Public Defenders in the Neighborhood.

Series: NIJ Program Focus
Published: March 1997
19 pages
40,917 bytes

National Institute of Justice

Program Focus

Public Defenders in the Neighborhood: A Harlem Law
Office Stresses Teamwork, Early Investigation

by David C. Anderson

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Highlights

Indigent defendants often are dissatisfied with
their court-appointed attorneys because of the way
services are delivered. Resources are limited
because of overloaded court calendars, creating
pressure for quick plea bargains. When cases drag
on, clients may have several lawyers over the
intervening months, risking the loss of crucial
information with each transfer. Too often, the
process seems structured more for expediency than
justice.

In 1990 the Vera Institute of Justice opened an
agency in Harlem that bases public defenders in a
community. Known as the Neighborhood Defender
Service (N.D.S.), it takes cases only from the
surrounding vicinity because it believes staff can
acquire a deeper knowledge of clients and their
problems that way than is possible in traditional
public defender agencies. N.D.S. also offers
clients help with personal and family problems that
lead to legal trouble.

Instead of working as individuals, N.D.S. lawyers,
investigators, and clerical staff function as
teams. Specially designed computer software allows
any team member to update a case record, look up a
case's current status, and display a repeat
client's history.

Several benefits to N.D.S.'s approach include:

o Lawyers and clients are more accessible to each
other and to crime scenes.

o There is more contact with a client's family,
friends, and neighbors during an investigation.

o Team representation enables use of a broad array
of resources and guarantees continuity should an
attorney leave N.D.S. or be unable to stay with a
case.

Aggressive, early investigations most distinguish
N.D.S. from traditional public defenders. About
half the clients retain N.D.S. attorneys before
they are arraigned. Cases are given early attention
so they can be investigated and analyzed thoroughly
before a client's first court appearance or,
ideally, to resolve the case before it goes to
trial. Traditionally, most public defenders get
cases when a client first appears in court and must
initially rely on information provided by the
prosecutor or police.

Since it opened, N.D.S. has represented more than
5,000 clients and has established itself as a
positive presence in court and in the Harlem
community. Today the staff totals 30, organized
into 3 teams; each carries a caseload of 180 to
200.

N.D.S. founders hypothesized that as it improved
the quality of justice for clients, the agency's
approach would reduce overall costs because its
clients would spend less time in jail or prison. So
far, that idea has been partially vindicated.
N.D.S. costs are about $1,520 per case (a majority
of which are felonies). At New York City's Legal
Aid Society, disposition of a felony costs $1,339;
a misdemeanor disposition costs $187. However,
N.D.S. clients have spent less time incarcerated.
According to a research study, N.D.S. clients were
sentenced to a total of 78,153 days of
incarceration, while their matched counterparts
with traditional representation were sentenced to a
total of 117,913 days. The one dilemma: savings
realized in upstate prisons did not affect the city
budget that funded N.D.S.

------------------------------

The witness told a terrifying story, still shaking
a little over it, even weeks later. The man came
into her family's fast food place, produced a gun,
and forced her into the back room. There he ordered
her to open the safe, then made off with the $4,000
it contained. She considered herself lucky not to
have been raped or killed. At the precinct station,
she looked through books of offenders' photos and
picked out a man named Duncan. Yes, she said, that
could have been the man.

As detectives followed up, it all looked plausible.
Duncan worked as a street sweeper for a business
group called the Grand Central Partnership. On the
afternoon of the crime his work assignment had put
him in the vicinity of the store, he had a criminal
record, and although he had signed in for work that
morning, he had failed to sign out that afternoon.

Duncan insisted he was innocent, but the police
convened a lineup, and the victim, having seen his
picture, now picked him out, more adamant than ever
that he was the robber. The police weren't about to
let him go.

Brought up for arraignment, Duncan met his
court-assigned attorney a few minutes before he
faced the judge. "You've got a rap sheet," the
lawyer said, looking over Duncan's file. "You'd
better cop a plea."

