Ben Polk (New York University School of Law) has posted Underfunded, but How Underfunded? on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Indigent defense in the United States is notoriously underfunded, but how underfunded? This Article offers the first nationwide estimate of the funding needed to provide constitutionally sufficient indigent defense services throughout America’s state and local criminal courts: roughly $28 billion annually, more than four times the amount currently spent. To arrive at this number, this Article synthesizes the constitutional standards governing indigent defense administration, gathers and parses available data sources, and marshals these together into a coherent empirical model of the American indigent defense system. The resulting findings, as well as the analytic approach itself, offer useful insights into a range of ongoing political and scholarly debates, as well as fresh lens through which to examine recent doctrinal developments.