Americans may take for granted that if they’re ever accused of a crime, they can choose their own attorney to represent them. The Supreme Court has ruled that Americans have a right to counsel in serious criminal cases, and nobody seriously argues that the government should make that important decision for us.
Yet that is exactly what happens across the country when defendants are too poor to hire their own attorneys. While other countries such as the United Kingdom have long allowed indigent defendants to choose their own lawyers, American jurisdictions historically restrict that choice to either a court-appointed lawyer or an assigned public defender.
In 2010, the Cato Institute published a study, Reforming Indigent Defense, which proposed a client choice model where poor persons accused of crimes would be able to choose their own attorney to represent them in court. If the accused opted for the public defender, he could make that choice, but if he wanted to explore other options, he could do that also. The Texas Indigent Defense Commission became aware of the Cato report and decided to give it a try with a pilot program in Comal County, near San Antonio. The program went into operation in 2015.
Today, the Justice Management Institute released an evaluation based on two years of data from the Comal Client Choice program. The report, called The Power of Choice: The Implications of a System Where Indigent Defendants Choose Their Own Counsel, suggests that the program is working as well or better than the old system across a variety of metrics.
Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/poor-defendants-should-get-choose-their-lawyers-too
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