"I didn't do it," Duncan protested. His record was
for picking pockets. He wouldn't know how to go
about an armed robbery even if he had wanted to
commit one. But the lawyer had nothing more to
suggest.

In court Duncan told the judge he didn't want to
plead guilty and that he wanted another lawyer. As
it happened, another one, summoned that day by
Duncan's godfather, appeared at his elbow to take
over his defense. No, he told his new client after
they had a chance to talk, you don't have to plead
guilty. If you're innocent, you should fight back.

Duncan's new defender, David Holman, turned out to
be the head of a team that included three other
lawyers, two paralegals, an administrative
assistant, and a student intern. They came free of
charge, courtesy of an agency called the
Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem.

All this struck Duncan and his fellow jail inmates
as amazing. On television that year, they watched
O.J. Simpson's panel of attorneys assembling each
day in a courthouse a continent away. Now here was
Duncan, the street sweeper, with a dream team of
his own.

When indigent defendants wind up dissatisfied with
court-appointed attorneys, the reason may have less
to do with who they are -- lawyers in public
defender agencies gain a uniquely valuable savvy
for the workings of criminal courts -- than with
how their services get delivered. In New York, for
example, the city's Legal Aid Society bases its
lawyers in big central courthouses, where they
typically meet clients only a few minutes before
their first court appearances.

Swollen court calendars limit resources for
investigation and other support work, creating
pressure for disposition of cases with quick plea
bargains. When cases continue for months, the
client may bounce from one unfamiliar attorney to
the next, risking the loss of crucial information
with each transfer. All too often the process seems
structured more for 
expediency than justice.

A Neighborhood-Based Defense Service

In 1990 the Vera Institute of Justice set out to
test a different model. It opened a Harlem office
that became the headquarters for a public defender
service based in a neighborhood rather than a
courthouse. It sought to acquire cases early enough
to investigate and analyze them thoroughly before
the client's first court appearance. (See "Building
on Earlier Developments" for examples of other
neighborhood-based defense services.)

It took cases only from the surrounding community
on the theory that doing so would make it possible
to acquire deeper knowledge of clients and their
problems than is possible in a courthouse agency.
Instead of working as individuals, lawyers,
investigators, and clerical helpers function as
teams, aided by computer software that enables any
team member to update a case record or determine
its current status at the click of a mouse. In
addition to efficient, early investigations, the
team structure guarantees continuity of
representation should a case drag on for months.

Beyond criminal defense, the defender office also
offers clients help with personal and family
problems that lead to trouble with the law. (See
"Cases Beyond Court" and "The Civil Fallout.")

Since it opened, the Neighborhood Defender Service
of Harlem (N.D.S.) has represented more than 5,000
clients in more than 6,000 criminal cases and has
established itself as a positive presence in court
and in the community. When the city contract that
had funded the pilot program expired in June 1996,
the New York City Council and the State of New York
pledged money to keep N.D.S. in business as an
independent agency for the current year.

N.D.S.'s Beginnings

The project's roots extend back to the early 1980s
when a Harvard undergraduate named Chris Stone
began teaching at an alternative high school. "The
kids kept getting arrested," Stone recalls. "When I
went to court, I saw lawyers who didn't even know
the names of our students. I realized that what I
wanted to do was be a public defender for the kids
I knew."

Stone went on to law school at Yale, then worked
for the public defender office in Washington, D.C.
He decided that the problems with public defense
had much more to do with the way agencies were
structured than with personal failings of
individual attorneys. He finally got a chance to
test that theory in 1990 as a project director for
Vera.

The Neighborhood Defender Service, which opened
that fall in a suite of offices on 125th Street,
underwent a lengthy shakedown as it searched for
clients at the early stages of a case. In the
beginning the agency arranged for its attorneys to
show up at Harlem police precincts at 6 o'clock
each morning to follow up on the previous night's
arrests. That lasted less than a year. The city
asked N.D.S. to close its precinct operation after
prosecutors began to complain.

