A draft of a report to be released next month calls for the creation of a statewide office in Pennsylvania to oversee the representation of poor people in the criminal justice system, concluding that the current system “labors under an obsolete, purely localized system, a structure that impedes efforts to represent clients effectively.”
Although the draft, 151-page report is highly critical of the current state of indigent defense in the commonwealth — Pennsylvania is the only state that provides no funding to defend the poor — it suggests that the statewide office incorporate the current county-by-county structure of the public defenders’ offices.