By The Editors

A ruling this week by New York’s highest court has opened the way for a legal challenge to the state’s widely-criticized public-defender system on the grounds that it has failed to provide adequate assistance to poor people charged with crimes.

Johanna Steinberg, Assistant Counsel in the Criminal Justice Practice Group of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., said the court’s ruling “marks an important step forward in addressing devastating failures in New York’s indigent defense system, failures which disproportionately affect African Americans. It will increase the momentum for reform across the country.”

Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, writing for the court’s 4-to-3 majority, said there was “considerable risk that indigent defendants are, with a fair degree of regularity, being denied constitutionally mandated counsel” at every stage of their involvement in the criminal justice process, putting them in danger of “grave and irreparable injury.”

The ruling came in a class-action suit that specifically challenged the performance of the public-defender system in five counties across New York State. But it will affect the entire statewide system and is expected to spur or strengthen similar challenges to asserted ineffective state support of public-defender systems across the country. Numerous states have faced such challenges, with settlements in some that have led to improvements in providing effective defense attorneys for the poor.