Partners for Justice: Reimagining Our Legal Infrastructure
There is a group of people in America who go to work every day to protect our fundamental rights—who defend individuals and the Constitution in court, acting as a last bulwark against government overreach. They are the country's public defenders. Emily Galvin Almanza takes us behind the closed doors of America's criminal courts to shed light on the system and advocate for a reimagining of our legal infrastructure.
A third of Americans have had a loved one represented by a public defender.1
Public defenders are free lawyers. In America, we only get free lawyers in one context, which is criminal court—if your liberty or your life is on the line, the U.S. Constitution says you have the right to counsel. For that reason, every jurisdiction in America has the ability to appoint a lawyer in a criminal case if a person cannot afford to pay for one themselves.
This looks different from place to place—in some places, public defenders are government attorneys working in a governmental agency, while in others they may work at a nonprofit public defender that holds a contract with the jurisdiction, while in yet other places they might be part of a network of local lawyers who get assigned to public defense cases. Across America’s five thousand nine hundred defender agencies, both the nature and quality of practice vary.2 A public defender’s office with more resources will be able to do stronger work than an under-resourced, overworked agency. And a public defender with a culture of commitment to client-led service and creating an empowering, high-quality defense for each person they serve will do better than an office where the lingering power dynamics of poverty lawyering have taken over and created cultural toxicity. So like anything else, defenders are not all alike. But they are all dedicated to the zealous, skilled defense of low-income people who stand accused, and they are also a last bulwark against government overreach and the intractable impulses of law enforcement to trample our Constitution.
At some point, every defender will be asked how we can represent “those people,” meaning “criminals.” I don’t love that word. I’ve represented people who have made devastatingly bad choices. I’ve represented people who had found themselves in a state where they could no longer control their behavior, for one reason or another. I’ve represented people who were operating under circumstances that I cannot personally imagine surviving. I’ve represented a lot of people who were innocent, a fact that I have noticed often surprises laypeople, because television tells us that most people who get arrested are guilty, while in real life most people who get arrested are poor, and may or may not be guilty.
The system looks very different from the inside than it does on the outside. The laws are not applied as they are written, they’re interpreted, letting all manner of human bias and opinion seep into the decision-making of courts. Exhaustion, jadedness, nihilism, and secondary trauma are everywhere, and since the court system isn’t just a machine—all these human emotions, irritations, and traumas come into play. The “law,” often perceived as objective, is applied so subjectively from place to place that two neighboring counties may in fact have unrecognizably different charges, procedures, and outcomes. People getting offered support and recovery in one town might have received hard time in the next town over. Even the language varies: an arraignment in New York might be magistration in Texas or callout in Louisiana.
So like everyone else who works in the criminal court system, we spend all day, every day, watching the law as it is practiced turn out to be nothing like the law you see on TV. But unlike everyone else in the legal system, we aren’t there to uphold the machine. We’re there to argue against the grinding of the machine’s gears, find flaws in the machine itself, object to it, and, sure, okay, sometimes rage against the machine. When we do this, we usually start by saying, “Judge, I have to make my record,” meaning that we know we’re getting shut down now, but we want to preserve all the wrongness we’re witnessing for a higher court, one that will review the transcripts from this day.
I spent ten years practicing in various Halls of Justice from California to New York, including at the legendary holistic defense practice the Bronx Defenders. After representing thousands of people, it became clear to me that there was a fundamental need in public defense that was, often, not being met. To truly defend someone, one must equip the defense team with the means to deal not only with the criminal case but with its drivers and fallout: loss of housing, employment, educational opportunity, health care. In 2018, I left trial work to start Partners for Justice (PFJ), a nonprofit supporting defenders around the country in filling that need. Our approach, termed Collaborative Defense, quickly took off, growing from two pilot locations in 2018 to more than forty locations by 2024.
In the early days of Partners for Justice, I was on the phone with a potential funder, standing in front of a laundromat in Laramie, Wyoming, where I had gone to visit my dad. The person on the other end was considering joining in the mission to expand public defense, but wasn’t so into resourcing a government service. I realized, then, how many people don’t understand the key factor that makes defenders a different part of the legal system: we are lawyers provided by the government, indeed, but we’re put there precisely to fight the government.