After that the agency had to fill its caseload with
court-assigned cases from the Harlem area, getting
clients at a later stage, while it mounted an
aggressive publicity and outreach campaign to
increase the number calling in on their own to get
help. Not until 1994 did the volume of call-ins
reach the point that N.D.S. no longer needed to
take Harlem cases assigned by judges at the
courthouse.

Aggressive Outreach

Despite the quality of its free service, the agency
found aggressive outreach essential to maintaining
a flow of new clients. Leonard Noisette, one of the
founding senior attorneys at N.D.S., describes the
heavily policed Harlem community as a "coercive
environment" where many residents don't fully
understand their right to an adequate defense. In
response, N.D.S. outreach workers have distributed
leaflets at housing projects and addressed civic
and church groups. Eddie Ellis, an ex-convict and
former minister of information for the Black
Panther Party in New York, has led a popular
workshop called "Know Your Rights," where he has
answered questions about search-and-seizure rules,
warrantless arrests, probable cause, and other
issues of police conduct. He talks about what a
person should do if arrested. "Keep your mouth shut
until your lawyer gets there," he says. "If your
lawyer doesn't get there for a long time, keep your
mouth shut for a long time."

In 3 years he distributed 125,000 plastic cards
imprinted with the agency's address and phone
number as well as a "Notice to Police Officers and
Prosecutors" that formalizes the bearer's request
to speak with an attorney and refusal to waive any
constitutional rights. "Once you present that card,
your rights are invoked," Ellis explains. "If they
question you beyond that point in the absence of
your attorney, anything you say cannot be used in
court."

In 1993 Stone became director of Vera, elevating
Noisette to lead N.D.S. Today he presides over a
staff of 30, including 15 criminal defense
attorneys and 6 paralegals who work as
investigators and social service coordinators. The
3 criminal teams are expected to carry caseloads of
180 to 200, for an annual total of about 2,500
cases.

While Duncan sat in jail, his team went to work. An
investigator visited with his supervisors at the
Grand Central Partnership and found records showing
that while he had neglected to sign out from his
afternoon assignment at 3:45, he was present for
assignment to an evening shift at 4:15 -- hardly
plausible behavior for an armed robber with $4,000
in his pocket. The investigator also interviewed
the complaining witness, a woman who appeared to be
in a continuing state of anxiety about threats she
perceived from black men. And he talked with
Duncan's sister, his godfather, and his barber.
A strategy emerged: Although the witness adamantly
claimed that she would never forget the robber's
face, the description she gave did not match
Duncan's that closely. In particular, she recalled
a clean shaven man; Duncan had worn a beard and
moustache on the day of the crime, a fact the
family and barber would corroborate. She also
failed to mention the prominent scar beside
Duncan's left eye.

Furthermore, the police who arrested him told
Duncan they had found his fingerprints all over the
crime scene, but the prosecutors were reluctant to
reveal results of the fingerprint analysis,
claiming the prints were smudged. Holman could win
the case if he could poke enough holes in the
victim's identification and show that the prints
police lifted did not match Duncan's.

`Right Around the Corner'

Does the neighborhood location really make a
difference? "It's the kind of thing that you can't
quantitatively prove," says Robin Steinberg, the
agency's deputy director, "but every single person
who's ever worked here and every client who's ever
been represented by us knows" that it does.

One benefit is simply that lawyers and clients are
more accessible to each other. Earl Ward, an N.D.S.
team leader, recalls that when he worked at the
central courthouse, "It was always a hassle to get
your client to come in and talk...the only time
they want to come downtown is when their case is
on, and that might not be a day when you have time
[for] a protracted discussion about his or her
case."

The neighborhood base also makes crime scenes more
accessible. Ward recalls the case of a young woman
charged with attempted murder. "Before she was even
booked...our investigator and myself had gone out
to the area where it happened. It was right around
the corner here...we walked over to 118th Street
and Seventh Avenue and we started speaking to
witnesses." They quickly learned that their new
client had a viable claim of self-defense.

Locating in the community allows for more contact
with a client's family, friends, and neighbors in
the course of investigations. It also generates
regular customers as clients return for
representation after new arrests. "We encourage
people who get into trouble again to call us,"
Noisette says, "because then we can come to court
with knowledge about who they are, what the
previous case was about, what's going on in their
life."

