SMU’s law school might not spring to mind as a bastion for the downtrodden.

But fighting for the legal rights of the country’s most vulnerable has been the career-long crusade of Pamela Metzger, executive director of the school’s Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center.

That’s what drew Metzger to the Hilltop from Tulane University seven years ago for what she saw as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Wealthy Dallas businessman Doug Deason had assembled $7 million to create an independent research and educational legal reform center at SMU’s Dedman School of Law.

The law school lured Metzger with a tenured professorship and the top job at the Deason Center to get her here. She’s been doing both ever since.

“My North Star is getting justice for the least amongst us,” Metzger said in a recent interview. She sees the Sixth Amendment with its constitutional guarantee to a speedy fair trial with the assistance of a public defense as the best vehicle for achieving that.

Today, Metzger and the Deason Center are nationally recognized for that expertise, educational initiatives and criminal legal ethics.

Yet, their work is relatively unknown in their hometown.

“Our kind of deep work is not flashy. As a result, people in Dallas often don’t know we’re doing it. It is quiet, steady, technical and methodological. It is not the stuff that makes the nightly news.”

But someday, it will be, she promised.

“We’re building something very special and innovative right here in Dallas that’s going to stand the test of time,” she said. “We have absolutely the best and brightest minds in indigent defense.

“It’s really a credit to SMU and the Dallas community.”

Liberal, conservative connect

Metzger and Deason, 62, are an odd pairing. She leans hard left. He’s a staunch conservative. But both are activists who believe that the U.S. judicial system is broken at every level and needs a systemic overhaul.

Deason’s instructions to the law school: Build something meaningful.

Metzger took that to mean she should build a nonpartisan, world-class research and advocacy center to lead the nation in criminal legal reform.

That’s right on target, said Deason, who oversees Deason Capital Services, which manages the $1.5 billion in assets built by his 84-year-old computer services magnate dad, Darwin Deason.

“I asked her not to just crank out academic white papers that no one would ever read, but instead do studies and pilot programs that we could base legislative changes upon,” Doug Deason said. “I was preaching to the choir.

“We are fast friends. We are hard to say no to when we team up.”

Deason describes her as driven, altruistic and brilliant.

Professionally, Metzger goes by Pamela, but otherwise, she’s Pam.

Metzger’s in the hiring mode, expecting to fill three additional positions in the next few months.

The current staff of 12 full-timers ranges from junior lawyers to seasoned attorneys and researchers, as well as people who never went to law school. Some work remotely in different states; others are on campus.

Representing 10,000 prisoners

Metzger, who grew up in Atlanta, started her legal career three decades ago as a federal public defender in New York.

Her commitment to public defense coalesced in 2005, when the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court assigned her to represent nearly 10,000 men, women and non-adult inmates stranded after Hurricane Katrina destroyed Orleans Parish Prison.

You might recall TV cameras scanning hundreds of abandoned prisoners lined up helplessly in the smoldering heat on a highway overpass.

Metzger learned that the New Orleans public defenders office kept lousy records even before the storm. It didn’t know how many people were in jail, why they were there or even their names.

“Public defenders simply showed up in court, and whoever was in court that day, who didn’t have a lawyer, became their client,” she said.

“It was a real introduction to a way of thinking that said it’s not enough to handle one case at a time,” Metzger said. “You have to think about systems and how to improve them.”

Stats and stories

Metzger is part data cruncher and part storyteller.

It’s not that she’s particularly enamored with statistics.

“I just find them useful,” she said. “I’m not a mathematician. I can’t add. But I’ve learned you have to have stats and stories. The stats tell you the scale of why things matter, but the stories tell you why they matter to your heart.”

The center is using ArcGIS geospatial mapping to identify small, tribal and rural legal deserts where there aren’t enough criminal lawyers to meet local prosecution and defense needs and where people have to travel long distances to get to courts, law offices and jails.

“We actually put things on a map and then measure drive times to see how far away people are from the courthouse and how long it takes them to drive there,” she said.

Using that data, the project is finding innovative ways to recruit, train and retain experts in criminal law. “We’re honoring the right to legal counsel for people no matter where they live,” she said.

