Contracted to Fail, Part 2: How Flat-Fee Contracts Undermine the Right to Counsel in California

New data reveals that California’s public defense caseload crisis is far worse than previously thought–with some lawyers handling 500 to 600 cases a year. This Part 2 report, written with Berkeley Law’s Criminal Law & Justice Center, addresses California’s continued use of flat-fee contracts to privatize public defense, paying for-profit lawyers and firms a lump sum to handle a limitless number of cases. 

Part 1 focused on how these contracts are structured, how they have been empirically shown to drive mass incarceration, and the long history of them being condemned by everyone from the State Bar to the ABA.  Part 2 looks under the hoods of several counties’ flat-fee systems and finds astronomical caseloads far beyond what has ever been publicly reported in California.