Gaining Access to Justice: A Subnational Study of the Public Defender’s Office in Mexico
With the transition to democracy, Latin American countries have embarked on implementing judicial reforms to redesign justice-sector institutions and build up the rule of law in the region. Reform efforts included empowe¬ring the courts, granting political independence to the public prosecutor’s off...
| Autor: | |
|---|---|
| Formato: | artículo |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2021 |
| País: | México |
| Recursos: | UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL AUTÓNOMA DE MÉXICO |
| Repositorio: | Mexican Law Review |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/15089 |
| Acesso em linha: | https://revistas.juridicas.unam.mx/index.php/mexican-law-review/article/view/15089 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palavra-chave: | Judicial reform public defenders legal representation accusatory criminal justice procedure merit-based career system Reforma judicial defensores públicos defensa legal sistema penal acusatorio servicio civil de carrera |
| Resumo: | With the transition to democracy, Latin American countries have embarked on implementing judicial reforms to redesign justice-sector institutions and build up the rule of law in the region. Reform efforts included empowe¬ring the courts, granting political independence to the public prosecutor’s office, professionalizing the public defender offices and implementing the accusatory criminal system in justice-sector institutions. To what extent are the reforms tar¬geted at the public defender offices changing the way legal defense is provided? In this article, after discussing a theoretical framework that captures and opera¬tionalizes the concepts of a merit-based career system, an accusatory criminal justice system and effective legal representation, I examine the extent to which the changes of transitioning from an inquisitorial to an adversarial system and from a non-merit-based career system to a merit-based career system have affec¬ted the way legal counsel is provided at subnational public defender offices. To accomplish this, I provide both a de jure and de facto measures (indicators of reform implementation). To identify the de jure indicators, I consulted legal texts (constitutions and secondary laws), and to gauge how the de facto indi¬cators work, I relied on interviews with public defenders, reports and academic documents. I collected 50 interviews with public defense attorneys from three Mexican states: Baja California Sur, Jalisco and Nuevo León. Findings from these states suggest that as reform implementation advances, public defenders have more tools to offer legal representation; more specifically, they are better trained, in addition to having higher salaries, a lower caseload per defender and increased access to forensic services. |
|---|