NAPD’s First Convening on Public Defense Independence is Coming this Month
For the first time in NAPD’s history, we are hosting a convening dedicated entirely to public defense independence. It grows directly out of the work of the NAPD and ABA Task Force on Public Defense Independence, and it brings together roughly 40 public defenders, advocates, policy leaders and researchers from across the country.
The convening will take place August 12th to 14th at the Johnson Foundation at Wingspread in Racine, Wisc., and we’re deeply grateful to the Foundation for its support in making this gathering possible.
For three days, participants will work through what structural, leadership, and line-attorney independence require in practice, testing our thinking against real cases from Oregon, Nevada, Louisiana, Montana, and Pennsylvania’s Luzerne and Montgomery Counties. The group will also dig into funding and prosecutor relationships and will work toward measurable ways to evaluate what independence delivers for clients.
Malia Brink, Policy Director at the Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center at SMU, and Keisha Hudson, Chief Defender at the Defender Association of Philadelphia, are serving as workgroup co-chairs and helping lead the sessions.
“NAPD is bringing together the people who have lived through the fights over independence and asking them to help us get the standards right. I’m proud of what this Task Force has built, and I’m looking forward to seeing the results of this extremely important event,” said Anthony Benedetti, NAPD President and Chief Counsel of the Committee for Public Counsel Services, Massachusetts’s statewide public defense agency.
“Every member of NAPD knows what it feels like to ask for a resource your client needs and get told no, or to worry that pushing back too hard on a caseload could cost you your job. That’s what independence protects against. This convening is where we turn that into standards the whole field can use,” said Lori James, NAPD Executive Director.
The Johnson Foundation has spent more than six decades convening leaders on the country’s toughest challenges. It was established in 1959 when industrialist H.F. Johnson Jr. donated Wingspread to promote what he called “the free exchange of constructive and purposeful ideas.” Wingspread has since hosted the founding conversations behind the National Endowment for the Arts, National Public Radio, and the International Criminal Court, along with landmark initiatives like the 1983 Policy Framework for Racial Justice.
We’re glad to bring public defense independence into that legacy, and confident the Foundation’s proven convening process will help this group turn hard conversations into real consensus.
We will share updates from Wingspread as the convening unfolds, and we will provide more information on next steps once the group wraps up on August 14.