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Public defenders

NIJ FY23 Research and Evaluation on the Administration of Justice: Advancing Access to Justice 60 Years after Gideon

Closing Date
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NIJ’s Research and Evaluation on the Administration of Justice Program supports rigorous research and evaluation projects examining the impact of court and other criminal justice tools, practices, and policies on the administration of justice and public safety in state, local, and tribal jurisdictions. With the 60th anniversary of Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963), and in collaboration with DOJ’s Office for Access to...

The Hidden Costs of Reentry: Understanding the Barriers to Removing a Criminal Record

May 2022

NIJ hosted a webinar to discuss under-researched aspects of reentry: expungement of criminal records and the impact of those records. This webinar includes a presentation of ongoing research projects examining the impact of legal aid for expungement and past research projects studying the accuracy and permanency of criminal records and the prevalence of collateral consequences of conviction. A Q&A session will conclude this webinar.

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Booker and Beyond Analyzing Sentencing Reform and Exploring New Research Directions

January 2022

This webinar features a discussion of previously published research on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2005 Booker decision - which effectively transformed the United States Sentencing Guidelines from a mandatory, to an advisory, system. The presentation will address selected research findings from the last 15 years. Individual participants will briefly review their previous research findings with particular attention paid to the analytic methods used.

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National Survey of Indigent Defense Systems, 1999-2000 (Bureau of Justice Statistics)

Conducted during 1999-2000, this survey represented the first systematic study of indigent criminal defense services by BJS since the 1980s. The study collected indigent criminal defense data at the trial level for (1) the 100 most populous counties in the United States, (2) 197 counties outside of the 100 most populous counties, and (3) states that entirely funded criminal indigent defense services. Information obtained includes...

Census of Public Defender Offices (Bureau of Justice Statistics)

The Census of Public Defender Offices (CPDO) involves the collection of data from all state- and county-funded public defender offices across the country, including offices that are publicly funded but privately operated and offices that handle capital cases only. These public defender offices handle the largest proportion of indigent defense cases of the three major indigent defense delivery systems: public defender offices, assigned counsel systems...

National Survey Of Indigent Defense Systems, 2013 (Bureau of Justice Statistics)

In 2013, the National Survey of Indigent Defense Systems (NSIDS) was designed as a census of all forms of indigent defense public defender, contract counsel, and assigned or appointed counsel in all fifty states and the District of Columbia. Indigent defense was characterized as state-administered (one or two central offices directing indigent defense for the entire state) or county-administered (each county provides and administers indigent...