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Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts has proudly given our support to HB3363, also known as the Funded Advocacy & Independent Representation (FAIR) Act, which successfully passed out of the Illinois House last week.

The FAIR Act would create an Office of State Public Defender in Illinois to better distribute funding to county Public Defender’s Offices based on need, require the collection and distribution of data on public defense, and increase the autonomy of public defenders by ensuring that their hiring is protected from judicial and political influence.

Equal access to justice for Illinoisians has been deferred for far too long. Illinois is one of three states with no statewide body ensuring that people who cannot afford private attorneys are given a vigorous defense. Prosecution in Illinois receives almost twice as much funding as public defense, leading to an inequitable system in which public defenders are overworked and underpaid. This unequal system is not only a barrier to high-quality public defense but also creates a lack of trust with the people public defenders represent, as clients may feel their defense is inadequate or influenced by the judges and politicians who determine their funding. 

Illinois is one of just seven states lacking statewide oversight or standards for trial-level public defense, and its public defense structure has been mostly unchanged for 75 years. Our state is short nearly 900 public defense attorneys, and disproportionately lacks public defenders in rural areas, with 60% of Illinois counties having no office of public defense and hiring private attorneys on a part-time basis to cover gaps. The Cook County Public Defender’s Office, for example, has a shortfall of nearly 150 public defenders and hundreds of support staff. Defenders with enormous case loads are at risk of not providing the effective counsel required by the Sixth Amendment, as expanded in Strickland..

Funding disparities between prosecutors’ and public defenders’ budgets exist in every county and primarily impact the rural, Black, and Latine clients who are most likely to use the public defender’s representation. 

Since the statewide elimination of money bond in 2023 as a result of the Pretrial Fairness Act, conditions and detention hearings are longer and held on a tighter schedule, giving the defense more opportunity to prepare evidence and provide an adequate defense for the accused. This change has benefitted accused people by empowering their defense to prepare evidence to argue for their release, but the new nature of the system has also revealed the lack of equity, independence, and resources for Illinois’ public defenders and made repairing this lack even more urgent. The Office of the State Public Defender and the State Public Defender Commission, which the FAIR Act would create, would work together to develop professional standards, workload guidelines, enhanced training, and coordinated recruitment.

Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts values court accessibility, accountability, transparency, equity, and community autonomy and is a proud member of the Coalition to End Money Bond and the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice. We staunchly support the FAIR Act’s mission to provide oversight, expand resources, and establish standards to ensure that every indigent defendant is zealously represented by their public defender. The FAIR Act is just the first step to this. We additionally urge increased funding to our public defense system.

To learn more about the FAIR Act and support its cause, visit https://fairactil.org/.