Benefits of the geographic base cut in another
direction as well. The N.D.S. computers that can
regurgitate a repeat client's history also maintain
information on police officers. "If...we have [an
officer's] name as the arresting officer on our
case," says N.D.S. investigator Trevor Scotland,
"we can punch it into the computer and see how many
other cases he's been involved with in the office."
The exercise turns up officers who have been
frequent subjects of brutality or abuse-of-powers
complaints.

Winning Teams

Instead of isolating themselves in individual
offices, lawyers on a team sit in cubicles in an
open area with the team's investigators and
administrative assistant. In addition to formal
meetings and informal consultations, team members
keep each other up to date via a computer network
and software developed for the project. All are
responsible for filing reports on new developments
-- investigative visits, court hearings, calls from
clients and their relatives. Each new report is
instantly distributed to every team member by
e-mail.

Teamwork means that "investigators...can continue
to work on a case even when the lawyer is tied up,"
Steinberg explains. In her previous job at Legal
Aid, she says, "when I was on trial everything came
to an absolute standstill [with other cases]. For 2
or 3 weeks a client didn't talk to me, couldn't get
to me.... That doesn't happen here." The computer
system makes it possible for the administrative
assistants or any other team members to satisfy
anxious clients with up-to-date information.

The team concept also allows attorneys to
co-counsel big cases that go to trial. "One
attorney will do the opening, another will do the
summation; they'll split up rounds of voir dire,
and they will take turns examining and
cross-examining witnesses," Ward says. Team
representation also guarantees a client continuity
in the event an attorney leaves the agency or is
unable to stay with a case for some other reason.

Neighborhood Defender Service managers say teaming
promotes democracy in the office, with positive
fallout for clients. "The nonlawyers on the team
feel just as much that the clients are their
clients as the lawyers do," Noisette says. He tells
of walking into his team area to find a lawyer
arguing with an investigator about whether to take
a call from a client. When the lawyer told the
receptionist he was too busy to speak to the man,
the investigator turned around in her chair and
said, "`No, you've got to take that call...that
client's called three times this week. I've talked
to him. The administrative assistant has talked to
him. He needs to talk to you.'" The attorney "had
an attitude, but he took the call," Noisette says.
"It would have never happened at the Legal Aid
Society...a paralegal would never have the nerve"
to confront a staff attorney that way.

Most of the team communication is less abrasive. "I
have personal contact with all the attorneys on the
team every single day," says investigator Jonathan
Pageler. "I know what cases are coming to trial. I
know...what our theory is on our case for every
trial that's coming up," and that shapes the
interviews he conducts with witnesses to help the
defense.

Despite these benefits, Stone and Noisette express
disappointment that the level of collaboration on
teams has declined as the agency's caseload has
grown. The original idea was for every lawyer on
the team to have as much knowledge of a case as any
other, a situation that existed for a while. "I can
remember...walking into a courtroom, not finding my
lawyer, seeing the case was ready, and being able
to do the case without a file," Noisette recalls.
The caseload makes that impossible today and even
limits the number of formal team meetings.

N.D.S. managers have also found reasons to tinker
with the team structure. Until recently, community
workers had shared obligations for investigation
and social service assessment; now one pursues
witnesses and crime scenes full time while the
other focuses on social service needs. The agency
also decided to put all newly hired attorneys on a
"training team," where they spend their first year
on misdemeanors and family court matters under
supervision of an experienced leader.

The Power of Information

In terms of process, it is the capacity for
aggressive, early investigations that most
distinguishes N.D.S. from traditional public
defenders. To a great extent the issue is
structural, since most public defenders don't get a
case until the client's first appearance in court.
"We generally do not do investigations before
arraignment," says Bob Baum, head of the Legal Aid
Society's criminal defense division, "because we
don't have the case." At N.D.S. about half the
clients retain the agency's attorneys before they
are arraigned; they call immediately after arrest
or when they learn police are looking for them.

