Justice for All: A Collection of New Empirical Research on Indigent Defense

It was our honor and pleasure to work with Dr. Amy Steigerwalt to present this special issue of Justice System Journal dedicated to empirical research on indigent defense. We are thankful to all the authors who contributed their work for consideration and are indebted to the reviewers who helped to ensure that this issue represents the diversity and quality of a vibrant research field. We are also mindful that this issue emerges amidst an epistemic crisis in which the concept of shared, verifiable knowledge is subject not only to justifiable critique but also to unwarranted attack. Indeed, as is increasingly true across organizations, institutions, and systems, the practice of indigent defense itself is rife with political battles in which research and data are often deployed as weapons. We view this crisis as an opportunity to celebrate science—the co-production of knowledge through iterative application and improvement of research principles and methods, grounded in commitments to transparency regarding the content, implications, and limitations of resulting data. We do so with this compilation of new research on indigent defense. These volumes have been a focus of our work since 2014, when we co-convened the Indigent Defense Research Association (IDRA) to build new connections among researchers in the field. Since then, IDRA’s conferences, monthly webinars, and listserv have provide a unique space for robust discussion and advancement of research on indigent defense. As was the case with prior volumes, the results of these discussions inform a collection of papers that readers are unlikely to find elsewhere. Some pieces are critical of indigent defense systems and the lawyers that work in them. Other work focuses exclusively on perfecting research methods. Some are animated by goals such as policy improvement, exposure of inequity, or liberation from oppression. But a common thread runs across these pieces: the shared desire to understand indigent defense more deeply and to describe it more accurately. We divide the seven studies in this volume into three groups. We begin with two studies that examine the experiences of people receiving indigent defense services. Each raises questions about what people want and need from indigent defense, and how often they are satisfied. We then move on to three further studies of professionals in indigent defense systems – attorneys and judges – which lead us to wonder about how well their work and goals match what service recipients want. And finally, we present two studies that look at indigent defense services at a jurisdictional level, each asking different questions about the benefits and adequacy of the systems under examination.