The Inaugural Meeting of the Right to Counsel National Consortium

Courtesy of Senior Counsel Andrew Stanner of the Office for Access to Justice

This week, the department hosted the first meeting of the Right to Counsel National Consortium, a diverse group of justice system stakeholders, from prosecutors to defense counsel to judges to advocates to public officials, brought together to address the many urgent priorities facing public defenders and the Sixth Amendment’s promise of a right to counsel.

Advancing the right to counsel is, of course, central to our mission at Office for Access to Justice (ATJ), but it is also especially personal for me.  Before I came to ATJ last year, I spent seven years as a public defender in Washington, D.C.

Being a public defender is not just a job, it is an act of public service and an expression of civic virtue.  But as we know, not everyone intuitively understands or appreciates the essential and honorable work that public defenders do.  

At Access to Justice, our goal is to put the full weight of the Department of Justice behind all those who seek to vindicate the Sixth Amendment rights of low income people throughout the country. 

Among the many pressing concerns for the Right to Counsel Consortium, perhaps none is more important than challenging the systematic waiver of that right around the country.  All too often, we see what happens to people – particularly those of limited means – when they do not have the guiding hand of counsel in their dealings with the court.  Americans who lack the money to hire a lawyer simply cannot vindicate their rights in court.  

Part of our work here at the department includes collaboration with the Office of Justice Programs, to ensure that defenders have ever greater access to federal funding.  ATJ worked with the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) to develop a multi-million dollar grant program – Answering Gideon’s Call – that helps jurisdictions implement one or more of the ABA Ten Principles of a Public Defense Delivery System.  BJA also enlisted our help with the $2 Million Smart Defense Initiative.

Apart from these targeted defender grants, ATJ has worked with BJA to better promote the use of Byrne/JAG dollars for indigent defense.  Byrne/JAG is the department’s single biggest funding stream for local justice assistance, but the Department of Justice does not dictate how it is spent.  Those decisions are made by local and state committees. ATJ has worked to make defenders part of those committees; we offered assistance to BJA when they re-wrote the Byrne/JAG solicitation to make indigent defense a top priority for department funds; we have reached out to defender organizations and produced webinars explaining how best to access federal funds and we have spoken directly to the state and local administrators themselves.

ATJ also does significant work to improve access to skilled and well trained counsel in Indian country.  We work very closely with the Bureau of Indian Affairs Office of Tribal Justice Support to make sure that those tribal courts that wish to pursue a western model have the resources and training to do so, and that they are staffed with a capable and well-resourced defender.

Still, there remains much more that needs to be done.  We need a well-funded, well-staffed, well-trained public defender office in every county and state in the country, for both adults and juveniles.  We want to promote access to counsel at first appearance, regardless of what the law requires, because it is good public policy.  We need to increase access to counsel in misdemeanor and traffic cases, because we are all too familiar with the abuses that occur in the absence of a defense attorney.  

We also want to re-conceptualize public defenders altogether.  Many think that people need public defenders so that they can go to trial and win, but the overwhelming number of public defender clients will never even get near a trial.  Rather, we need to promote holistic defense, either within public defender offices themselves, or by connecting public defenders with strong civil legal aid organizations to provide many of the civil-side legal services – mental health advocates, disability attorneys, housing lawyers, education advocates and immigration attorneys – that make a defender office holistic.  People who come into contact with the criminal justice system often do so because they are in the throes of addiction, because they are suffering from emerging or persistent mental health issues, because they are dealing with crippling family strife or because they have educational disabilities or other needs that are unidentified or unmet.  A public defender office needs to be in a position to deal with all of these eventualities.

This group has tremendous promise. There is nothing that matters more to us at Access to Justice than upholding and enhancing the right to counsel.