Poor criminal defendants in Pennsylvania can sue their counties when they believe inadequate funding of public defender offices will infringe on their Sixth Amendment right to counsel, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ruled in a case that attracted the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice and American Bar Association.
As the only state that provides no funding for indigent defense, Pennsylvania’s public defender offices rely entirely on their county commissioners for their budgets. In many counties, such as Luzerne County, the subject of the ruling in Kuren v. Luzerne County, the result is an office full of overworked, underpaid attorneys with insufficient resources to give their clients adequate representation, according to members of the public defense community.
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