Episode 87

Public Defense Reimagined: A New Jersey Blueprint

Hosted by Matt Adams

“Most people don't want to commit crime. There are very few people who go out of their house in the morning and say, 'I'm going to commit crime.' ... Most people are dealing with experiences in their lives, be that addiction, be that mental health issues, be that an inability to get a job or housing, that are maybe not the direct cause of crime, but certainly part of a constellation of things that keep people trapped in a cycle."

In this episode of The Presumption of Innocence, host Matt Adams sits down with Jennifer Sellitti, who leads New Jersey’s Office of the Public Defender, to discuss her office’s holistic defense pilot in Atlantic, Hudson and Monmouth Counties.

The program pairs attorneys with client service specialists, many who have firsthand experience with the justice system, to connect clients with a range of services that address the broader needs driving criminal justice involvement.

The pilot has shown promising results for participants: a 98% arrest-free rate among a parole-related subset, prison sentences that are 65% shorter than the national average, and an average reduction of 2.2 years in state prison exposure.

At an estimated $75,000 per year to incarcerate one person in state prison, Sellitti explains the program could generate substantial taxpayer savings while helping clients rebuild their lives. Legislation is pending to expand the program across New Jersey.

Sellitti also discusses the core role of public defenders in protecting constitutional rights, including her office’s recent representation of protesters arrested outside Newark’s Delaney Hall ICE detention facility.

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the participants and should not be considered the views of Fox Rothschild LLP or its attorneys. This podcast is for informational purposes only, is not legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship.

Presumption of Innocence Ep 87 (Matt Adams & Jenn Sellitti)

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Speaker: The views expressed in this podcast are those of the participants and should not be considered the views of Fox Rothschild LLP or its attorneys. This podcast is for informational purposes only, is not legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship

Matt Adams: Hi, everyone, and welcome back to "The Presumption of Innocence," a podcast brought to you by the White Collar Criminal Defense & Government Investigations practice at Fox Rothschild. I'm your host, Matt Adams, and I am going to have the great fortune of welcoming back to the program today my good friend Jennifer Silletti.

Jenn's a 17-year veteran of the OPD, and before being named to the top job, she served as the agency's director of training and communications, and also served as a deputy in the Middlesex Trial Region and assistant deputy in the Essex County Adult Region. Those of you who are longtime listeners of the program will remember Jenn from episode 10 of "The Presumption of Innocence."

She had not yet assumed the head of her office but she talked to us about the representation of unpopular clients. Since taking the helm of the office, Jenn's made national headlines for advancing one of the country's first state holistic public defense representation models, an approach that is pairing attorneys with social workers and client specialists to address the broader needs of the people that come into the criminal justice system in New Jersey.

The results have been remarkable, and there's now legislation pending through the process in New Jersey to expand the program statewide. Jenn, it's a great pleasure to see you doing such great things. Welcome back to the program.

Jennifer Sellitti: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Matt Adams: Well, I'm so thrilled to have you.

So- Let's reset the frame, if you will for listeners who may have not caught your first appearance here on the program. Can you tell us a little bit about your path to your relatively new promotion in the last couple of years to the role of public defender, and then a little bit more generally how you got into public defense work and how your earlier roles within the office really prepared you for leading it?

And I'll just share my perspective in terms of as a private defense lawyer, the partnership that we develop with the public defender's office is so critically important because when we talk about advancing policy, advancing policy for the benefit of our clients and the bar writ large, we really have to have that kind of partnership because the vast majority of the cases, the trenches, are being fought by the public defender's office.

So really just give us a little bit about... Give us a 20-second update on your, on your, your ascension into this new role, and bring us full circle from when we last left off

Jennifer Sellitti: So I have been a really lifelong public defender in my career as a lawyer. Started in the public defender's office in Massachusetts.

And I do think that being able to be in all those roles as a manager, as a line attorney, as a training director, gave me an opportunity to see all parts of the agency. I know we're focused on criminal law here, but our agency also does mental health. We do child welfare. We do parental defense.

We do a number of other things. And my role as training director really enabled me to see all parts of the agency and what attorneys were doing across all 66 offices. So I think it did put me in a really good position coming into management, having not only been in all the roles a criminal defense attorney can do, but also having exposure to the vast array of other things that our office does that a lot of people don't even know that we're doing because they don't get talked about as much.

Matt Adams: And, and I'll just note, you're serving at a time when public defense budgets are being cut. Public defense is being backburnered, and, and, and, and I don't mean that pejoratively, but the people making political decisions have oftentimes forgotten about the vital key role that public defenders play.

Jennifer Sellitti: I think you sort of hit it in the question. One of the things that did surprise me is how little even other government agencies and how little the legislative branch really knew about who we were and what we did, and how much we did.

And how many things, how many decisions that those organizations and legislators are making touch the clients of our office. Prior to me taking over, we did not have a government affairs section. We did not have a community affairs division. So one of the things that was really important to me was introducing us, or reintroducing us to stakeholders, to people who were making decisions every day that impacted the lives of our clients.

