Attorney-client relationships in a criminal court in Santa Clara County, California

Abstract

This report describes—and offers recommendations for improving—the quality of attorney-client relationships in a criminal courthouse in Santa Clara County, California. We draw on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations collected between July 2021 and June 2022 from the Hall of Justice, one of four state courthouses in Santa Clara County that deals with adult criminal cases. Interviews with a diverse sample of 37 defendants suggest that they hold mostly positive views of their relationships with defense attorneys, though such perceptions vary by type of counsel and income. Moreover, among those who hold positive perceptions of their current defense lawyers, some defendants expressed negative attitudes toward, and recounted negative experiences with, current and previous lawyers. Ethnographic observations of public court proceedings further reveal recurring negative attorney-client relationship attributes, including silencing and sidelining, miscommunication, brevity of interaction, and cooperation with the state (or, coercion). We conclude with several immediate and long-range suggestions for improving the quality of defense provision in the county.

Racial Disparities in Arrests in Santa Clara County, California, 1980-2019

“…Although we cannot be certain, we suspect that most of the "Other" category consists of Asian people, who are not separately classified in the data but who currently make up more than a third of the county's population. Indeed, our ethnographic observations of the Hall of Justice, a courthouse in San Jose, California, from 2021-2022 suggest that a meaningful number of criminal defendants in Santa Clara County are Asian (Duarte, Hunt, and Clair 2022;Hunt, Nmai, and Clair 2022).…”