“Judging Federal Defense Systems: Does The Type Of Counsel Representing Defendants Influence Outcomes In Federal District Court?”

Because today is National Public Defense Day, I figured this was a good time to flag this recent empirical article recently published in the Albany Law Review authored by Richard Hartley, Kelly Roberts Freeman and Bryce Peterson.  This complicated research has too many details to summmarize here, but this discussion from the conclusions especially caught my attention:

The findings from our models of these three important decisionmaking stages in federal criminal courts reveal that outcomes are indeed conditioned by the type of counsel representing the defendant.  But the specific effects depend on the outcome examined and the type of attorney being compared to federal public defenders.  For example, defendants who are represented by CJA appointed and private attorneys have better odds of being released ROR compared to defendants represented by federal public defenders.  Regarding the incarceration decision, however, both CJA appointed and private attorney clients have higher odds of being sent to prison than those represented by federal public defenders.  Similar results emerged for the sentence length decision.  Individuals represented by CJA appointed and private attorneys received significantly longer average sentences than those represented by federal public defenders.

These results support the idea that federal public defenders, as integrated members of the federal courtroom workgroup, may have more expertise in federal criminal case processing and familiarity with federal judges and Assistant United States Attorneys that enable them to be better positioned to obtain more favorable sentencing outcomes for their clients.  Their disadvantage compared to CJA appointed and especially private attorneys at the ROR decision, however, is interesting and may have to do with the types of clients or cases that the public defender offices represent.