Andrew Davies on Rural Access to Counsel

In this episode, Andrew Davies, Director of Research at the SMU Deadman School of Law's Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center, discusses his article Gideon in the Desert: An Empirical Study of Providing Counsel to Criminal Defendants in Rural Places, published in the Maine Law Review 2019 symposium edition. Davies discusses the issue of rural indigent defense as an issue of scarcity of resources, then explains what is required on the Gideon/Argersinger/Scott line of cases. He the explains how he went about capturing and theorizing access to counsel when collecting and analyzing data from over one hundred rural Texas counties. Davies then discusses the differences in access to counsel between urban and rural counties, while identifying the traits that make some rural counties better at consistently providing indigent defense than others. Dr. Davies's research is available on SSRN, and you can find him on Twitter at @AndySMUDeason.This episode was hosted by Maybell Romero, Assistant Professor of Law at Northern Illinois University College of Law. Romero is on Twitter at @MaybellRomero. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.