Justice by geography

The Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution ranks No. 1 in Metzger’s legal heart. She’s determined that every state lives up to that constitutional promise.

Many aren’t, she says, including Texas.

To most of us, the word indigent means someone who is extremely poor without the means for a normal life. But in the legal world, indigent specifically means someone who can’t afford to hire an attorney, Metzger said. Just who qualifies for court-appointed counsel varies significantly in Texas, where individual counties set the rules.

For example, Borden and Lynn counties in West Texas are adjacent to each other, but you have to be more than twice as poor in Borden County to qualify for court-appointed representation than you do in Lynn County.

“You’ve just been arrested in Borden. You might be in the greatest crisis of your life. But you’re expected to somehow prove to a judge that you don’t have enough money to hire a lawyer even though you make 75% of the federal poverty level,” she said. “You go one county over to Lynn — where you can earn twice the federal poverty level — and it’s an entirely different experience.

“That kind of justice by geography just isn’t right.”

And when it comes to indictments, you can be jailed in Texas for 90 days without being charged with anything. In Mississippi, you can be held indefinitely. Such jail time without being charged equates to “a state-sanctioned disappearance, and we allow this all over the country,” she said.

Experiments and grants

The Dallas County District Attorney’s Office wants to make sure this doesn’t happen here, she said.

The Deason Center is doing an experimental study to see how Dallas County can improve the charging process.

She tells me about this “randomized controlled trial,” and my eyes glaze over.

Then she puts it in lay language.

“The cases that aren’t going to be prosecuted are taken out of the system earlier, therefore freeing up more resources for cases that are going to continue,” she said. “It’s very, very special. We’re working with the Chrest Foundation and the Child Poverty Action Lab.”

Together, they’ve hired two experienced intake specialists to work assault cases as soon as the complaints are filed, listen to the parties involved and determine which cases should be pursued.

“In general, the [Dallas County] DA’s office doesn’t have enough bandwidth to offer services to victims and witnesses until much later in the process,” Metzger said. “When this is all done, I think people not only in Dallas will know about it, but really across the country, because it is a first-of-its kind study.”

The center also landed a prestigious $800,000 grant from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) to explore ways to shore up enforcement of the Sixth Amendment.

It is one of two national grants awarded by the U.S. Department of Justice in honor of the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling that said criminal defendants must be provided a defense attorney, even when they can’t afford one.

“Go into a misdemeanor court in Texas, and there is an excellent chance that most of the people will not have a lawyer by their side even though they could go to jail,” she said. “That’s not the way the [Constitutional] framers envisioned this.”

The Deason Center’s work came to the local forefront in 2019, when it worked with Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot concerning his decision not to prosecute first-time misdemeanor marijuana offenders when there’s no evidence of a weapon, distribution or possession in a school zone.

The center’s research demonstrated that after Creuzot implemented this policy, police referred far fewer cases to the DA’s office for prosecution, freeing them to do more critical work and saving taxpayers money.

But the center’s study, Fewer, Not Fairer, indicated police in many Texas counties were far more likely to refer Black suspects for marijuana prosecution than suspects of other races.

Hard decisions ahead

What are the trends Metzger sees for indigent public defense?

Louisiana, where she spent 16 years working on public defense initiatives, was once a model for the nation, she said. But it has had a “shocking retrenchment” on core principles that’s “terribly disappointing.”

On the other hand, places like South Dakota have passed impressive indigent defense legislation.

“But the thing that is most worrisome — and it is true across the country from Florida to Maine to Oregon — is that we’re confronting a desperate shortage of people to provide representation in criminal cases, and we’re also seeing a shortage in prosecutors.”

That means the country needs to make hard decisions about the legal system, she said.

“We can’t simply say, ‘Well, the Constitution doesn’t apply when you don’t have enough lawyers.’ We’re either going to have to change the way we think about crime or make the work of being a prosecutor and a public defender more sustainable so that we can encourage people to take on those roles for justice to work.”

Meet Pamela Metzger

Titles: Professor, Dedman School of Law; executive director, Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center

Age: 58

Education: Bachelor of Arts, Dartmouth College, 1987; J.D., New York University School of Law, 1991

Resides: Dallas