Indiana’s trial courts use largely individually set, unwritten methodologies to decide who’s poor enough for publicly funded legal defense, the state has found.

About two-thirds of Hoosier judicial officers — judges, magistrates, commissioners and referees — reported policies at their trial courts are set by individual officers, and a similar proportion noted they don’t have written policies.

That’s according to a survey sent to 514 judicial officers working for trial courts in mid-January. More than 340 replied by the mid-February deadline, and of those, 261 presided over criminal cases and were shown the full list of questions.

The study arose from 2024’s Senate Enrolled Act 179 . The little-known Justice Reinvestment Advisory Council approved its release ahead of a July de

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