By Eve Brensike Primus. Full text here. Indigent defense lawyers today are routinely overwhelmed by excessive caseloads, underpaid, inadequately supported, poorly trained, and left essentially unsupervised. The result is a serious cultural problem in indigent defense, especially in jurisdictions where such defense is handled by lawyers lacking the community and institutional reinforcement that strong public-defender offices…

By Paul Marcus. Full text here. Gideon v. Wainwright is arguably the most significant criminal justice decision in American history. Gideon’s recognition of indigent criminal defendants’ right to publicly funded counsel had an immediate and enormous impact on the fate of defendants nationwide. Despite the widely acknowledged problems with providing adequate representation in the years since…

By Fred R. Shapiro. Full text here.

Foreward by Rajin S. Olson, available here.