Our criminal justice system is adversarial by design. Prosecuting attorneys work on one side of the aisle, and defense attorneys on the other. Defense lawyers play a critical role, as they serve as a check and balance on the near-limitless power of the prosecutor.

About a year ago, I wrote about Allegheny County’s broken system for providing defense counsel to poor people who cannot afford to hire a lawyer. At that time, I was hopeful that the courts would act soon to fix it. That failed to happen.

Which means that today in Allegheny County, the criminal legal system continues to treat you better “if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent.”

A groundbreaking report by the Rand Corporation, a renowned research institution, highlights the problem. The report confirmed that “(o)verloaded public defense attorneys simply cannot give appropriate time and attention to each client.”

When attorneys do not have enough time to serve their clients effectively, the justice system “risks unreliability, denying all people who rely on it — victims, witnesses, defendants and their families and communities — efficient, equal, and accurate justice.”

In a system where the accused consistently fails to receive an adequate defense, this “inevitably cause(s) harm.” Here is what that “harm” looks like for Allegheny County’s citizens: Innocent people are imprisoned. Young people with promising futures are unfairly branded with felony convictions. People with mental illnesses languish in jail when what they need is treatment.

“To avoid these harms,” and ensure that “attorneys have the time needed to” do their jobs properly, the Rand report establishes “new national public defense workload standards.”

Attorneys operating under Allegheny County’s court-run defense system do not come close to meeting those national standards.

As background, people facing criminal charges have a right to counsel. If they cannot afford to hire an attorney, the county has a legal and moral obligation to ensure that the accused still receives adequate counsel. The Public Defender’s Office represents many indigent (poor) defendants, but cannot handle every case. The local courts appoint and pay private attorneys to meet the excess demand. That court-run system is the focus here. Due to the high number of cases, every year, thousands of lives are impacted by the quality of court-appointed counsel.

Despite recent changes, the courts continue to mismanage the appointed-counsel system. The abysmally low pay rates, in particular, encourage attorneys to adopt a high-volume practice. The Rand report recognized the flaw in this approach. Because the “compensation received for each representation” locally is “so low,” attorneys must accept “far too many cases than is reasonable” in order “to sustain the financial viability of their legal practices.”

To illustrate the injustice of Allegheny County’s approach, consider this scenario: an 18-year old kid is charged with a felony for selling marijuana. Assume the young man is a first-time offender, and is otherwise a good kid. And also assume that he lives in Mt. Lebanon, and his family can afford to retain a skilled defense lawyer. That lawyer pulls out every stop to avoid a felony conviction, which would permanently harm the young man’s ability to secure a good job. The lawyer’s efforts include everything from arguing motions in court to multiple meetings with the prosecutor in the hope of convincing them to spare the young man from a felony conviction. Ultimately, the prosecutor agrees to drop the felony charge in exchange for the kid’s completion of community service and other penalties. The young man gets a second chance.

And in my opinion, rightly so. While we (society) should hold people who break the law accountable, we should also be reluctant to ruin a young man’s life with a felony conviction based on a youthful lapse in judgment, particularly for a non-violent offense. Instead, we can impose accountability in other, more effective ways.

Now assume instead that the young man who sold marijuana — again, a first-time offender and otherwise a good kid — lives in Homewood. And his family cannot afford to hire a lawyer. So the court appoints a lawyer to represent him. The court’s fee policy imposes a limit, or “cap,” on the number of billable hours that the appointed lawyer can devote to the case. Per the national workload standards, that limit is 37 hours less than the average time it takes to handle this type of case. Because the lawyer cannot afford to do work that she knows she won’t get paid for, the lawyer devotes far less time to the case than necessary. The end result is this: The young man from Homewood is saddled with a life-altering felony conviction. Not because he’s more “blameworthy” than the kid from Mt. Lebanon; rather, because his lawyer failed to invest enough time and attention to his case.

And the problems run deeper than the failure to provide fair compensation.

To cite one more example (there are many others), the fee system encourages bad client outcomes by structuring payment so that attorneys get paid more when their clients do worse. Yes, you read that right. Returning to the example above, if the kid from Homewood who was branded as a felon instead had his felony charge dismissed early in the case — a far better outcome — the court, in turn, would have slashed his attorney’s hourly rate by 20%.

Different outcomes for the poor kid from Homewood and the rich kid from Mt. Lebanon is not justice. But the truth is, in Allegheny County’s criminal courts today, we see people who made similar mistakes get treated differently all the time.

One root cause of this problem is the courts’ failure to invest in fair defense funding. And it’s not as if the courts cannot afford to do so. In fact, defense funding makes up just 2% of the court’s budget. It’s just that the courts have made a choice not to make the necessary investment.

Allegheny County, and particularly our most vulnerable community members, deserve better.

Rob Perkins is president of the Allegheny Lawyers Initiative. All views and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone.

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