The Results Are In: Trial Judges' Views of IDS

In 2015, the Office of Indigent Defense Services (IDS) asked the School of Government to conduct an online survey of how superior and district court judges view IDS’s administration of indigent defense in North Carolina. Last week, the School issued its report of the survey results, Trial Judges’ Perceptions of North Carolina’s Office of Indigent Defense Services: A Report on Survey Results (March 2016) (referred to below as the Report). The verdict? Judges have a positive view of IDS’s performance, overall and in several key areas, but the results include a few warning signs for indigent defense. Methodology. Development and implementation of the survey was led by David Brown, director of the School’s Applied Public Policy Initiative. Before coming to the School, David spent eight years with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the GAO, in Washington, D.C., where he conducted performance audits of major federal programs. The survey he developed was disseminated by email to North Carolina’s trial judges on September 30, 2015, and was open for a little more than one month. To ensure candor, all responses were anonymous. The survey included closed-ended questions—for example, questions asking judges to indicate their satisfaction or dissatisfaction on a 1 to 5 scale (very satisfied, satisfied, neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, dissatisfied, and very dissatisfied)—as well as open-ended questions allowing judges to comment at greater length. By the close of the survey, 54 of the state’s 112 superior court judges and 81 of the state’s 270 district court judges had responded. The Report notes [...]