Maybell Romero, Rural Public Defenders

Maybell Romero was our third speaker in the Rural Law and Policy Series. She is a legal scholar who specializes in rural criminal justice systems. Her talk, Rural Public Defenders, can be viewed by clicking below:

bio

Maybell Romero researches in the areas of criminal law, criminal legal system ethics, constitutional law, and juvenile justice. A major focus of her research is rural criminal legal systems. Maybell Romero is currently an associate professor of law at Northern Illinois University College of Law. During a decade of legal practice in Utah, she served as both a state’s attorney and defense attorney and handled child welfare and civil litigation matters. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law (2006), where she was the editor-in-chief of the Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law, and holds a B.A. from Cornell University (2003).

abstract

Scholars and policymakers have begun to focus on the deleterious effects of the privatization of different functions in both the criminal adjudicative system and criminal legal system on the whole. Much of this attention lately has been directed to privatized police forces, privatized prisons, and even privatized prosecutors. As important as the examination of privatization and outsourcing in these arenas is, the role of the privatized public defender—in particularly, the rural public defender—gets lost in the shuffle. This Article highlights such public defenders, especially in the rural context, and the specific ethical conundrums that arise when local governments such as counties and cities decide to privatize their public defense services through the use of competitive bidding. The Article then discusses the specific perverse incentives that rural public defenders face and burden under when their services are procured by way of competitive bid, not with the intention of arguing that such services should never be bid out but rather that any jurisdiction using such a system should be fully cognizant of the risks they incur when choosing to do so. The Article then suggests potential interventions that may be employed to mitigate or even eliminate some of the troubling aspects of using competitive bidding to procure rural indigent defense services. 

other work by Maybell Romero

You can find more of Maybell’s work here.

She is also on Twitter @MaybellRomero.