So we set up a government affairs office here. We have a community affairs department. And they're doing everything from weighing in on policy and weighing in on new legislation, to proposing legislation, to going out into the community. In the last year we have done multiple expungement fairs in communities across the state, where we're helping community residents expunge their records.

We're doing a lot of those in partnerships with big organizations, with legislators and being able to really sit down with people in the community at all levels. Just citizens of the community as well as the people who are responsible for representing those communities in Trenton, and explaining what it is that we do.

And I think it's such a huge, important thing that they know we are representing about 75% of people charged with indictable offenses. We are the largest criminal defense firm in the state of New Jersey by far. And the things that people in Trenton are doing affect our clients in ways that a lot of people haven't thought about.

And I'm really proud to say that at this point I think they are thinking about us. We get calls all the time.

Matt Adams: I know from our work together with the Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers of New Jersey that concepts, broad, big picture concepts of criminal justice reform are impossible without marrying the private defense bar and the public defender's offices, and I'm so glad to see you taking on that role.

How does that institutional history of sort of being a trailblazer inform the direction that you're taking your office today?

So, I think one of the things that we've been really focused on is getting outside the box, doing things the way they haven't been done before, and proposing new solutions to really fixing the problems that are underlying the drivers of crime. And kind of ending this cycle of criminalization and starting to find new ways to help people heal their lives and not come back to our office.

So, there's a long-

Matt Adams: Well, that you are doing.

Jennifer Sellitti: Yeah.

Matt Adams: That you are doing for sure. The New Jersey OPD has been receiving some significant positive media attention recently. Before we dive into those specifics, and without burying the lede, can you set the stage for our listeners about what this holistic representation model that you are now championing as a statewide model for public defense and, and, and why did you make this your signature initiative for your administration?

Jennifer Sellitti: The holistic model at its core, what it does is it partners an attorney with an advocate, a specialist. I think we're calling them specialists because sometimes they're social workers, sometimes they're advocates. A non-attorney who is going to be responsible for connecting that person to programs that can address the underlying causes of the behavior that brought them into the system.

And it, it does a lot of things. I think there's, there's sort of four things that holistic defense does. One, it allows us to intervene earlier in the case and bring cases to resolution faster. Meaning as in sort of a typical criminal defense model, I might get a case. Maybe it's a, a drug case, say.

I get the case. I'm a lawyer. I am focused on winning that motion to suppress. So maybe I file that motion to suppress, I lose it six months later, seven months later, and now I'm talking about how do we resolve this case because maybe it's not a good case for trial. In the old days, I would start looking for a bed in a treatment facility at six or seven months, right?

Once the, the case is kind of done. Where now you would have somebody meeting with the client within days of arrest when they're in the throes of the things that brought them to us in the first place, and we can get them moving down a path of getting connected to the services that are going to help address what brought them to us.

Then whether I win the motion to suppress or I lose the motion to suppress I am at a much better position seven months later to say to a judge, "Give this person probation instead of state prison." Or this person is getting released, but now they have access to the tools that are going to make them better.

So it allows us to intervene earlier to resolve cases earlier. It also allows us to maximize our state investment in public defense. Lawyers are expensive, right? Lawyers are expensive. They have high caseloads. So if we can bring in a non-attorney advocate to pair with them on a case to do the non-lawyer things, not only are we driving the cost of public defense down, we're enabling our lawyers to handle more cases because they're not doing things that they shouldn't be doing.

Obviously, we're helping people rebuild their lives in the process, and for me that is the most important thing. So that's sort of the third thing. For me, it's the lead. But I think when we're talking about this publicly we do have to recognize that there's a lot of government efficiency that is achieved through this, which is important right now, as you suggested.

And then the kind of the fourth thing that I that, that holistic defense does is it reduces reliance on incarceration. Putting people in prison is expensive, and most people are getting out in, of prison. It costs $75,000 to put a person in prison for one year. We can lower those costs by showing that there's a lot of people that don't belong in state prison.

And in our pilot, we have a three-county pilot. In that pilot, the average person involved in that pilot saved 2.2 years in state prison. That means for every person in the pilot, they're in programs instead of prison, and we're saving the taxpayers about $150,000 per person. That's remarkable. And we have about a 12% of the people that come into our office in the pilot program, about 12% of our clients can benefit from these programs.

So the cost savings could be massive. So we feel like it's a no-brainer because it protects public safety, but it also puts our clients on a path not to come back to us.

Matt Adams: And I want to get back into that pilot program and start talking a little bit about some of the cost savings, because I think that's where the political will to sort of carry this forward is really going to be found.

But before we go down that, I think one of the most profound public statements that I've seen from you about this holistic model to defense is you said, quote, "Today's cases are no longer purely legal," and that they, quote, "involve overlapping social needs," unquote. Can you expand on what you mean by that, and what were you seeing in the client that your office represents that led you to this sort of light bulb moment that a new approach, sort of a disruptor was necessary in order to flip the script on what was going on.

Was it recidivism or was it something else?