This also means that we are, in many ways, your best protection against government overreach— even if you think you will never break the law. The rights you think you have—the right to remain silent, to be safe from unreasonable searches of your home, car, or person, to speak privately with a lawyer if you’re in trouble, to be safe from unlawful interrogations, to have a fair trial—aren’t ironclad. They are under attack almost every day, because in an adversarial system it is the government’s prerogative to argue about why a judge should lessen or set aside an individual’s rights to give the government a little more leeway. When they do this, it erodes the Constitutional protections we all expect. The people standing between you and that erosion are public defenders, whose daily fight to preserve those rights for others will directly benefit you or your loved one, should you ever need those protections.
So that’s where we stand. Part of a system, but also trying to dismantle that system’s power, and carrying an almost sacred duty to fight that system at every turn. We are, essentially, outsiders operating on the inside. Unlike private attorneys, who may visit a given court system from time to time, I spent most of my waking hours inside the system, getting to know the people who work there, the incentives they labor under, the weird corners that can be cut, and the slippage between what the law says and what’s actually going to happen on any given day.
As public defenders, we see it all: how one-fifth of people confined to solitary stay in darkness for years on end;3 that 90 percent of children waive their right to a lawyer when in police custody,4 and, once interrogated without protection, over a third will falsely confess;5 that about a quarter of new prison admissions in this country aren’t due to new crimes, but to technical violations of parole.6 We bear witness to and do battle against the consequences of benighted public policy, because when voters mistake punishment for safety, they make policy choices that actively take us further from the kind of nation (or neighborhood) we want to live in.
Around the country, defenders are generally representing more people than we should—our caseloads are so high that studies, lawsuits, and strikes7 are all accumulating into an urgent chorus of calls for change. Our resources are also scarce. While prosecutors can review 100 percent of the evidence, use the police force and forensics labs as their investigative branch, and essentially create the cases they litigate, defenders are often dealing with “trial by ambush,” where courts can shove us—and our clients—out to trial when we’ve only been given much of the crucial evidence hours or even minutes beforehand.
Defenders and prosecutors also operate under wildly different incentives. Defenders are rewarded for standing up for fundamental rights, and for doing our best work to defend both the individual and the Constitution, whether we win or lose. We don’t come to this job for the money—there isn’t much—or the prestige—even less—but rather because we believe in the Constitution and we feel passionately about standing up for others and doing good. A lot of the feedback we receive is immediate, coming from the person we serve, and, at its best, can be a constant source of growth and moral alignment (at its worst, it’s getting yelled at by a sovereign citizen).
Prosecutors may face very different incentives, including pressure to secure convictions or risk their own advancement. I recognize that does not represent 100 percent of their profession, just as I do not represent or speak for all public defenders. I also recognize that there’s a lot of variance within this line of work: there are prosecutors who callously seek to advance themselves by stepping on the necks of the wrongfully convicted, and there are prosecutors who are actively and even heroically fighting for a safer and more just society. There are public defenders who dedicate their lives to free and equal justice, and there are public defenders who burned out long ago and are falling short of their duty of representation. There are police who pose a lethal threat to the citizenry, and there are police who genuinely just want to keep people safer. But these caveats aside, the rampant inequities of the criminal courts are largely not because of “bad” individuals, but rather arise from the system in which these individuals operate, and the incentives and beliefs that shape their actions.
That being said, bad incentives do not excuse oppression. And there are proven, exciting solutions that don’t just make us safer, but might also have great side effects like more hospitable neighborhoods or stronger public health.
On any given day, public defense work is a study in grief, recovery, agility, improvisation, and deep knowledge of the systems around us. We’ve got clients all over the courthouse, maybe ten cases set to be heard on an average morning, appearances on every floor, and that doesn’t even touch the jail visits, investigations in the field, or trips to talk with our clients and their families, wherever they may be. Defense is also, at its core, a service profession, meaning that if you’re a good defender, you’re delivering the kind of legal counsel and support that doesn’t just keep your client out of jail, but also takes into account their specific life circumstances. If a kid wants to go into the military, for example, a good lawyer isn’t just offering a one-size-fits-all deal but recognizing that 99 percent of case outcomes short of dismissal and expungement will destroy this kid’s dream, so we, as lawyers, have to do the extra work to not only end the case but do so in a way that keeps their hopes for the future alive. If you’re doing the job right, you’re learning a vast amount about each person you serve and, of course, the community in which they live.
