The Problem with Ignoring the National Public Defense Workload Study
By Kawan Clinton, Deputy Attorney in Charge of the Manhattan trial office of The Legal
Aid Society. Co-chair of the NAPD Workloads Committee.
This blog is in response to Professor John P. Gross: https://publicdefenders.us/blogs/the-
problems-with-the-national-public-defense-workload-study/.1
The problem with the National Public Defense Workload Study (NPDWS) is simple. It is long
overdue and lands in a political landscape that makes one of our own doubt its validity. He is
more concerned about speculating whether the current Supreme Court will uphold the right to
counsel sometime in the future than fighting now to change the poorly kept secret that public
defenders have been forced to carry grossly excessive caseloads for decades.
Excessive caseloads can and do lead to innocent people being convicted. The doubters of that
proposition are a distinct minority; they most certainly are not the front-line attorneys practicing
day in and day out in America’s many courtrooms.
The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world.
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2024.html. Mass incarceration is the bread and butter of our
criminal legal system. The states – and the federal government — must sufficiently invest in state
pubic defense systems so that public defenders will have workloads that ensure competent and
effective representation for all of their clients. This has not been the case in public defense for
the last half century. Now we finally have a national workload study that reliably establishes just
how bad the situation is today. We must heed the data and conclusions provided in the NPDWS.
When you are used to having less, when you finally get what is needed, it feels like abundance.
For many decades we have been forced to do so much with so little. It has become the norm. The
NPDWS feels like someone finally spoke up, nationally, about an issue that has been swept
under the rug for over a half century. Excessive caseloads have been breaking public defender
offices and our practice as a whole.