Jennifer Sellitti: I think it's that most people don't want to commit crime, right? There are very few people who go out of their house in the morning and say, "I'm going to commit crime." It happens, sure, but most people are dealing with experiences in their lives, be that addiction, be that mental health issues, be that an inability to get a job or housing, that are maybe not the direct cause of crime, but certainly part of a constellation of things that keep people trapped in a cycle.

So if we can break that cycle by giving people the tools they need to be successful and rebuild their lives we can start to really move the needle when it comes to recidivism and when it comes to setting up people for success and to not come back to us. But even in, like, in the pilot program what we were seeing, and when it came to needs, is that about one in four of our clients were unhoused that benefited from the program and were able to get connections to housing.

Six in 10 had a mental health diagnosis that was being untreated or undertreated. And four out of five of our clients were experiencing underemployment or unemployment, and we were able to connect about 80% of those to job placements and job training. So part of this is also by having this holistic model and tracking who's coming into us, tracking what services that they need help connecting to, we can start to really clearly define in the state of New Jersey where the gaps are.

How many people are struggling with housing? How many people are struggling with mental illness? How many people that are coming into the system are struggling with certain things? And start to think about ways to access partners and services in the community to shore those gaps and to help those people that are in need and make sure, again, that they're not coming back once they come to us and they get access to those services.

Matt Adams: You've drawn this distinction between a case-centered approach, you know, let's go defend this case, and then a client-centered approach, which is we have to look at what other external variables may be at play here as well. And I, I think that is so much about what we do as attorneys, but you're so right that there's seldom enough time for the attorney who's worrying about all the idiosyncrasies of a defense and studying the evidence to try and come up with a strategy that we, we seldomly have time.

I, I know in, in the private practice, and my caseload is certainly less rigorous than some, some of your people in your office. But I've told clients, you know, "Listen, I, I can't be your therapist and your lawyer." And that's that moment this model actually affords the lawyer to say, "Not only I can't be your therapist and your lawyer, but I'm not a therapist.

I don't know how to be your therapist." So you, you've moved that case-centered focus to this client-centered approach. And why don't you just walk us through what that looks like when a person first comes through your, your office, through intake, and how does that pairing with necessary services actually get effectuated because people's needs are different.

That partner that you're talking about, right? The, hypothetical, the, the need for the therapist, I can't be your therapist. I'm not a therapist. I can't possibly defend you and also have a, a, a beat on your psychological issues that you might be facing. How do you screen the clients to know where the appropriate placement for these ancillary services is?

Jennifer Sellitti: So the, the first thing that we do when somebody comes in, and it's going to be right at that first court appearance. The attorney representing them there will sort of screen out cases that could benefit from the program and refer them. We have completely transformed our intake process here to accommodate this program, so we're now getting information from people at the beginning that we just didn't used to gather that helps inform who might be good for the program.

And one thing I'll say is over the last couple years, there's been a lot of proposals for courts to step in and provide these programs, for treatment providers to provide one-size-fits-all programs. We believe that these decisions belong with the attorney, both just to protect the client, but also because, you know, our clients tell us things that they don't tell their therapist, they don't tell their preacher, they don't tell people that are involved with the court system.

We may have a client come in for one thing, and on paper it looks like they have a certain constellation of problems, but they're confiding in us about other things. So that confidential relationship really puts us in the best position to be the connector to the services. The other thing that we have done that I think is working really well is once the attorney screens the client, talks to the client, we do the intake, and we pass it to a specialist, is the people that we've hired to do this program are largely system-impacted in one way or another.

We also-- we have many, and I'm really proud to say that we have many people working in these roles that are graduates of the New Jersey Step Program that have been in prison, gotten their college degrees, have come out, and are now working for the office. I can be the best attorney in the world, I can be the most empathetic attorney in the world, but I have never been to prison, right?

So when you have somebody who has been through that experience, who's able to sit down with a client and talk to them in a way that no attorney, no matter how good they are unless the associate attorney has experienced it, right? But most attorneys have not experienced that, and we have seen such phenomenal results, not only from people who are trained and qualified to do this work because they have social work degrees or training in their background, but because they have lived experience that really resonates and connects to the people we serve.

Matt Adams: Yeah. That's, that's just so true. Let me take the devil's advocate perspective for a minute. Critics, those who, who might say that what you're proposing is too expensive or that lawyers should simply stay in their lane, should focus on legal advocacy, leave the social services to other agencies. How do you respond to this argument that this makes a public defender's office too expensive, too involved in other things that maybe are outside of their focus?

Explain how you would respond to those critics.

Jennifer Sellitti: It's two things. First is thinking about your community, and the second is money. So first thing first. Most people who go to prison are coming out. That's the reality. So unless we want to start to put everybody in prison for the rest of their lives for every offense, which nobody would argue about doing, we have to reckon with the reality that most people are going to come out.

And many people with third- and fourth-degree crimes that we represent are coming out right away because they're going to get probation. They're going to get a county jail sentence. They're going to get a short prison sentence. I would rather have a neighbor who's been equipped with the tools to deal with the problems that brought them there in the first place than not.

