![]() ![]() In a county with a public defender office, the state imposes minimal requirements about: public defender office space the selection of the public defender the amount of the county public defender’s compensation the number and compensation of assistant public defenders or support staff in that office and whether and when private attorneys should be appointed to handle indigent defense cases, and how those private lawyers should be compensated. Today, all 102 counties have a public defender office, but in 60 of these counties the county board can wholly eliminate the public defender office and all of its employees (both attorneys and non-attorney staff) at any time, for any reason or no reason. State law automatically creates a public defender office in the 42 most populous counties, while the other 60 counties can choose whether to have a public defender office. State law requires that all representation of indigent people in the Illinois circuit courts is provided either through a public defender office, through private attorneys, or through both. The State of Illinois delegates to its counties and trial court judges the responsibility for providing and overseeing attorneys to effectively represent indigent defendants in the trial courts, and it delegates to its counties nearly all of the responsibility for funding the right to counsel of those indigent defendants. ![]() The ABCs of Illinois’ trial-level indigent defense systems The detailed examination, explained briefly here, shows how and why the State of Illinois is defaulting on its constitutional right to counsel obligations and what can be done to fix it. On June 8, 2021, 6AC published its report, The Right to Counsel in Illinois: Evaluation of Adult Criminal Trial-Level Indigent Defense Services, culminating a multi-year, statewide study of the provision of the right to counsel in Illinois in adult criminal cases at the trial level, conducted at the request of the Illinois Supreme Court and the Administrative Office of Illinois Courts. Under Gideon, it is the state that is obligated to provide the Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel in the state courts. Supreme Court declared it is an “obvious truth” that anyone accused of a crime who cannot afford the cost of a lawyer “cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him.” In the intervening years, the Court has clarified that the Sixth Amendment right to counsel means every person who is accused of a crime is entitled to have an attorney provided at government expense to defend him in all federal and state courts whenever that person is facing the potential loss of his liberty and is unable to afford his own attorney. ![]()
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