensic data or technology that wasn’t present before.

Despite ethics rules requiring defense lawyers to limit their workloads to a level that allows them to provide the level of legal representation guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution’s Sixth Amendment, defense attorneys are being asked to juggle too much work against their will, a phenomenon that eventually causes harm to their clients, the study found….

In the study, a team of attorneys and researchers from RAND Corporation, the National Center for State Courts, the American Bar Association and the Law Office of Lawyer Hanlon, proposed a new set of standards to determine manageable workloads for public defenders.

The study’s authors say the updated caseload standards reflect technological changes sweeping through the criminal defense practice — things such as social media, cell phones, surveillance cameras, and body cameras — that didn’t exist decades ago. It also highlights how much more time attorneys need to devote the necessary attention to their clients’ cases.

Under the currently used guidelines, created by the National Advisory Commission in 1973 and known as the NAC standards, public defense attorneys devote an average of 13.9 hours to each felony case and 5.2 hours to each misdemeanor case. That standard means that each year, on average, an attorney is expected to handle 150 felonies, or 400 misdemeanors. The typical number of yearly cases involving mental illness is 200, and the same is for juvenile cases. An attorney is expected to work on 25 appeals per year.

The new guidelines contained in the study, on the other hand, more than doubles the average number of hours to be spent on felonies, recommending that they be 35. And it more than quadruples the hours for misdemeanors to 22.3. If used as a reference in determining caseloads, the new figures would make the work of attorneys significantly more manageable, according to the study….

The study’s methodic assessment of public defenders throughout the U.S. painted an even more concerning picture, according to the researchers involved in it. For example, in 2022, public defenders in rural St. Clair County, Missouri, reported a caseload of 350 felony cases per lawyer. In Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, each attorney handled more than 300 felonies per year.

The study’s authors said those figures are more than double the number of cases recommended under the old guidelines, which they say are already taxing for attorneys. “Public defenders and other providers of indigent defense grapple with an overwhelming caseload that exceeds the reasonable capacity for effective representation, but the available data about the magnitude of this issue has been inadequate and outdated,” ABA President Mary Smith said in a statement accompanying the release of the study.

The study took a comprehensive look at other workload studies that have been done since the NAC standards were created and focusing in particular on the period spanning from 2005 to 2022, using what is known as Delphi process, which involves analyzing a complex issue relying on a diverse cohort of experts who reach a consensus.

The full RAND study, which is titled “National Public Defense Workload Study,” is available at this link.