And we can-- we see for example, with expungements, we do a lot of expungement work. We see that people who've gotten an expungement have a far lower recidivism rate than people, the general public, right? It's because people, when people are given the tools to understand the cost of crime and to understand their value to the community and to be able to integrate into a community with skills to make that community more productive, they are better neighbors.

The other piece of it is cost, and this is where math gets weird because when we first added the number, my communications people said, "Don't talk about the numbers because people will think you are lying." That's how good the numbers are. So I will just give you the equation, and people can fill in the numbers.

It costs $75,000 a year to send somebody to state prison. We represent about 65,000 people a year in criminal cases. So if everybody saves just one year in state prison, that's $75,000 a year. Now, in our pilot program, it's anywhere from 10 to 15%. We're saying 12, that's probably a little on the low side. But about 12% of our client population has saved somewhere around 2.2 years in state prison.

You do that math, it is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. But even if we said 1%, if 1% of the people we serve benefited from this program and saved one year in state prison, that's about $6 million a year. The program pays for itself if we can put 1% of the people into the program. And we are, I don't want to say confident, we are 100% certain that our percentage of our clients that will benefit and save time in state prison is going to be well beyond 1%.

Jennifer Sellitti: So we are not spending money for this program, we are saving it if we were to vector this program to all 21 counties across the state.

Matt Adams: And I want to get there, but let's first talk about the pilot program.

Jennifer Sellitti: Mm-hmm.

Matt Adams: Because this is, this is practically how you're able to cite to such statistics

Jennifer Sellitti: Mm

Matt Adams: because you have deployed this holistic representation model

Jennifer Sellitti: Mm ...

Matt Adams: with the necessary staffing and structural changes and community partnerships, and you've seen the challenges, the highs, the lows, and that has been what enables you to cite to such profound statistics that have people taking notice.

Jennifer Sellitti: Mm-hmm.

Matt Adams: So you chose three counties, if I'm not mistaken, for the pilot, Atlantic, Hudson, and Monmouth.

Jennifer Sellitti: Mm-hmm.

Matt Adams: What went into the decision to start in those jurisdictions rather than perhaps the state's most populous urban counties like Essex, Camden, places like that?

Jennifer Sellitti: One of the things that we found is the more populous counties do have better systems for connection and services.

There's systems that could benefit from holistic defense for sure. But we found when we were looking for the appropriate pilots, we found that some of the larger, more urban counties already have a significant service system in place. So we were looking for places that had a little bit more options for us to go in and kind of structure a system.

We chose Atlantic because it had the highest backlog, and we saw this as something that could reduce backlog in the county. We chose Hudson because there were big service providers there, but also a need to kind of start directing clients to appropriate services in that county. We also chose Hudson because they have a very aggressive trial culture.

And one of the things that you have to be careful of when you're doing holistic defense, that it doesn't become a substitute for lawyering. That if there's a motion to suppress, the lawyer's going to file that motion to suppress and argue it, not say, "Well, I can get them a really good deal for probation," because of the, the holistic defense model, right?

So we wanted a real aggressive trial county, and that was one of the reasons we chose Hudson. And then Monmouth County had a lot of services, but they were all very disparate. So we were trying to find a county that had services everywhere, but nobody was really acting as the hub for those services.

And then in New Jersey, you always have to do north, central, south, if you're a believer in central New Jersey like I am. So in this mix, we have a northern, a central, and a southern county.

Matt Adams: Well, that makes a lot of sense. So these client specialists, are these the people you're talking about that may even have justice-impacted backgrounds that sort of integrate into the daily workflow of your attorneys?

Is, is that the title you've given them?

Jennifer Sellitti: Yes. now we're calling them client service specialists because before we did have some investigators in a role that we call navigator. We used to call them drug court navigators because they would help people connect to drug court services. But now they're doing it more broadly outside of recovery court and for some of our clients.

And then we have the advocate that came with us when we instituted the pilot program. So there's three in Hudson and then two in the other two counties. But we kind of collectively-

Matt Adams: So-

Jennifer Sellitti: ... call them specialists.

Matt Adams: And, and in, in talking about the places you chose to roll out the pilot program, you mentioned this access to community partnerships.

There's a lot of social services available in New Jersey. It, it is one of the benefits of the state. it has independent nonprofits and even affiliates of for-profit enterprises that are extraordinarily helpful in public-private partnerships. And it's one of the strengths of the state.

How do you manage that coordination with these individual discrete entities, all of which have either either a faith-based background or some sort of other guiding principles that may be a little bit different from on a case-by-case basis. You know, you might be talking about partnering with Jewish Family Services, for example, and you might not have the same kind of background for your clientele.

How, how do you find the various community partners that are going to be part of your program? Or do you just welcome everybody under the tent and say, "Let's go"?

Jennifer Sellitti: So we do welcome everybody, and part of our advocates' or our specialists' job is to go into the community, locate every available service, whether it's a once-a-month meeting in a church basement or something like AtlantiCare or Jewish Family Services, New Jersey Reentry, or Volunteers of America, a big service provider.

