Published on: Thursday, December 19, 2024

A U.S. federal judicial panel has endorsed giving public defender programs greater organizational independence within the federal judiciary, a structural shift that would grant lawyers for indigent defendants greater control over their budgets, staffing and policies (article available here).

The proposed organizational change was detailed in a report on Wednesday describing what was discussed during a September closed-door meeting of the U.S. Judicial Conference, the federal judiciary's policymaking body.

The report said the Judicial Conference's Committee on Defender Services endorsed, "in concept," creating an independent federal public defense program within the judicial branch but outside of the governance of the Judicial Conference or the judiciary's administrative arm.

The report said the proposed change would be consistent with recommendations made by two panels in 1993 and 2017 tasked with evaluating the public defender system, the most recent of which recommended creating an independent commission to oversee them.

News of the endorsement came a week after a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced legislation for the first time to create an independent commission to oversee federal defenders to address structural concerns that have plagued the program for years.