Suburban caseload ecstacies

Seth Abramson has returned from the NLADA training in Dayton with some fresh insights about public defense in the USA:

What I learned is that the sort of caseloads we see here in New England (55 to 80 distinct clients at any one time) are in no way representative of public defense in America. In fact, it's far more typical for a public defender to have 200 to 250 clients at a time. Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that I met, in Dayton, a multitude of honest, hard-working, well-intentioned folks who were absolutely and irretrievably in over their heads.

My only quibble is, he needed to go to an out-of-state CLE to realize this?