And that's what they've been doing. And I, I, I think it's client by client specific. I call it kind of the New Jersey diner approach to services, where you know how you can get a diner, you go to a diner and you get the standard burger, Coke, and fries. There's a lot of people who need a burger, Coke, and fries, and we are giving a lot of people connections, which is great because that means the numbers for be- Like, we're, we're feeding people into the big service providers.

We're kind of pre-screening, getting people in there, and a lot of people can be handled through all the services there. But sometimes there are people that walk into a diner that need a milkshake, chicken parm, and disco fries, right? This weird collection of things that are on

Matt Adams: To- totally Jersey.

Nobody else outside New Jersey, disco fries are, are, are, are something special.

Jennifer Sellitti: Very special. But right, like a collection of things where you're looking at this huge menu going, "No, this person needs this from the big service provider, but they need that program going on in the church basement on 10th Street."

And we can put all that together. And then what our advocates do, or our specialists do, is they keep track of all that. They monitor the client as they go through it, and they write a mitigation report. So when it comes time for sentencing, all the lawyer has to do is take that mitigation report and say, "This is everything my client has been doing."

So we're no longer standing there, whether it's a big service provider or a constellation of services. We're no longer standing there at sentencing going, "Please, please, please, my client promises never to do it again." We are saying, "My client has not done it again for seven months, and here's why."

The clients represented in this model, our clients, have prison sentences that are 65% shorter than the national average

Matt Adams: I really give your office a lot of credit because it, it just is a testament that you know the communities you serve, that you're able to find... I, I love the analogy, the Jersey diner, because, you know, you can get anything at a diner.

You can get a bacon, egg, and cheese or a burger, but you can also, you know, I think there's diners in Jersey that serve sushi if you need it.

Jennifer Sellitti: You can get whatever you want, and that's our goal. Our goal is to look at an individual and say, "What do you need?" And put it together for them. And there's nobody doing that.

And I always say, we are not in the service business. We are not providing anybody with services. We are in the connection business, and bringing all these services together for the benefit of an individual whose needs we know better than anybody else because we have the confidential attorney-client relationship.

Matt Adams: Yeah. One thing that was really stark about some of the statistics that your office has released in connection with the pilot program is that public defenders in New Jersey carry caseloads at 3.2 times the national best practices standards.

Jennifer Sellitti: Mm-hmm.

Matt Adams: That's your own figures. That's, that's your own self-analysis of how overworked your people are, right?

Does adding the responsibility to have this holistic coordination increase or decrease the workload of individual attorneys? Because I think we can all intuitively say that we want to decrease the load because then they can get better attention. Each individual discrete client gets better attention when the public defenders are not overburdened by too many cases.

Jennifer Sellitti: So, I'm going to take that in reverse. Yes, this will decrease the load because we will now have lawyers lawyering. Lawyers who went to law school to be lawyers can lawyer, and they can work with a specialist who is on the team, who's part of the defense team that's doing everything else. And also doing a lot of communication with the client too, right?

So that's, they're, you know, they're working for the attorney. They enjoy the confidential relationship. They can also talk to and communicate with the client. The other thing is, is so that number, that 3.2 was our ranking in the national caseload study done by RAND Corporation several years ago, and that was the number when I first took over.

We hired in my first year the biggest new attorney class. We, we moved heaven and earth to figure out ways to access the number of employee, the employee count that we had to turn more positions into attorney positions. So we were able to bring on almost 60 new lawyers in my first year, which is about twice the size of the largest class before that.

So we did bring on a lot more lawyers, and we have given lawyers a lot of other tools like AI-based tools, like more navigator support, things like that to help them. So they haven't done another RAND study. I don't think we're at 3.2 anymore. We're-- I'm sure we're a little bit over the national average now, but I think we are much more in line with what caseload standards should be when I look at the numbers around the county.

So we've really worked hard to lower that. But it is not our intention to do holistic defense and now say, "Lawyers, great, now you can handle more cases." It's to keep the caseloads the same or lower them while giving attorneys tools that allow them to maximize the time they spend with their clients, be that a program like this or even AI or using other kinds of tools to assist them at doing the things that keep them from sitting down and holding space for the people we serve

Matt Adams: I want to go down the path of AI because I, I've served on the New Jersey Supreme Court's Committee on AI, as I, as I believe your office has been fully represented there.

Jennifer Sellitti: Mm-hmm.

Matt Adams: And everybody in the state is embracing AI. And it's just a question of trying to model it to the specific needs of the system. How's your office embracing it? You, you mention it as a factor to help diminish the caseload. So what specifically is your office doing amidst bringing on this added responsibility-

Jennifer Sellitti: Yeah

Matt Adams: of essentially caring for the social services needs of its client population?

Jennifer Sellitti: So the answer is we are using AI everywhere we can, as fast as we can. So you know, we're using things like Westlaw AI. We're using the proprietary New Jersey version of ChatGPT for our work. We're also building.

We built an AI brief bank. We are looking at ways to use AI everywhere we can, even to help write mitigation reports, to help organize service providers in connection with the holistic defense program. See, I see it as an organizational change. It's not just using a product. One of the things that we did is we, we realized that some of our secretarial tasks were now going to be automated through the use of technology and AI.

