Justice for all
Shapiro’s budget should lay groundwork for constitutional indigent defense, education
The delivery of Gov. Josh Shapiro’s first budget to the General Assembly on Tuesday should represent more than a set of priorities for 2023-2024: It ought to commit state government to a more fair, just and equitable commonwealth in the 21st century, and propose a significant down-payment toward achieving those goals.
That will mean fixing long-term, systemic problems in the state’s education and indigent defense systems. Both continue to rank near the bottom in equity, while raising constitutional questions about their insidious and noxious effects on Pennsylvania’s people. Neither fix will be fast, cheap or easy, but they are fundamental to the state’s future. Both will take the state’s best bipartisan efforts throughout Mr. Shapiros four-year, or even eightyear, tenure.
Reform education funding
No state can provide equal opportunity without providing an equitable and adequate public education.
Pennsylvania’s system of funding local public schools subverts the educations of hundreds of thousands of children. The Commonwealth Court ruled last month that it violates the state’s constitutional mandate to provide a “thorough and efficient” education for all students.
Whether or not House Republicans appeal the decision, the state must start to repair the egregious, longstanding gaps in school funding that discriminate against children in poor school districts, including South Allegheny, East Allegheny, New Castle and Philadelphia. Gaps in education funding undermine academic achievement and, ultimately, exact significant criminal justice and social service costs, as well as lost productivity and jobs.
Owing to an excessive reliance on local property taxes, funding gaps between the wealthiest and poorest districts in Pennsylvania are the nation’s widest, favoring districts with an abundant tax base. Narrowing those gaps will require more state funding, either by expanding the “fair funding” or “level up” programs, or through some other formula.
Now, state funding provides only a third of local school budgets. Only a handful of states provide less.
Experts for the plaintiffs have estimated that raising state school funding to constitutional standards would cost an added $4.6 billion. Whatever the costs ultimately total, the state will need to put a significant down-payment on them next year.
Justice for all
On indigent defense — ensuring fair and adequate legal services to all — the state is doing even worse. Pennsylvania has become a McJustice state for those who can’t afford a lawyer, with a hodgepodge of fast, cheap and ineffective legal services that fail to meet even minimal constitutional standards. Pennsylvania is one of only two states where local public defender offices operate without state funding or uniform standards, resulting in justice by geography. Starting salaries for public defenders are, in general, abysmal, and court-appointed attorneys are compensated by flat fees, regardless of the complexity of the case.
Mr. Shapiro’s budget address Tuesday must underscore the need for a state office that provides adequate funding and uniform standards for indigent defense.
That won’t be cheap, but the costs of doing nothing are higher. Poor legal services have exacted hundreds of millions of dollars for, among
other things, inflated prisoner sentences, court-ordered retrials, incarcerating the innocent and wrongful conviction lawsuits. Annual incarceration costs in Pennsylvania are more than $40,000 for each prisoner.
No one knows how many innocent people are among the state’s more than 36,000 prisoners, but more than 100 people have been exonerated. Since 1976, in Pennsylvania’s capital cases alone, hundreds of prisoners have been resentenced and 10 exonerated. It’s a chilling indictment of a substandard system of legal defense in a state that still has a death-penalty statute.
To his credit, Mr. Shapiro took a big first step toward eliminating the system’s worst risk — executing the innocent — by refusing to sign death warrants and calling on state legislators to abolish capital punishment. Still, the costs and injustices of substandard legal services to the poor are spread throughout the criminal justice system.
Pennsylvania has made a mockery of the Gideon case, decided unanimously by the U.S. Supreme Court 60 years ago. The landmark decision established the constitutional right to legal counsel and an adequate defense for the accused, regardless of income.
It’s time to make real in Pennsylvania the constitutional rights to an adequate and equitable legal defense and education. That will take years but, by committing the state to those goals Tuesday and proposing sufficient funding to move forward, Gov. Shapiro in his first two months would lay the groundwork for establishing equal justice and opportunity in Pennsylvania.