Resource-strapped public defenders can usually only provide direct client services. Meanwhile, police and prosecutors get to lobby for legislative changes. In Illinois, we are upending that status quo.
By Sharone R. Mitchell, Jr. | Published in Inquest
One of the fundamental injustices of the U.S. criminal legal system is that who ends up in court has more to do with how much money they have in their pocket than almost anything else. Across the country, the vast majority of people who find themselves being arrested and prosecuted are poor.
Enter public defenders, who carry the responsibility of defending folks who cannot afford to hire private lawyers. The public defense system is the greatly imperfect solution that resulted, more than sixty years ago this Wednesday, from the Supreme Court’s recognition in Gideon v. Wainwright that the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to counsel. And because the vast majority of people in the legal system cannot afford to pay for counsel, public defenders represent the vast majority of people in the system. The Law Office of the Cook County Public Defender, which I head and which covers the city of Chicago and more than 120 suburbs, represents tens of thousands of people every year.
The volume of work is overwhelming—and here I am speaking on behalf of public defense agencies nationwide—and it means that our offices have been forced to focus our limited resources exclusively on direct representation. Meanwhile, police and prosecutors—often enjoying blank checks from local governments—have feasted on this imbalance. They’ve used their public relations staff to shape public narratives and successfully lobbied for laws written from the perspective that if we just punished people harder and for longer, all the harm produced by the inequities in our society would magically disappear—or we’d at least feel safer. That addiction to jails and prisons as a catch-all solution has starved communities like mine of money and the freedom it grants—and it has also utterly failed to deliver the safety our communities deserve.
But a new day is coming. Public defender’s offices have increasingly started to realize that we have a duty to get ourselves off the hamster wheel. Client after client coming into the same failed system is not an outcome that we will meet with silence.
This year for the anniversary of Gideon, I’m reflecting on this hamster wheel of (in)justice and how we can change not just our experience as defenders but also the fate of our clients. My hope is for a future in which many of our would-be clients never meet us at all—because they are never arrested or charged.
Our office, like many others, has decided that it is time to take our advocacy from the courtroom to the statehouse. In the roughly four years since we began investing more heavily into policy advocacy, our efforts have helped protect pretrial reforms that made Illinois the first state in the nation to eliminate money bail, provided representation for those who are unfairly facing deportation, and expanded diversion opportunities for clients and communities who deserve help, not harm.
Alongside those banner efforts—often won in coalitions with nonprofit and grassroots partners, who do the essential work of base-building and community organizing—our office has also identified smaller wins no less essential for the improvement of our clients’ chances for success both in court and beyond. We’ve limited drug testing for cannabis and alcohol for people on probation—these are legal substances that adults under supervision should not be criminalized for using—and ensured there are fee waivers available for the cost of drug tests for people on probation.
Last spring, our first legislative session with a fully staffed policy team, we passed a total of five bills addressing issues ranging from clients found unfit to stand trial to the custody status of our child clients who are dually involved in both the delinquency and child welfare systems. Every bill we initiated was developed out of the practical experience of our on-the-ground experts, who every day help identify the achievable changes that might have never risen to the top of a legislator’s priority list if we had not been there to identify them and explain their impact.
Simultaneously, a growing public defender presence in our legislature has helped organize to defeat bad bills—not just the simple penalty enhancements and expansions of criminal offenses, but also the sneaky efforts like expanding hearsay exceptions or giving prosecutors more ways of introducing evidence of other crimes.
This isn’t sexy work, but it is the definition of public defense. Our practitioners’ experience representing clients is reflected in each piece of feedback we provide to change what the law becomes. And we do this work on behalf of our future clients whose cases we will litigate under those statutes now informed, for the first time, by both sides of the criminal courtroom.
Last year, public defenders in Illinois even took on the fundamental power imbalance and underfunding we’re all so familiar with: we passed the first major systemic reform to public defense in more than eighty years. Illinois was an outlier nationally as one of only five states that had no statewide oversight or standards for our purely county-based public defenders. Last year, working with public defenders and advocates around the state, we were proud to contribute our office’s capacity and policy expertise to pass the Funded Advocacy & Independent Representation (FAIR) Act, which is on track to provide defenders in Illinois with the independence from political and judicial interference and, eventually, the resources we need to better serve our clients. Defenders from across the state who had never before engaged in the state legislative process actively shaped public defense reform and, thus, our own futures.
I’m proud that our office can use our unique capacity to stand up for the fair treatment of all our clients—even the ones with the hardest cases and those facing the most serious accusations. As public defenders, ours is not a legislative agenda many nonprofits or community organizations would choose. The poor people who end up being our clients don’t usually have lobbyists fighting for their interests, so we have stepped up. We are proud to be protecting their rights in the state capitol, whether we ever have, or ever will, represent them in court.
Make no mistake: our first and most central responsibility will always be to our current clients, each of whom deserves the best possible outcome in their individual case. But we also have a duty to our future clients, our communities, and our profession to fight against the systems that, left to their own devices, will continue to produce injustice after injustice. We only hope that more join our fight.
Link to article via Inquest: https://inquest.org/public-defense-goes-to-the-capitol/
March 17, 2026