So we took the secretaries that were really, really good with technology and moved them into our MIS department, so that they're now still sitting in their offices, but they don't work for the secretarial side anymore. They're working for the technology arm, and can be liaisons between technology and the attorneys, and helping the attorneys learn how to maximize technology.

And that gives them a much bigger career path with the agency, because they have more opportunities for promotion and pay. And then ultimately, my goal is to use AI as much as we can to communicate with clients. To somehow work out a way that we can have a real-time feedback loop with the people we serve using apps, using AI tools so that attorneys can kind of hit a button and find out what a client has done between court dates, for example.

Or better communicate with the people we serve on a phone. We are looking at all that, and I'm, and I'm really proud. A lot of these things are things that public defenders offices aren't doing, and we've been recognized around the state around the country, and even in other parts of the world, as one of the public defender's offices of leading when it comes to using AI.

And I always look at it as this, like, the whole point of AI is not to replace humans. I think it makes us more human. Because the more time I can give my clients to sit in a room and look into the eyes of their client, something AI can never replicate, the better off our clients and our lawyers are going to be.

So that's always the goal. Automate the mundane. And one more thing I'll say about AI, I think as defense attorneys, all of us have this responsibility to be a sword and a shield, right? Defense attorneys are always have an opportunity and responsibility to be offensive with things like AI.

But we also have to be defensive. There is going to be AI coming into courtrooms, and we're going to have to challenge evidentiary standards, challenge foundations, challenge software, challenge code in ways that we haven't before. So the more adept my attorneys are at using AI in their law practice, the better they're going to be at spotting bad AI when it's coming into the courtroom

Matt Adams: When it comes to impact, I think one of the most striking things is the wealth of statistics that you can cite to from the pilot program.

Some of them you've mentioned. all of them are out there publicly, but I want to focus on just a few because I want to talk through, you know, what this really means in laypeople speak, because it's striking. Your office has cited a figure that up to 98% of program participants remained arrest-free when provided holistic support.

That is remarkable. 98% of participants remained arrest-free. Can you put that in context? What's the baseline? How do you account for the selection of only this three-county pilot program at this point? Because that's something to take note of.

Jennifer Sellitti: Yes. So I do want to be clear about that, the 98%, because this is a small subset, and that was a group of people that were a part of our parole revocation and release program. And the reason that we use them as a subset is because there was a finite end to their term because they were on release from parole. So we could actually say the time that they were on parole and since, they have not been rearrested.

Versus because the program's only a year old, people who are in court pretrial, it's not enough time, because by the time the case resolves, it's probably like eight, nine months, sometimes a year before a case resolves. There really wasn't enough time on the street for us to do that with everybody because it wouldn't be really credible numbers.

Statistically, they wouldn't be super valid numbers. But I think the takeaway there is it's not only a population of people who are getting holistic defense services, they're people who have been in prison and violated parole. So these are people who have violated the conditions of release, who are now given holistic support, and now not violating them at 98%.

Jennifer Sellitti: Well, I hope it would be that if there's a holistic program in their county, or if we're able to expand to other counties, that they say that they value that we're going to put somebody in that program. Because they know that they're going to get what they need to not commit new offenses.

The other thing that I will say about the, the 70% number is you have to remember that a lot of the people that we are representing are people who have violated conditions of pretrial release before, are people charged with serious felonies. So the subset of people that we are representing pretrial arguably have more serious offenses and more repetitive offenses than the general population.

So that 70% number, while it's sort of on par with pretrial arrest figures in certain places around the state, is really significant when you look at the types of clients we're representing. So when you can take somebody who has some repeat offenses, and we use holistic defense to keep them from going back in on a detention motion, that that person is now able to stay arrest-free pretrial when they haven't before, I think speaks volumes about the potential for it.

Matt Adams: I want to move out of the statistics for a moment because math scares me. I want to, I want to put it on the human level. I'm sure that there are plenty of stories that your office has about how this model is working and the impact that it has had on your clients. Mindful a lot of that's confidential, can you anonymize couple or three client stories for me just so the audience gets a sense for the way that the program is, is applying to humans, to lives?

Someone who received housing or treatment or support and turned their life around through the program.

Jennifer Sellitti: I think the one story that always comes to my mind is one that happened, it was an Atlantic County case. A gentleman who had very serious substance use issues that the attorney was pretty confident had to do with a very serious mental health problem.

But like many people who are in the throes of a, of a mental health crisis, they don't recognize that they have an issue there. So the attorney was an excellent attorney, an empathetic attorney, a good, one of our best, a great attorney, and said, "I think I want to refer you to this program." And he said, "Absolutely not, if it means I have to get mental health treatment.

Absolutely not." And the judge was saying, "I'm not giving this person probation unless they get mental health treatment." And this is a client who'd been to state prison many times. So rejecting an offer of treatment meant doing a state prison term, which the client said, "Fine, then send me back to state prison."

Like, that's where we were at. I'd rather go to state prison than do mental health treatment. And then our advocate, Paul, who has been public about the fact that he has been in state prison and has had that experience, a, a graduate of of the, the New Jersey Step Program and a, just a phenomenal advocate, got into a room with him.

