The African American survivors and descendants of the town of Rosewood that was destroyed in a race riot in 1923 also called Mr. Hanlon “Lawyer Hanlon” when he and his partner Martha Barnett, future President of the American Bar Association, represented them in their successful efforts to recover $2.1 million from the Florida Legislature in 1993.

Throughout most of Mr. Hanlon’s career, he has been a civil rights lawyer doing institutional reform litigation (public schools, prisons, public health institutions, public housing, etc.), mostly in the Deep South.  In 2019, The New York Times called him “one of the leading voices in public interest law for decades.”

About twenty-five years ago, the great American death penalty lawyer George Kendal asked Mr. Hanlon to turn his attention to America’s criminal “justice” system, particularly America’s indigent defense system.

At that time, Mr. Hanlon had never done any work on indigent defense systems. When he went inside those courtrooms and saw what was going on –-what he would eventually call America’s “criminal processing system” –- Mr. Hanlon was shocked by what he saw and heard.

For the next twenty-five years, Mr. Hanlon filed systemic litigation attacking America’s criminal processing system, publishing four law review articles about that system, teaching a law school course at St. Louis University School of Law about that system, and like his mentor Chesterfield Smith,[1] speaking out publicly about that system and testifying as an expert witness in litigation seeking to change that system. His work has been featured in the New York Times, on 60 Minutes and on the PBS Evening News Hour.

Mr. Hanlon has held various positions in the American Bar Association (ABA) and the National Association for Public Defense (NAPD), but after he retired from Holland & Knight in 2013 he formed a new law firm, known as “Lawyer Hanlon,” a firm that would work with other law firms, lawyers, law professors, law students and experts who he recruited to join him in his efforts at criminal justice reform.

Mr. Hanlon has now concluded that, with rare exceptions, America’s criminal processing system is systemically unconstitutional and unethical.  Moreover, it is now clear that this system is criminogenic – it is producing, rather than preventing crime.  And now we can prove those points with reliable data and analytics.

Most disturbingly, Mr. Hanlon has concluded that we – all of us in our profession, and especially his generation of lawyers and judges – have been the principal facilitators of mass incarceration in our nation, which has inflicted untold damage on millions of people, particularly black and brown people.

Mr. Hanlon is now convinced, as he said on the PBS Evening NewsHour, that “you cannot do mass incarceration unless the entire legal system just rolls over and plays dead.” In the memorable words of the late Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, we–all of us–have become “loyal foot soldiers in the Executive’s war on crime.”

When Mr. Hanlon was the General Counsel for the NAPD in 2014, he proposed that the NAPD adopt, and the NAPD then adopted, the following goal for reform of public defense workloads in the country: “To produce a critical mass of reliable data and analytics to support the development of new enforceable National Public Defense Workload Standards to replace the 1973 NAC Standards.”

Over the course of the ensuing 10 years, the NAPD helped Mr. Hanlon recruit courageous public defenders to conduct reliable workload studies, and in some cases, institute litigation to enforce the recommendations of those studies.  Mr. Hanlon was the Project Leader for the ABA on seven groundbreaking public defender workload studies, working together with major accounting firms.  

Mr. Hanlon then assembled the team of The RAND Corporation, the ABA, the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) and himself to recruit a panel of 33 expert criminal defense lawyers from across the nation to review Mr. Hanlon’s work and ten other public defense workload studies.  Then, using reliable data and analytics and applying the law and standards applicable to criminal defense work, the team produced new reliable National Public Defense Workload Standards (NPDWS) in 2023.

The issuance of the NPDWS in 2023, replacing the outdated, unreliable and  discredited 50-year-old 1973 NAC Standards, was a watershed event for our nation’s criminal justice system.  It is now clear that public defenders are carrying at least three times the amount of work than they can handle ethically and constitutionally.  In the summer of 2025, the Washington Supreme Court became the first state supreme court to adopt the NPDWS for that state.

Mr. Hanlon has now formed the Quality Defense Alliance, consisting of the law firm of Holland & Knight, the accounting firm of Moss Adams, the JFA Institute, the NAPD and Lawyer Hanlon to advocate and, if necessary, litigate to enforce the NPDWS in states with receptive supreme courts across the nation. In November 2025, we obtained a preliminary injunction in Oregon, and the case is set for trial in February 2026.

In litigation to enforce the NPDWS and other reliable public defense workload studies – in Massachusetts, Missouri, Washington and Oregon to date – it has become apparent that when forced by the courts to provide adequate representation for people accused of crimes, states have no choice but to confront the disturbing realities in our nation’s criminal processing system that they have completely ignored during the last half century. 

The law is now clear: no adequate defense representation, no prosecution. A criminal court is not properly constituted unless there is a judge, a prosecutor and a defense lawyer who can adequately represent their clients. Experienced judges, prosecutors, academics and defense lawyers have all agreed to that proposition in the ABA’s Defense Function Standards.

In short, states faced with the choices that this kind of litigation presents are forced to develop and implement serious criminal justice reform — both supply side reform and demand side reform. 

Supply side reform inevitably involves more public funding for indigent defense for these systems to be ethical and constitutional. 

But demand side reform may be even more important – fewer cases and less reliance on excessively long sentences. The Brennan Center has estimated that 38% of America’s prisoners are not dangerous and could be released at great public savings.  This population needs a much less expensive, much more effective and robust social services delivery system, skilled at dealing with the problems of poverty, homelessness, mental illness and addiction. 

Grossly excessive sentences require much more public funding for  both public defense (cases with longer sentences require much more public defense work) and incarceration of those inmates (feeding them, clothing them, housing them, and providing physical and mental health care for them for decades). There is simply no reliable evidence that long term sentences are worth their cost in terms of public safety.

[1] Mr. Hanlon has no illusions in this regard.  Paraphrasing the great Senator Lloyd Bentsen, Mr. Hanlon likes to say, “I worked with Chesterfield Smith, I knew Chesterfield Smith.  I assure you I am no Chesterfield Smith.  But I had a quantum leap in my understanding of the role of the law in our society after working with him for 14 years. And I can do my best to emulate his approach to the law.”