Season’s Greetings from the 6AC! We at 6AC are privileged to travel all across the country to meet with criminal justice stakeholders and policymakers as we aim to help them ensure an effective right to counsel. This year brought us…
Tag: commissions
2019 Year in Review
Tagged with: commissions, funding, Idaho, Indiana, litigation - systemic, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Sixth Amendment Center, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin
Nevada creates and empowers a statewide indigent defense commission
Pleading the Sixth: After decades of public defense studies, legislative and supreme court right to counsel commissions, and numerous attempts at statutory indigent defense reform, the Nevada legislature has created a state commission to promulgate and enforce uniform standards statewide…
A lack of effectiveness and financial oversight define Maine’s right to counsel system
Pleading the Sixth: Maine is the only state in the country that provides all indigent defense services through private attorneys. There are two principal reasons that other states have moved away from using solely private attorneys. First, it is difficult to…
Oregon’s complex bureaucracy obscures just another fixed fee system
Pleading the Sixth: Oregon stands as a cautionary tale regarding indigent defense reform. Often extolled (including by this author) as a working model that provides effective public defense services through a statewide system of contracts, a new comprehensive evaluation by…
Indiana Task Force on Public Defense urges comprehensive reform
Pleading the Sixth: In October 2016, the 6AC released its evaluation of trial level right to counsel services in Indiana, detailing how and why the Indiana public defense system results in the actual and constructive denial of counsel to the indigent…
Withholding felony representation for months at a time in Mississippi
Pleading the Sixth: Felony defendants throughout Mississippi are arrested and then routinely wait from typically two months to up to a year before a lawyer begins working on their behalf. When a felony lawyer is finally appointed, the attorney is too…
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