A recent presentation by ILS Research Director Andy Davies on how empirical research relates to policy reform is now online here (beginning at 13:25):

By Alyssa Clark

Take Home Message: A partnership between defense attorneys and social workers increased the odds of juvenile clients receiving alternative sentences by almost three times in this Kentucky study.

Full report: L. Geurin, M. Otis., and D. Royse (2013). Increasing Alternative Sentencing in the Juvenile Justice System Through a Partnership Between Public Defenders and Social Workers. Journal of Forensic Social Work, 3 (3), pp. 261-277.

Take Home Message: Parents of juveniles may steadily disengage from the juvenile court process when their expectations of the system’s fairness or efficacy are not met.

Full report: L. Pennington (2015). “A Case Study Approach to Procedural Justice: Parents’ Views in Two Juvenile Delinquency Courts in the United States.” British Journal of Criminology, 55 (5), pp. 901-920. The author is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Worcester State University in Worcester, MA.

Take Home Message: When lawyers in civil cases improve case outcomes, it often has more to do with their skills navigating complex court procedures and relationships than their knowledge of the law.

Full report: R. Sandefur (2015). “Elements of Professional Expertise: Understanding Relational and Substantive Expertise Through Lawyers’ Impact.” American Sociological Review. 80 (5), pp. 909-933.

By Alyssa Clark, ILS Research Intern.

Take Home Message: The need for legal services is often great in rural areas, yet their availability is scarce.

Full report: H. Wandler (2015). “Spreading Justice to Rural Montana: Rurality’s Impacts on Supply and Demand for Legal Services in Montana.” Montana Law Review. 76 (2), pp. 225-55. Professor Wandler is Associate Professor at the Alexander Blewett III School of Law, University of Montana.

Take home message: When caseloads were reduced through the injection of significant additional funds in Brooklyn, measurable improvements to the quality of representation occurred.

Take home message: Most Tender of Plea forms are written in language that the average defender client would have significant difficulty reading. Many also do not contain information that defendants need to know prior to entering a plea.

Full report: A. Redlich & C. Bonventre (2015). “Content and Comprehensibility of Juvenile and Adult Tender-of-Plea Forms: Implications for Knowing, Intelligent, and Voluntary Guilty Pleas,” in Law and Human Behavior, 39(2), pp.162-76.

Take home message
"The more a public defender asks for their client’s opinion, listens to the client’s concerns, looks into the prosecutor’s evidence when applicable, and informs the client of all possible consequences with the case, the more likely it is that the client will be satisfied with the overall handling of the case.”

Full report: C. Campbell, J. Moore, W. Maier and M. Gaffney, 2015. “Unnoticed, Untapped, and Underappreciated: Clients’ Perceptions of their Public Defenders.” Behavioral Sciences and the Law, DOI: 10.1002/bsl.2182.