Alameda County

The Smart Defense Alameda County project provides, for the first time, defense counsel representation at arraignment for felony cases in Oakland and for both felonies and misdemeanors in Hayward, California, two of the County's largest cities. At the Summit, the project team reported representing approximately 1000 previously unrepresented clients at arraignment per quarter since February 2016. The preliminary results of this representation show more people being released from jail, and sooner, at a cost savings to the county jail.

Smart Defense Wisconsin's project has identified statewide performance indicators across practice areas and integrated the public defender's and the court's data systems in order to track those indicators in real time and create reports to inform evidence-based performance evaluations and policy decisions. The project team shared its comprehensive process for selecting indicators and overhauling their data system. First, a multidisciplinary team identified their various data needs; this team included the State Public Defender's agency leads and division directors, information technology staff, and research partners from the Public Health Institute of the University of Wisconsin. In addition, they consulted with line staff and contract counsel about the functionality of their existing data reporting systems and made significant changes to the interfaces in response to their feedback.  At project end, drawing on its upgraded data system, the State Public Defender will have a set of regularly generated management reports to aid in internal staff performance assessment and in external messaging to the legislature. It will also have a new interface to collect improved information on vouchering and performance from private bar attorneys who handle conflict of interest cases. 

Smart Defense New York City reported completing an intensive study of the city's assigned counsel plan (ACP) and leveraging this assessment to add seven additional staff members to support the ACP's administrators. Previously, two administrators oversaw 1100 private attorneys (who handled all of New York City's homicides and 95% of its criminal trials) without any data about these attorneys' performance. The Smart Defense project conducted a needs assessment of the ACP and mapped out the complicated legal oversight mechanisms for the ACP system. This information helped MOCJ bring stakeholders together to submit a joint proposal for a new vouchering system - to include performance data tracking - to the Mayor's Office of Management and the Budget.  The New York Smart Defense team feels certain that without the Smart Defense work, there would never have been additional resources provided for the ACP system. The grant provided the opportunity for broad stakeholder engagement around the needs of the long-neglected ACP system.

In Kentucky, in sharp contrast with the state's public defender system, private attorneys who contract to represent clients in conflict-of-interest cases have historically received no oversight, resources or training. Paid only small, flat fees for their work, they have not been required to report information about their case activities. The Smart Defense Kentucky project team hired a Conflict Counsel Coordinator to provide resources, training and oversight to conflict counsel, and began requiring attorneys to report basic data about their cases to help assess the effect on performance of the added resources. At the Summit, the Conflict Counsel Coordinator workshopped challenges to data collection and analysis with other Smart Defense site teams. A number of Smart Defense site teams have grappled with common difficulties of monitoring and improving representation provided by private attorneys, especially: appropriately overseeing conflict-of-interest cases; incentivizing additional reporting and case work without additional funding; and connecting decentralized practitioners to available training, motion banks, communities of practice, and other resources from which full-time defenders benefit. Smart Defense Kentucky's preliminary findings are providing empirical support for arguments about the needs of conflict counsel and the importance of ongoing oversight.

The Smart Defense Texas team demonstrated its soon-to-be-launched A.C.T. Smart online portal, which reports on indigent defense performance measures for Texas' 254 counties. The project team displayed how the current website of the Texas Indigent Defense Commission - the statewide oversight body - displays high-level, county-by-county data about public defense funding and caseloads but offers little to state and local policymakers in terms of context for these data. The new data portal will collect performance measures and explain their relevance to statutory requirements and best practices for indigent defense in Texas. The project team will shortly have the results of a pilot test of data reporting from several of the state's largest counties.