Stone emphasizes the importance of getting
information early. "The problem with most defense
models," he says, "is that the lawyer is the last
person to know anything. Lawyers get all their
information from the prosecutor through discovery,
and they ask for information from the cops. They
are giving advice to clients about the law they
know in response to facts they are getting from the
government." Steinberg adds that the issue is
particularly germane in New York, where rules
governing discovery are restrictive. "Prosecutors
have the option of giving you a lot, but they don't
do it often. As a result, without good
investigation, you often wind up going before the
judge without a lot of good information."

The Neighborhood Defender Service has more
investigators per attorney than traditional
agencies (one to four at the Harlem agency,
compared with one to seven at the Legal Aid
Society), and most are young college graduates,
likely to be more enthusiastic about their work
than the retired police officers typically employed
by public defenders. N.D.S. managers also note that
in other agencies, investigators may operate as
part of a separate unit, carrying out investigative
tasks on orders from individual attorneys rather
than sharing information as part of a team.

The N.D.S. emphasis on early investigation looked
especially good to a client named Reuben, who got
into a fight with a neighbor in a shack located at
a community garden. During the fight Reuben's
neighbor fell and lost consciousness, then died in
the hospital a few days later. Prosecutors charged
Reuben with murder after hearing from a witness who
claimed Reuben had hit the man with a pipe.

Reuben called N.D.S. when he learned police were
looking for him. N.D.S. attorney Jenny Kronenfeld
negotiated his surrender after Reuben identified
several witnesses who said he had not used a pipe
and that the fight was just a shoving match.
Kronenfeld and N.D.S. investigators pursued the
witnesses and nailed down their stories. They also
found a physician to review hospital records,
attend an autopsy of the victim's brain, and
develop theories about how the man, in poor health
before the incident, could well have died of
natural causes. The investigative work helped
Kronenfeld argue successfully for Reuben's release
from jail on his own recognizance while prosecutors
reconsidered the charges.

The need to spend such resources on a homicide case
seems obvious, but N.D.S. routinely invests in less
dramatic matters as well. Pageler recently spent
most of a morning locating and interviewing a woman
who had persuaded police to charge her daughter's
boyfriend with statutory rape. The boyfriend had
come to N.D.S. for help.

It was not a case with a big future. The daughter
and her boyfriend had lived together on and off for
the previous few years and had a child together.
The mother disliked the boyfriend and was trying to
make trouble for him after getting into a fight
with her daughter. Still, Pageler appeared at the
mother's door, identified himself, persuaded her to
let him in, and sat with her for nearly an hour
asking her about her daughter, her daughter's
boyfriend, and their problems.

Then he wrote out a statement for the woman to sign
in which she said that her main reason for calling
the police was her fear that the boyfriend was
about to take her daughter and grandchild away to
Detroit. She noted that her fight with her daughter
occurred a few days after the boyfriend's 21st
birthday, and she stated that despite their
relationship she had never seen her daughter and
her boyfriend kiss or engage in any other physical
contact, "I guess out of respect."

"That's more than I expected to get," Pageler said
with some satisfaction after the visit. To make the
statutory rape charge stick, he explained,
prosecutors would have to show proof of sexual
contact after the boyfriend turned 21, but the
mother now had gone on record with a statement
saying she had seen none since that date. She also
demonstrated a motivation to lie that N.D.S.
lawyers could use to challenge any of her
testimony.

Neighborhood Defender Service managers insist on
the need to give all cases a certain level of early
attention. In traditional practice, Stone points
out, attorneys tend to save investigative resources
for cases going to trial. "Yet that is the worst
place to concentrate resources. Investigation
should be used to prevent cases from going to
trial. Trial is important, but it is not the main
service the office provides to clients because most
cases don't go to trial.... If you look at N.D.S.
that way, that's what it's all about -- the
investigators, the teams, and the neighborhood 
location."

Catch-22 on Costs

Stone, Noisette, and the other founders of N.D.S.
had postulated that in addition to improving the
quality of justice for clients, the agency's
approach would reduce costs by making it more
efficient. So far, that idea is only partially
vindicated.

