Thanks to a new judicial report, the challenges facing the state’s indigent defense system are coming more into focus. Now, the question is how to move forward.
The constitutional right to an attorney may be chilled under the current indigent, or public defense system in South Dakota according to the report published by the Sixth Amendment Center.
6AC deputy director Aditi Goel said providing a lawyer for indigent clients is a state, not local, responsibility.
“An effective lawyer is not a warm body with a Bar card, it is one who is qualified, trained, supervised and is adversarial," Goel said. "South Dakota delegates this entire constitutional responsibility for trial-level services to counties, and it results in a decentralized patchwork of county-funded public defense systems. Only three counties have public defender offices with staff attorneys and paralegals, while other counties have no lawyers at all. This is justice by geography.”
Goel explains the methodology going into the recently published report.
“We independently researched relevant law and analyzed significant amounts of data provided by (the Unified Judicial System)," Goel said. "I cannot emphasize enough that UJS and stakeholders across the state were cooperative, and nearly every person that we spoke to expressed a sincere and honest desire to improve the quality of public defense services.”
People like University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law dean Neil Fulton, the state indigent legal services chair.
“The report to me is a wonderful picture of the reality that is, and I think there’s a lot of consensus on what the reality that we want is, and to generalize it’s an effective and efficient system of indigent defense," Fulton said. "The trick is moving from the reality that is to the reality that we want.”
Fulton expressed optimism that plan would be laid out in detail during upcoming meetings of the state indigent defense commission.