And I don't really know what Paul said in that room that was any different than what the attorney said in that room. But I know that Paul, when he speaks to people, has such a connection and such an empathy and such an ability to break past the walls that many of the times our clients put up, and make a connection with him that no good lawyer ever could.

And ultimately, he agreed to give it a shot. He had multiple prior felony convictions that had resulted in state prison sentences. Paul wrote a mitigation report that persuaded the judge to deter him from, I believe it was either a five- or seven-year state prison sentence. It was a big state prison sentence, to a five-year period of probation.

And that was over a year ago. That client is taking medication. He's doing substance use treatment. He's doing mental health treatment. He's working. He's in contact with our office, and he has had no violations or arrests since that. And I believe it is one of the longest periods in his life that he has gone without having any interaction with the criminal legal system So I think that's a great story because it talks about all the services we can provide, but also about the power of sending people into the room to meet with a client who can understand and speak with them in a way that the attorney just can't and the attorney shouldn't have to, because then the attorney can be in court attorneying and doing lawyer things.

And I just love-- I love that story because I think it really encapsulates so much of what this program is about.

Matt Adams: I want to take another pivot.

Jennifer Sellitti: Mm-hmm.

Matt Adams: So you have the pilot program, you've got favorable data. Now it appears that you are moving towards statewide implementation. I know you have a couple of strong partners in the New Jersey Legislature.

Talk to us a little bit about where the future might lie for a program such as this and project into the future a bit about what that might look like.

Jennifer Sellitti: So yeah. So, we met with Assemblyman Schaer. It was just like a, a normal-- like a typical, like, introduce us to your office and what you do visit, which turned into me talking about the pilots and him saying, "Why don't I have this in Passaic County?"

And calling three days later and saying, "We have to make this happen." Because he-- like, he always says and he's said publicly, "This is a no-brainer." We, we rebuild people's lives and we save money, and we keep people from coming back into the system. Like, there's no losers in this at all. So he drafted a bill.

Immediately, we had about seven, I think, assemblypeople are now signed on to it. Every day more sign on. Senator Wimberly has it in the Senate. Senator Gopal is co-prime on it in the Senate. And that would just be to take the three-county program and expand it, whether that's a, a huge expansion of three to 21 right away, or a gradual expansion.

And as I think you know, and everybody knows right now, it's really just a a numbers game of what gets funded by the Legislature as we're going into this budget year. But we just keep saying to people, like, I don't see a way that we can lose money on this program, and it does all the things that we've been talking about, all the things we've been hearing about over the last six months to a year about helping people who are deserving rebuild their lives and giving second chances, saving money that the government doesn't need to spend and can save on other things, and maximizing government workers, right?

Maximizing what our attorneys are able to do. It's a small investment up front that will pay-- I would bet any amount of money that it's a small investment that will pay itself off in the inside of a year.

Matt Adams: Remarkable, remarkable. And, and, and a lot of the decisions about statewide expansion and statewide social programming are driven by cost-benefit analysis.

And I, and I think one of the things that your pilot data does present is that stark cost savings that could be, could be realized even amidst the, I think, acknowledged costs that it would have to implement such a program.

Jennifer Sellitti: Yes.

Matt Adams: And, and I, I give you a lot, a lot of credit for that. For the defense attorney or public defenders in other states, we're a national audience that are listening right now, what would you give to them?

What advice about how to move forward with a model like this against what are the national prevailing headwinds about social programs, about government spending, about the whole idea of just the criminal legal system right now, which are a mixed bag. What advice would you give to those people in those other states that might not have the support from their state legislators like you do?

Jennifer Sellitti: I, I do think it is, is always speaking in the lens of the person who is going to oppose it, right? When I sit down with my friends and like-minded people, I am not talking about the cost savings, right? I'm not talking about maximizing attorney efficiency. I'm talking about changing and saving people's lives, right?

I'm talking about that quote when it says you, you've got to... What is it? You got to stop pulling people out of the river and start going upstream and finding out why they're falling in, right? I'm talking about the touchy-feely-

Matt Adams: Desmond Tutu.

Jennifer Sellitti: Desmond Tutu. I'm talking about the touchy-feely side of all of this.

But the reality is, is we, we oftentimes public defenders are living in an echo chamber where we think everybody's going to be moved by the same things. I think it's okay to embrace the fact that I am going to make my employees more efficient and save the state money. Those things, just because I say those things doesn't make me sort of a traitor to the cause and to wanting to help rebuild people's lives.

And I do when I speak with other people who are trying to get any kind of program going in their state, I always kind of advise them, take off your true believer hat and put on the hat of the person who's going to pay their taxes at the end of the year, and ask how you can make it personal and benefit to them.

And that way you can talk to any legislator. Even the most hardened, you know, tough on crime legislator is going to have to take a look at this and say, "The numbers speak for themselves. We're not raising recidivism and we're lowering costs, and people aren't coming back," right? So I think that you're not a traitor to the cause if you start to speak to a broader audience.

