“The overwhelming majority of the U.S. prison population is made up of poor people. This also creates a back-breaking, mind-boggling burden for public defenders, and in jurisdictions without a public defender office, lawyers who are appointed by judges to represent indigent criminal defendants. With only 60 minutes to an hour and only 24 hours in a day, the sheer volume of criminal defendants assigned to and needing assistance from what few public defenders and appointment-receptive lawyers there are available, an overwhelming workload is created that none of these lawyers can handle and still be able to deliver the reasonably effective assistance that the Sixth Amendment requires.“
Prison Legal News
May 15, 2019