This is one of the most misunderstood aspects of being a public defender. While we are publicly perceived as criminal defense counsel (which is true), the fact that we’re operating inside a system that can touch so many aspects of a person’s life—from housing to employment to health to children and families—means that we’re also doing a lot of other work. In holistic defense offices like Bronx Defenders, or in the collaborative defense offices I support in my current role, that other work may be quite overt; public defender attorneys may be collaborating with housing lawyers, civil rights lawyers, social workers, mental health treatment professionals, community organizers, employment advocates, and more to make sure that we, as a team, can fully address the fallout from a criminal case. But even in “regular” criminal defense, the role of the defender goes astonishingly far beyond litigation.
For example, when a defender helps secure a dismissal of charges, wins a trial, helps a client get their record expunged, or even negotiates a plea to a less damaging charge, they’re not just potentially preventing incarceration, but also doing direct economic mobility work by keeping their client more employable. Not to mention how often we find ourselves on the phone with someone’s boss, asking them not to terminate this person’s employment for having to come back to court again and again, explaining that the repeated days off are a feature of an overburdened court system rather than willful absenteeism by our client. When we prevent an unaffordable fine or fee from being imposed, or have a hearing that enables a client to keep their driver’s license, we’re keeping money in the pockets of people who can least afford to lose it. And, of course, incarceration itself is expensive, to the state, the incarcerated person, and their family. Public defenders play a vital role in preserving the economic well-being of low-income families and limiting the out-of-control government spending on incarceration.
When we help a client find a mental health or substance use treatment program that’s actually a good fit for their goals and needs, that isn’t just criminal defense, it’s the provision of health care. Every good defender has fielded those late-night calls from a person in crisis, ready to quit the program, and spent the hour it takes to talk our client through the moment of panic and support them in a decision to stick with recovery. Incarceration is so damaging to health—via trauma, creating and exacerbating chronic conditions, addictions, relapses, and exposing people to communicable disease without adequate access to medical care—that preventing incarceration may, in some cases, be as important to lifespan as quitting smoking. Yet few people ever talk about the role defenders play in improving and protecting public health.
All of these interventions aren’t just serving the individual client, but the public at large. Many of my clients have indeed done harm. If there’s some reason why they’re doing that (as there usually is), solving the problem—and helping them be less likely to engage in that harm again—doesn’t just benefit them, but everyone around them who might have been negatively impacted by their actions. Safety, after all, is collective. If I’m not doing well and I act on it, it impacts everyone around me. I cannot be individually “doing well” when my neighbors are unhoused, or unable to feed their kids, because their state of desperation will inevitably impact us all.
The system touches everything, and that pushes a lot of defenders to end up doing work in areas we never expected. We have to figure out whether we have the bandwidth and expertise to litigate school suspension hearings when our kid client will otherwise be alone against a government lawyer. We have to decide whether we have time before court to go through our client’s résumé and help them figure out how to talk about their open case in a job interview. There are more than forty thousand documented “collateral” consequences of having a criminal case.8 That’s a lot of complexities to heap onto the shoulders of under-resourced, overloaded defenders. The stakes, obviously, are highest not for us but for the person we’ve promised to protect. It’s amazing how often we manage to do so, against all odds.
This is not to say that there is nothing beautiful or worthy to be found in our legal system. If anything, my new book, The Price of Mercy, is a love letter to some of the best ideas of justice writ large, and to the future we could have, if we were willing to do the work of reimagining our legal infrastructure. This critique is an act of love. There is something touching, brave, and profoundly human about a nation that chooses to leave the finding of truth in the hands of an assemblage of strangers. A nation that gives ordinary people the franchise of jury service, and places, in the hands of our communities, so much power to determine what we collectively believe is right and wrong. There is wisdom in the testing of a story, in the cross examination of witnesses to try to highlight, for those finders of fact, any flaw that might crack the facade of credibility. Our adversarial system—were it able to actually include and represent the people it most impacts, and if it had the resources to offer people solutions instead of punishment—could be powerful, effective, and humane. If we want to make it better, we can choose to do so. I hope, after reading this, you’ll make that choice.
Adapted from The Price of Mercy, published by Crown. Copyright © 2026 by Emily Galvin Almanza. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Emily Galvin Almanza is the co-founder and executive director of Partners for Justice, a nonprofit creating a new collaborative model of public defense designed to empower defenders nationwide. Prior to founding PFJ, Emily fought for clients inside the L.A. County Public Defender’s Office, the Santa Clara County Public Defender’s Office, and the Bronx Defenders, and with the Stanford Three Strikes Project. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Teen Vogue, and Time, among other publications.