In 1995 the Neighborhood Defender Service handled
about 2,500 cases on a $3.8 million budget, or
about $1,520 per case. (Under the new funding
arrangement, the annual budget totals $2.5
million.) At Legal Aid, disposition of a felony
costs $1,339, while a misdemeanor disposition costs
only $187. N.D.S. says that it has not calculated a
breakdown of average costs for felonies and
misdemeanors, but Noisette points out that in 1995,
66 percent of the cases it handled were felonies,
compared with 37 percent for all criminal cases in
Manhattan, a figure that reflects the Legal Aid
Society's caseload. (N.D.S. administrators
speculate that Harlem residents charged with
misdemeanors are more willing to take
court-assigned help from the Legal Aid Society,
while those charged with more serious crimes seek
special help from N.D.S.)

The heavy felony practice necessarily inflates
N.D.S.'s costs per case. Its managers also point
out that because they intervene earlier with
clients, much of the work they do involves cases
that don't reach the point of disposition in court,
a fact that artificially increases the raw
calculation of costs per disposed case.

Neighborhood Defender Service officials understood
from the beginning, however, that their
representation would cost more than traditional
practice. They counted on reductions in the amount
of time their clients spend in jail and prison to
produce net savings to the system. The only hard
research on the agency's work so far confirms that
idea, but less usefully than N.D.S. managers would
have liked. (See "The Impact of the Neighborhood
Defender Service on Case Outcomes.") The cost of a
day in New York State prisons averages about $70,
while the figure for city jails exceeds $150. At
those rates the reduced time behind bars easily
offsets the higher cost of N.D.S. representation to
make it competitive with a big institutional
provider like Legal Aid. But there is a problem: To
the extent the savings are realized in upstate
prisons, they don't affect the city budget that
funded N.D.S.

"We're in a little bit of a Catch-22," Noisette
laments. "The city looks at those statistics and
says.... `It's fine that you're doing this great
work, but you're not saving us a whole lot of
money'."

Holman's strategy worked. In court he hammered at
the victim's identification of Duncan: She said the
man who robbed her was clean shaven, but on the day
of the crime, Holman showed, his client's beard and
moustache were intact and clearly apparent.
According to the police report, she initially
described the robber as dark skinned, while
Duncan's complexion is relatively light.

On that point Holman got an unexpected dividend.
When the victim denied she had described the man as
dark, the attorney brought in the police officer
who wrote the report; he claimed he had made up the
fact that the robber's skin was dark. Holman had a
field day with that. What else had the officer made
up? Why should the jury believe anything he said?

The fingerprints clinched the case. Prosecutors
sought to fend Holman off by saying the prints were
smudged. But the defense attorney persisted, and
when he finally got hold of the prints he found
they weren't too smudged to work with. He then
obtained a report showing that none of the prints
matched Duncan's, including those lifted from
furniture the victim said the robber had touched.
The jury found it easy to acquit Duncan of all
charges.

Later Duncan could reflect on how far he had come
from the day the Legal Aid attorney recommended he
plead guilty. "If I didn't have these people here,
the Neighborhood Defenders, I would be in a whole
lot of trouble," he said. "They're good lawyers.
They're very good lawyers."

------------------------------

Building on Earlier Developments

Shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the
right of indigent defendants to free counsel,
lawyers for the poor began organizing
community-based legal services to provide both
civil and criminal representations for neighborhood
residents. Connecticut's New Haven Legal Assistance
was among the first to provide comprehensive legal
services to clients who walked in the front door,
and it is one of few that continues to maintain
criminal defense services in a primarily civil
office.

For most neighborhood offices, the different
mandates and funding streams for civil and criminal
representation made comprehensive services
impractical. Nevertheless, the advantages to
communities of neighborhood-based defense services
continued to tempt legal reformers.

In 1971 the National Conference of Black Lawyers
organized the Roxbury Defenders Committee in Boston
near a local courthouse. The Roxbury Defenders
Committee carried out an aggressive campaign of
community outreach and staffed a 24-hour hotline
that neighborhood residents could call when they
needed representation.