I think that's really good advice, and it's advice that was given to me when I, when I got this job by some people who really know what they're doing, so

Matt Adams: I would be remiss if I didn't bring up an unrelated topic. New Jersey is in the headlines right now, perhaps not for good reasons. We've had some significant issues, let's call it with some protests outside of Delaney Hall, an ICE detention center in Newark, right next to the Essex County Correctional Facility.

A privately run prison where ICE detainees are being held. And your office has taken some pretty profound steps in representing some of the protesters who have been charged as a result of occurrences that allegedly went on i- in, in the clashes that have blown up and, and really unfortunately become national headlines.

Talk to us a little bit about your efforts there.

Jennifer Sellitti: Yeah, so it was around that weekend of May 29th, May 30th when the ICE came out and the state police sort of took control of the scene at Delaney Hall, and then the Newark Police Department, city of Newark put in a curfew. So on Sunday the 31st, about 61 protesters were arrested for violating the city curfew. The New Jersey Office of the Public Defender only represents people in Superior Court unindictable offenses.

But because of CJR, we provisionally represent anybody who is charged and not yet appointed an attorney, or case has not been downgraded. And we represent anybody provisionally that is charged with an indictable offense. On Sunday quite candidly, we had been in touch with some people because we'd been getting some phone calls from protesters about some of the things that were going on there.

And there were people that had, you know, phone numbers of attorneys in the office. And when they, 61 of them were arrested, and we knew that a person that had, had talked to us had not been able to make a phone call, we got concerned. Because they were arrested at nine o'clock on Sunday night, and it was about noon, and we still hadn't heard from her.

And then we found out that the Newark Police Department still hadn't booked any of these people, even though they were planning on just releasing them on summonses. And for people out there who don't know, most of the time when you're released on a summons, it's a very quick process. You get booked quickly, you get your summons, you're told when to come to court, and you're on your way.

So these folks were being held bonded-

Matt Adams: For very low-level offenses, by the way.

Jennifer Sellitti: Very low level.

Matt Adams: Right? N- some of them, under New Jersey law, non-crimes.

Jennifer Sellitti: Non-crime.

Matt Adams: Municipal violations, petty disorderly persons offenses.

Jennifer Sellitti: But we did find out they were charging them all with fourth-degree riot, which meant not only were we provisionally representing, but we were provisionally representing on indictables.

So when we found that out, we immediately crafted a motion, which we didn't have to file because we were able to work with the local authorities and convince them to get things moving. So we got everybody out by Monday night. Everybody, all 61 were out. And then we signed them on to a motion to dismiss because there was no rioting charge there.

The rioting charge was an overcharge, and the resisting arrest, no one resisted arrest. There's lines of people getting zip cuffed. Like, nobody's resisting arrest. So we filed a motion that before that motion could be heard, we signed up... We were trying to track down all 61 of them. I think we got over 50 of them to sign on to this motion.

Our Newark office, Ben Van Meter, who's a phenomenal, phenomenal attorney in our office, agreed to take this on. He filed a motion, and before that motion could be heard the city of Newark downgraded all the rioting charges and dismissed all the resisting arrest charges. So we continue to get calls.

We continue to get calls in the middle of the night. We continue to get calls from the jail. We continue to get calls about arrests as they unfold. And what I keep saying to people is, "This is no different. We do this every day. This is what public defenders do. We represent people that are charged with crimes, and we ensure that their rights are being protected.

It doesn't matter if they're protesting outside Delaney Hall. It doesn't matter if they're accused of murder. It doesn't matter if they're accused of the most horrible crimes you can imagine. This is not political, right? I mean, I have grave concerns for our clients that are in Delaney Hall. That is a separate issue that we are dealing with.

But for us, it's not a political fight, it's a legal one. If you want our clients, you got to come through us. And if you're going to hold my client for more than almost 24 hours without even booking them, then we're coming for you. And I think people have had a hard time. It's been politicized to be something like we're doing something special or we're getting out of our lane.

Like, this is our lane. We are not civil rights lawyers. We are not protest lawyers. Our lane is criminal defense, and we represent anybody who is charged with a crime in the state of New Jersey provisionally and then sometimes after that. And we are doing our jobs and doing our duties as public defenders to defend their rights, get them out of jail as quickly as possible, and make sure that they are only charged with things that are appropriate and then ultimately, that they resolve their cases in the most favorable way possible.

Matt Adams: Jennifer Sellitti, the people of New Jersey are lucky to have you watching over their civil liberties and due process. I'm really proud of you, my friend. Keep up the good work. It's been a real pleasure to talk with you. Do promise me this. Once this becomes a statewide phenomenon, this holistic approach and you're inevitably going to make it happen.

I, I know you too well to know that you won't take no for an answer. Will you come back on and talk to me about some of the additional successes of it once it it rolls out statewide?

Jennifer Sellitti: Of course, my friend. And thank you so much. Thank you for everything that you do to kind of lift up the voices of public defenders and your partnership for our work, truly.

We're really appreciative of it.

Matt Adams: That's all the time we have on this episode of "The Presumption of Innocence," but till next time, I'm Matt Adams. We'll see you then. Take care.