The impact of defense counsel at bail hearings.
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Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 37146147.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1126/sciadv.ade3909 and PMC identifier 10162660.
- Licence recorded as CC BY-NC.
- Because redistribution is not established, this page shows the abstract only. Follow the links below for the full text.
Abstract
Roughly half of U.S. counties do not provide defense counsel at bail hearings, and few studies have documented the potential impacts of legal representation at this stage. This paper presents the results from a field experiment in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, that provided a public defender at a defendant's initial bail hearing. The presence of a public defender decreased the use of monetary bail and pretrial detention without increasing failure to appear rates at the preliminary hearing. The intervention did, however, result in a short-term increase in rearrests on theft charges, although a theft incident would have to be at least 8.5 times as costly as a day in detention for jurisdictions to find this tradeoff undesirable.