id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
inlawrev-22382	Lefstein, Norman	Will We Ever Succeed in Fulfilling Gideon's Promise?	2018	20	.pdf	application/pdf	10040	509	53	[Vol. 51:39 Gideon was decided more than fifty years ago.30 Despite these important developments, the vast majority of state courts fail to deliver on Gideon’s promise.31 Consider, for example, the findings of national studies conducted about public defense in state courts.32 During 2003, commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Gideon decision, the ABA Standing Committee on Legal Aid and Indigent Defendants (ABA SCLAID) held public hearings in four sites across the country and invited public defense experts to offer their assessments of state public defense representation in criminal and juvenile courts.33 The witnesses were drawn from diverse geographic regions representing twenty-two states.34 Their testimony resulted in hundreds of transcript pages detailing the problems of public defense across America.35 Most observers of public defense in the United States agree that in the federal courts Gideon’s promise is being substantially fulfilled by the representation provided by skilled and well-trained full-time public defenders and private attorneys appointed pursuant to the Criminal Justice Act (CJA).93 The federal defense program is also far better funded than state defense programs and CJA lawyers are usually better screened and always better compensated than in state courts, i.e., at $129 per hour for felony cases and at an even higher rate in capital cases.94 As a result, the best defense lawyers in a community will sometimes 91.	cache/inlawrev-22382.pdf	txt/inlawrev-22382.txt