This month Patrick Boylan reviews Free Justice: A History of the Public Defender in Twentieth-Century America by Sara Mayeux.

Brief of Amici Curiae Americans For Prosperity Foundation, Dream Corps Justice, National Association of 
Criminal Defense Lawyers, Niskanen Center, Right On Crime, The R Street Institute, and The Sentencing Project in Support of Petitioner.

Argument: A sentencing judge should not be allowed to functionally overrule a jury's tal acquitof a criminal defendant and punish him for that same acquitted conduct. Yet all too many criminal defendants who were acquitted of more serious criminal charges but convicted on one or more lower charges face judges doing just that. How is this constitutionally dubious sentencing practice possible? Put simply, many lower courts have mistakenly overread this Court's per curiam decision in Watts to permit sentencing judges to do what Apprendi and its progeny later prohibited; namely, find facts that increase the punishment beyond that authorized by the jury's findings of guilt. Acquitted-conduct sentencing flips the presumption of innocence on its head by allowing judges to functionally overrule unanimous jury acquittals based on judge-found facts using the far lower preponderance standard, gutting the Sixth Amendment's jury-trial right. At a minimum, the Sixth Amendment jury-trial right, coupled with the due process requirement that all facts necessary to legally authorize punishment must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, should bar judges from using the same alleged conduct a jury acquitted a defendant of to justify dramatically increasing a defendant's Guidelines range and sentence.

Amicus Curiae Brief of the Petitioner, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in Support of the Real Party in Interest.
 

Argument: NACDL, as amicus curiae, submits that Article 52(a)(3), UCMJ, which authorizes non-unanimous verdicts by three-fourths of the voting members in a courtmartial for serious offenses, is unconstitutional on its face. First, military law has long recognized that a military accused has a right to “a fair and impartial panel” which is “a matter of due process” under the Fifth Amendment. United States v. Wiesen, 56 M.J. 172, 174 (CAAF 2001). That is because “[i]mpartial court members are the sine qua non for a fair court-martial.” United States v. Modesto, 43 M.J. 315, 318 (CAAF 1995).

Educating for Justice: Training Public Defense Providers to Elevate the Sixth Amendment

In 2018 NACDL filed a public comment in support of a Petition before the Wisconsin Supreme Court to raise the rate of compensation for court appointed counsel, and declaring its current $40 per hour rate as unreasonable. The Court refused to hold the state's rate unreasonable, but did elect to raise its own court assigned case rate from $70/hour to $100/hr.

The heart of the American system of justice is the adversarial process. It is the means by which truth is pursued, justice is done, the individual is protected from government overreach, and community values are expressed.

When a person is accused of a crime, the U.S. Constitution guarantees that person the right to a lawyer even if he or she cannot afford one. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed this basic principle more than a half century ago in Gideon v. Wainwright, and in subsequent cases that expanded the right to misdemeanor prosecutions. Yet this right is violated every day in South Carolina’s magistrate and municipal courts – collectively referred to as summary courts – where scores of people are convicted, sentenced, and sometimes incarcerated, without having been represented by counsel.

When a person is accused of a crime, the U.S. Constitution guarantees that person the right to a lawyer even if they cannot afford one. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed this basic principle more than a half century ago in Gideon v. Wainwright, and in subsequent cases that expanded the right to misdemeanor prosecutions. Yet this right is violated every day in South Carolina’s magistrate and municipal courts – collectively referred to as summary courts – where scores of people are convicted, sentenced, and sometimes incarcerated, without having been represented by counsel. [Released April 2016]

Among the rights enumerated in the Sixth Amendment is the right to a speedy trial.

New Report Investigates Courts in South Carolina that Convict and Jail Many Defendants without a Lawyer Present -- Washington, DC (April 4, 2016) – Today, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the ACLU of South Carolina released a new and critically important report, Summary Injustice: A Look at Constitutional Deficiencies in South Carolina's Summary Courts.

Researchers systematically gathered data from magistrate and municipal courts in five counties. The research confirms that there is a pervasive lack of procedural justice and fairness in these courts. Far too many accused persons are not advised of basic constitutional rights, and even when they are, those rights are not respected. [Released January 2017]

New Study Reveals 'Profound and Dramatic Understaffing' of Rhode Island Public Defender System-- Washington, DC (Nov. 16, 2017) -- In order to determine whether defenders in Rhode Island are facing a caseload crisis, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), the American Bar Association Standing Committee on Legal Aid and Indigent Defendants (ABA SCLAID), and the accounting firm of BlumShapiro, undertook an assessment of the Rhode Island Public Defender system ("RIPD").