In 1976 the Criminal Defense Consortium of Cook
County established community defender offices in
six Chicago neighborhoods: West Town,
Lakeview-Uptown, Lawndale, Woodlawn, Harvey, and
Evanston. The Consortium made extensive use of
paralegals and law students and, like the Roxbury
project, emphasized early entry into cases as soon
as suspicion had focused on a client.

Both the Roxbury and one of the Chicago offices
continue to operate, and public defenders in Boston
are now building on their experience in Roxbury to
create comprehensive defense services, especially
for young defendants.

------------------------------

Cases Beyond Court

Public defenders are used to seeing clients whose
social needs dwarf whatever legal problem brought
them into the office. Too often, however, the
defense work ends with disposition of the legal
case. "When I learned how others do it, how...once
they get their clients out of jail, they just let
them go, I was really surprised," says Diana
Sanabria, an N.D.S. staff attorney who hasn't
worked as a lawyer for anyone else. "I guess I was
naive about that."

Cathy Plaza, head of social work for N.D.S., offers
two examples of cases where the agency's commitment
to the client -- and his or her family -- made a
difference.

One concerned a high school student brought into
court for truancy. Plaza found him a counseling
program and testified on his behalf before the
judge. But in the process, she discovered that he
was living with his 71-year-old great grandmother,
who was raising three other grandchildren by
herself, one of them only 2 years old. The family
lived in a rickety tenement amidst leaking pipes
and exposed wires. But the grandmother remained
intensely private and fiercely proud, refusing any
help from city agencies while supporting the
household on a small pension.

Plaza gained her trust and continued visiting her
long after her grandson's court case was settled.
Eventually, she persuaded the woman to accept food
and clothing from a neighborhood charity and to
collect some welfare benefits for support of the
children. When the apartment burned, Plaza found
the family a place in city-subsidized housing.

The truancy case had exposed a major social work
challenge that Plaza felt obliged to pursue long
term. "What you want to do with her is to help her
keep those children," Plaza explains. "That's what
keeps her going...and that's what's kept them
going.... This is what you call intensive case
management. It takes time."

Another case involved a teenager charged with
assaulting an older man. The teenager turned out to
have a long psychiatric history, including
medication to control hallucinations. The victim of
the assault kept coming to court and expressing
concern for the boy who had beaten him, causing
Plaza to grow suspicious.

She brought the boy in for one-on-one meetings and
soon learned that the older man had been abusing
him sexually for several years; the boy had finally
tired of submitting to the abuse and struck back.
The lawyers determined that there wasn't enough
evidence to press charges against the older man,
but Plaza moved swiftly to protect the boy. She
found a place for him in a psychiatric hospital in
Michigan, arranging for Medicaid funding and an
N.D.S. staff member to escort him by plane.

He remained there for 11 months, then transferred
to a halfway house in Montana before returning to
New York. "That was some piece of social work,"
Plaza says. "So far, knock wood, he's okay."

------------------------------

The Civil Fallout

From the beginning N.D.S. committed itself to
helping clients with civil matters that arose from
their criminal cases. These may have included loss
of parental rights because of arrests for child
neglect or abuse, deportation orders for immigrants
in trouble with the law, and seizures of cash,
cars, or other property in the course of drug
arrests.

Another common civil issue arose from the city
housing authority's policy of evicting tenants when
members of their households were arrested on drug
charges. For these clients the civil case may have
been far more urgent than the criminal one -- as
when a teenager's arrest for possessing a small
quantity of drugs threatened to put his whole
family out on the street.

At first criminal defense team attorneys were to
follow up on any civil matters related to their
cases, but as the need became clearer, N.D.S. set
up a civil team consisting of a staff attorney, an
administrative assistant, and a lawyer on loan from
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, a prestigious
New York firm with a commitment to public interest
law.

