Would prosecutors be less aggressive if significantly more monies were devoted to indigent criminal defense?

The question in the title of this post is the big question that lingers for me after review of this important New York Times op-ed authored by John Pfaff over the weekend.  The piece provides data to back up John's frequent Twitter lament that problems with indigent defense funding do not get enough attention nor play a sufficient role in analyses of problems with modern criminal justice systems.  The commentary, headlined "A Mockery of Justice for the Poor," merits a full read and here are a few key excertps:

In the landmark case Gideon v. Wainwright, the Supreme Court held in 1963 that the state or local government had to provide a lawyer to any defendant facing prison time who could not afford his or her own.  This was no minor decision.  Approximately 80 percent of all state criminal defendants in the United States qualify for a government­provided lawyer.

Yet despite this constitutional guarantee, state and county spending on lawyers for the poor amounts to only $2.3 billion — barely 1 percent of the more than $200 billion governments spend annually on criminal justice.  Worse, since 1995, real spending on indigent defense has fallen, by 2 percent, even as the number of felony cases has risen by approximately 40 percent.

Not surprisingly, public defense finds itself starved of resources while facing impossible caseloads that mock the idea of justice for the poor.  In Fresno, Calif., for instance, public defenders have caseloads that are four times the recommended maximum of around 150. In Minnesota, one public defender followed by a reporter estimated that he had about 12 minutes to devote to each client that day.  There is no way these lawyers can manage the cases being thrown at them.

In New Orleans, caseloads are so high that the parish’s public defender office has started to refuse to take cases, including murder cases.  Public defender offices in other states, including Florida, Missouri, New York and Pennsylvania, have taken similar steps when caseloads have grown too heavy.  To make things worse, 43 states now require indigent defendants to pay at least a portion of their lawyers’ fees, even though these defendants are by definition indisputably poor....

There is, however, a way out of this, one that the presidential candidates of both parties should embrace, one that should have broad bipartisan appeal. And it is an approach that no one is talking about.

The federal government, which now provides just a few million dollars per year to prop up local indigent defense services, could make an annual grant of $4 billion to state and local governments for indigent defense.  This is a mere 0.3 percent of the federal government’s approximately $1.2 trillion discretionary budget.  This money would triple spending on indigent defense, especially if the grant was tied to pre­existing spending by local governments so they couldn’t just cut their own spending one­-for-­one with the grant.

For Democrats, this plan would target a major cost of poverty and inequality and, because of the correlation between wealth and race, it would tackle at least some of the racial imbalances that permeate the criminal justice system.  For Republicans, who worry about state overreach and the government’s ability to oppress its citizens, meaningful public defense ensures that the poor, too, are able to check the state when it is acting in its most powerful capacity.

Funding indigent defense would also help scale back mass incarceration, a goal both parties share.  My research has shown that the primary source of prison growth in the 1990s and 2000s has been prosecutors’ filing of felony charges against more and more arrestees, many of whom in the past would have faced misdemeanor charges or no charges at all. Ensuring that prosecutors’ opponents are able to do their jobs competently would dampen prosecutorial aggressiveness.

Tellingly, as public defender caseloads have soared amid shrinking budgets, prosecutor caseloads appear to have held relatively steady, as funding and hiring of prosecutors generally rose over roughly the last 20 years.  Public defenders find themselves at an increasing disadvantage, surely contributing to our nation’s inability to really rein in prison population growth.  If defendants had well-­funded, effective representation, our adversarial system would do what it is intended to do.  What we have right now, however, simply is not adversarial: relatively well-­funded, well-­staffed prosecutor offices square off against public defenders whose caseloads defy imagination.

Funding public defense would ensure that poor people’s constitutional rights are protected, would advance a commitment to justice shared by liberals and conservatives alike, and would help roll back our staggering prison population.  It is also feasible, cheap by federal standards, and would have powerful, long­lasting effects.

I agree 100% with John's call for much greater funding of public defense — although I would much prefer a federal law that urged states to link criminal defense funding/spending to criminal prosecution funding/spending. I am not keen to have federal taxpayers provide an expensive "justice bailout" for all states disinclined to tax their own citizens to pay for constitutionally-required services for those they seek to (over)prosecute. (Indeed, I fear that at least some states now doing significant sentencing reform because of prison bills coming due might use clever accounting to afford more prison beds for more offenders if they get a massive yearly influx of federal cash to cover defense services.)

But I really question the notion that greater funding of public defense "would dampen prosecutorial aggressiveness" based on what I see in the operation of the federal criminal justice system. Though certainly not perfectly funded, federal public defenders seem to me to be among the best funded (and certainly the most consistently dedicated and capable and knowledgeable and experienced) of all defense phalanxes that I have seen. And yet I have seen precious little evidence that federal prosecutors are less aggressive because they are frequently facing these defense attorneys in federal criminal cases. (And, of course, we the very largest increase in any jurisdiction's prison population and the lengthy of sentences served over the last 30 years has been at the federal level.)

Moreover, in a few cases in which I have served as an expert witness or amicus at sentencing, I have sometimes perceived that certain federal prosecutors get even more aggressive when they realize that a particular defendant has the resources and personnel needed to put up an especially vigorous defense. (Indeed, I expressly warn some defense attorneys when they seek my formal assistance in a low-profile case that they should consider whether my involvement may risk doing more harm than good due to possible prosecutorial reaction to my involvement.) I do not mean to assert that federal prosecutors are distinctly unfair or uniquely aggressive when going after well-defended defendants, but I do mean to question whether it is really likely that prosecutors will be generally less likely to "strike hard blows" if they know the other side has more ability to defend against those blows.

That said, I do think better funding of state criminal defense is likely to better deter (or later identify) prosecutorial misconduct, and it also could and should have salutory effects on other aspects of state criminal justice systems --- e.g., better funded indigent defense services should be better able to focus on parole systems and expungement efforts and other back-end services for indigent defendants, and perhaps they also would bring more needed strategic constitutional litigation to assail particularly troublesome practices in some state systems. But, to wrap up, I think the only sure-fire way to "dampen prosecutorial aggressiveness," other than to reduce the number of prosecutors, is to dramatically reduce the number of crimes on the books and make sure (through mens rea and jury reforms) that prosecutors have a little more fear of losing when they first think about filing felony charges.