Skip to main content

The Criminal Justice Act Turns 50

By

Last Wednesday marked the 50th anniversary of the Criminal Justice Act (CJA), which was signed into law by President Johnson on August 20, 2013. The CJA (codified at 18 U.S.C. §3006A) mandates funding for court-appointed counsel to represent indigent defendants charged with felonies or Class A misdemeanors in federal court. Although the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to counsel for the accused, it is silent as to whether the court must provide an attorney for a defendant who cannot afford one. It wasn’t until Johnson v. Zerbst, 304 U.S. 458 (1938), that the Supreme Court established the right to court-appointed counsel in all federal criminal cases.

Even after Johnson, however, no funding was provided for court-appointed lawyers. This often made it impossible for them to hire experts or investigators and to provide an adequate defense. The CJA mandated that court-appointed lawyers receive hourly fees and expenses. Six years later, an amendment to the Act provided for the hiring of full-time government defense lawyers. Today, the federal Defender Services program serves 91 of the 94 federal judicial districts.

Although providing court-appointed counsel for indigent defendants may seem like an unqualified good, the system has its drawbacks. Funding remains a problem. During the 2013 sequestration, for example, federal defenders’ budgets were cut drastically. Furthermore, the severity of mandatory-minimum sentencing means that prosecutors have enormous power to force defendants into plea bargains. This situation has led some to argue that indigent federal defendants are worse off now than they were before the passage of the CJA. For an example of such an argument, see this 2013 article from the Yale Law Journal. For more on the history of the CJA, see this article on the United States Courts website. 
  
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Amazing, but True, Deportation Story of Carlos Marcello

By
Earlier this week, the University of Houston Law Center was fortunate to have as its guest Professor Daniel Kanstroom of Boston College of Law. An expert in immigration law, he is the Director of the International Human Rights Program, and he both founded and directs the Boston College Immigration and Asylum Clinic. Speaking as the guest of the Houston Journal of International Law’s annual Fall Lecture Series, Professor Kanstroom discussed issues raised in his new book, Aftermath: Deportation Law and the New American Diaspora . Professor Michael Olivas introduced Professor Kanstroom to the audience, and mentioned the fascinating tale of Carlos Marcello, which Professor Kanstroom wrote about in his chapter “The Long, Complex, and Futile Deportation Saga of Carlos Marcello,” in Immigration Stories , a collection of narratives about leading immigration law cases. My interest piqued, I read and was amazed by Kanstroom’s description of one of the most interesting figures in American le
1 comment
Read more

C-SPAN Video Archive Now Online

By
Legislative researchers and politics fans take note. C-SPAN recently completed a digitization project placing the entirety of its video collection online. The archives record all three C-SPAN networks seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. The videos are available at no cost for historical, educational, research, and archival uses. The database includes over 160,000 hours of video recorded since 1987 and the programs are indexed by subject, speaker names, titles, affiliations, sponsors, committees, categories, formats, policy groups, keywords, and locations. The most recent, most watched, and most shared videos are highlighted on the main page. To start watching, visit the C-SPAN Video Library and use the search function at the top of the page.
Post a Comment
Read more

Texas Subsequent History Table Ceases Publication

By
This week, Thomson Reuters notified subscribers that publication of the Texas Subsequent History Table will be discontinued and no further updates will be produced, due to “insufficient market interest.” Practitioners have been extracting writ (and since 1997, petition) history from the tables since their initial publication in 1917 as The Complete Texas Writs of Error Table . The tables, later published by West, have been used for nearly a century to determine how the Texas Supreme Court or Court of Criminal Appeals disposed of an appeal from an intermediate appellate court. The purpose of adding this notation to citations is to indicate the effect of the Texas Supreme Court’s action on the weight of authority of the Court of Appeals’ opinion.  For example, practitioners may prefer to use as authority a case that the Texas Supreme Court has determined is correct both in result and legal principles applied (petition refused), rather than one that simply presents no error that requires
Post a Comment
Read more