The civil team expired with the original N.D.S.
funding in June 1996, but Leonard Noisette hopes to
revive it soon. During its years of operation, the
civil team made a point of filing lawsuits against
the city for clients who said they had been abused
by the police. "We only did this litigation if our
clients had tried to obtain a private lawyer and
had been unable to do so," said Martha Rayner, who
led the civil team. "We weren't interested in
taking work away from private lawyers." Nor were
N.D.S. or its clients necessarily interested in
cashing in on such matters. Rayner recalled the
typical case of a 15-year-old arrested and held in
handcuffs for reasons that turned out to be
"incredibly petty" but did not lead to any criminal
charges.

The youngster felt insulted and frustrated, and
after N.D.S. lawyers disposed of the criminal
matter, they filed a suit for false arrest. The
case ended in a small monetary settlement and, more
important to the client, a conversation with the
arresting officer mediated by a judge. "Our client
felt like this was a really wonderful opportunity
for him to say what he needed to say," Rayner
recalled. "Whether that made a huge difference in
his life, I don't know. But he had a chance to
regain some of his dignity, having felt really
violated by the police, and in a lot of our police
misconduct litigation, that's oftentimes what our
clients want."

------------------------------

The Impact of the Neighborhood Defender Service on
Case Outcomes

In 1993 researchers at the Vera Institute of
Justice compared a sample of cases handled by the
Neighborhood Defender Service with similar cases
handled by traditional defenders in the same New
York City courts. They began with all cases begun
at N.D.S. during a 6-month period in 1991 and a
second 6-month period in 1992. Using a data set
containing all cases arraigned in New York County
during those months, the researchers located the
N.D.S. cases and, for each case, located a matched
non-N.D.S. case. In creating the comparison groups,
two cases were considered matched if the two
defendants:

o Were the same gender.

o Were members of the same race or ethnic group.

o Were in the same age group.

o Had the same number of prior felony convictions.

o Had the same number of prior misde-meanor
convictions.

o Had the same number of open cases.

o Had been arrested on a charge of the same level
of severity.

o Had been arrested on a charge of the same type.

o Had been arrested on additional charges of the
same level of severity.

This process found matches for 732 N.D.S. cases.

A matched sample was needed because N.D.S. cases
were generally more serious than typical cases in
New York County. Whereas the majority of arrestees
in the county were charged with misdemeanor
offenses, over two-thirds (69 percent) of those
defendants represented by N.D.S. were arrested on
felony charges. The most common arrest charge for
N.D.S. clients was drug related (47 percent),
followed by harm to persons (16 percent), harm to
persons and property (12 percent), and property
crimes (11 percent). For only 30 percent of the
defendants, the arrest that brought them into the
sample was their first; yet the great majority (69
percent) had no prior felony convictions, and a
similar proportion (63 percent) had no prior
misdemeanor convictions.

The researchers compared the outcomes of court
proceedings between the matched pairs of cases on
four measures that might be related to the
effectiveness of counsel: release at first
appearance, speed of disposition, conviction, and
sentence. The research showed no significant
difference between the chance of release at first
appearance, the speed of disposition, time in
pretrial detention, or the chance of conviction
between the two samples, but it did find
statistically significant differences in the
sentences imposed across the matched pairs of
N.D.S. and non-N.D.S. cases. Neighborhood Defender
Service clients in the sample were sentenced to a
total of 78,153 days of incarceration; their
matched counterparts with traditional
representation were sentenced to a total of 117,913
days.

------------------------------

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------------------------------

About This Study

This Program Focus was written by David C.
Anderson, a former member of the New York Times
editorial board and the former editor of Police
Magazine and Corrections Magazine. He is the author
of Crimes of Justice: Improving the Police, the
Courts, the Prisons and Crime and the Politics of
Hysteria: How the Willie Horton Story Changed
American Justice.

Findings and conclusions reported here are those of
the author and do not necessarily reflect the
official position or policies of the U.S.
Department of Justice.

------------------------------

The National Institute of Justice is a component of
the Office of Justice Programs, which also includes
the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Bureau of Justice
Statistics, Office of Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention, and Office for Victims of
Crime.

NCJ 163061

March 1997