Public defense in the United States is not just underfunded but also understudied. In their forthcoming article, David Abrams and Priyanka Goonetilleke empirically examine, for the first time, an essential question about public defense: What difference does vertical representation make?
Criminal justice advocates, scholars, and the American Bar Association strongly favor vertical representation—where a single public defender represents a defendant throughout their case—over horizontal representation, where different attorneys handle different stages.
This article provides the first empirical analysis of how attorney continuity affects criminal case outcomes. Using a natural experiment created by the Defender Association of Philadelphia’s transition from horizontal to partially vertical representation, the authors provide the first empirical analysis of how attorney continuity affects criminal case.