Maryland Office of the Public Defender

The National Public Defender Workload Study was released on Sept. 12 and is a collaboration between the RAND Corp., National Center for State Courts, American Bar Association Standing Committee on Legal Aid and Indigent Defense and Law Office of Stephen Hanlon in St. Louis.

Maryland leads the country in an alarming datapoint: seventy percent of the state’s prison population is African American, in a state that is only one-third Black. We speak with the attorney general and the state’s top public defender about a new effort to end this disparity.

The Maryland Defenders Union formed in 2020 seeking improvements in workload, pay and retention and represents more than 600 employees across the state.

Syed's defense attorney discusses his release Monday after 23 years in prison, and the work of the Innocence Project, a collaboration between UBalt School of Law and the Maryland Office of the Public Defender.

Maryland’s public defenders have announced their intent to unionize. The lawyers and their support staff said unionizing will help ease the challenges of…