Full Citation
Title: Is Your Lawyer a Lemon? Incentives and Selection in the Public Provision of Criminal Defense
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2017
ISBN:
ISSN:
DOI:
NSFID:
PMCID:
PMID:
Abstract: Local governments in the United States are required to offer free legal services to low-income people accused of crimes. Indigent defendants represented by private attorneys working as assigned counsel fare worse than defendants represented by public defenders or retained attorneys, but the reasons for the observed differences in case outcomes are not well understood. We shed new light on the causes of these disparities by taking advantage of detailed court records from one large jurisdiction in Texas that allow us to track the same lawyers across different case types. We find that the majority of the disparity in outcomes is due to within-attorney differences across cases in which they are assigned versus retained. In contrast to the existing literature, our results show the selection of low-quality attorneys into assigned counsel can explain at most one-quarter of the gap in outcomes for low-income defendants. A fee structure for assigned counsel that incentivizes obtaining quick pleas from clients likely contributes to moral hazard. We also present evidence that endogenous matching of defendants and privately retained attorneys plays some role in determining case outcomes, but does not explain the assigned counsel penalty.
User Submitted?: No
Authors: Agan, Amanda; Freedman, Matthew; Owens, Emily
Publisher: Rutgers University
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Crime and Deviance, Other, Poverty and Welfare
Countries: