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Standard Seventeen: Non-Discrimination
- American Bar Association Standards for Criminal Justice, Providing Defense Services, Standard 5-3.1, Chief Defender and Staff:
- The defender should be sensitive to all of the problems of his client community and particularly sensitive to the difficulty generally experienced by the members of such community in comprehending his role. Specifically, he should be concerned with the following:
- He should seek, by all possible and ethical means, to interpret the process of plea-bargaining and the defender's role in it to the client community, as this is a traditional area of relationship difficulty.
- He should maintain a personal sensitivity to the fact that, to the extent that he and his office "belong" to any group more than any other group, they "belong" to the client community.
- He should seek to maintain a representative cross-section of the ethnic and other groups which characterize the client community among his staff.
- He should, where feasible, seek office locations, which will not cause the defender's office to be excessively identified with the judicial and law enforcement components of the criminal justice system, and should make every effort to have the office or offices within the neighborhoods from which clients come.
- He should be available to schools in the community and to local organizations to educate members in the community as to their rights.
- He should maintain close relationships with legal service groups within the community, with public interest groups, and with organized groups within the client community.
- Selection of the chief defender and staff should be made on the basis of merit and should be free from political, racial, religious, sexual, ethnic, and other considerations extraneous to professional competence. Recruitment should include special efforts to employ attorney candidates from minority groups which are substantially represented in the defender program's client populations. The chief defender and staff should be compensated at the rate commensurate with their experience and skill sufficient to attract career personnel and comparable to that provided for their counterparts in prosecutorial offices. The chief defender should be appointed for a fixed term of years and be subject to renewal. Neither the chief defender nor staff should be removed except upon a showing of good cause. Selection of the chief defender and staff by judges should be prohibited.
National Legal Aid and Defender Association, Standards for Defender Services, 1976, Standard III-8:
P/T Paralegal - TDA
