Pay to Play? Campaign Finance and the Incentive Gap in the Sixth Amendment's Right to Counsel

Abstract

For nearly 60 years, the U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed that the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees felony defendants the right to counsel, regardless of their ability to pay. Yet nearly all criminal procedure scholars agree that indigent defense as practiced today falls far short of its initial promise. These scholars frequently cite a lack of political support, insufficient public funding, and a failure to address instances of inadequate legal representation, among other things, as causes for the underlying systemic dysfunction.

We contend that these conventional critiques are incomplete. Rather, indigent defense systems often fail due to poor design: they do not align publicly funded defense attorneys with their clients’ best interests. This is particularly true when courts appoint private attorneys to represent indigent defendants for a fee, as is done in hundreds of jurisdictions across the United States. We explain how such assignment systems create an “incentive gap” that financially motivates defense attorneys to maximize their caseloads but minimize their efforts.

We then show how campaign finance exacerbates this problem. Specifically, we provide empirical evidence that elected trial court judges and criminal defense attorneys regularly engage in “pay to play,” where judges appoint attorneys who donate to their campaigns as counsel for indigent defendants. We find trial judges routinely accept such donations, often as apparent “entry fees” from attorneys who have just become eligible for appointments. These judges, in turn, typically award their donors more than double the cases they award to non-donors, with the average donor attorney earning greater than a 27-fold return on her donation. Indeed, we find indigent defense appointments can be surprisingly lucrative, with many donor attorneys earning tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars across the hundreds of cases assigned to them by their donee judges.

Worse, this apparent quid pro quo between judges and defense attorneys appears to directly harm defendants. We find that defense attorneys who donate to a judge are, if anything, less successful than non-donor attorneys in attaining charge reductions, dismissals, and acquittals, or avoiding prison sentences. We contend donor attorneys might underperform simply because they take on so many more cases from their donee judges, and hence spend less time on each matter.

Our study is the first empirical analysis of how campaign finance distorts criminal trial court decision-making. While our data are from Harris County (Houston), Texas—the nation’s third most populous county — we show that pay to play is probably endemic across that state. Indeed, similar problems likely affect millions of Americans, as trial judges who control indigent defense assignments in many other states — including California, Georgia, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio, among others — accept attorney donations to fund their electoral campaigns. Unless substantial reforms are made to address the corrosive influence of campaign finance on criminal defense, the Sixth Amendment’s right to counsel will continue to ring hollow for millions of indigent defendants.

Keywords: assigned counsel, right to counsel, campaign finance, indigent defense, Gideon v. Wainwright, incentive gap, quid pro quo, campaign donation, judicial election

JEL Classification: K14, K40, K41