Is Your Lawyer a Lemon? Incentives and Selection in the Public Provision of Criminal Defense

Amanda Agan, Matthew Freedman and Emily Owens

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2021, vol. 103, issue 2, 294-309

Abstract: Governments in the United States must offer free legal services to low-income people accused of crimes. To provide these services, many jurisdictions rely on assigned counsel systems, where private attorneys represent indigent defendants on a contract basis. These defendants are more likely to be convicted and incarcerated than defendants with privately retained attorneys. Using detailed court records, we investigate the mechanisms behind this disparity and consider their policy implications. We find that adverse selection among lawyers is not the primary contributor to the assigned counsel penalty. We conclude that reform efforts should address moral hazard in assigned counsel systems.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_00891
Access to PDF is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Is Your Lawyer a Lemon? Incentives and Selection in the Public Provision of Criminal Defense (2018)
Working Paper: Is Your Lawyer a Lemon? Incentives and Selection in the Public Provision of Criminal Defense (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:restat:v:103:y:2021:i:2:p:294-309

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().