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ST. LOUIS — Stephen Hanlon tells a story about a cocktail napkin. It’s the early 1970s and a bunch of white, middle-aged lawyers are meeting in a bar in San Diego.

Their task was to develop standards for public defenders. How many cases could one public defender handle at a time? How many cases were too many? At what point did it become unethical to take more cases because their clients couldn’t possibly get good representation?

The lawyers jotted down some numbers. There was no serious study, no data, but those numbers became the standards that guide the courts.

“It was crazy,� says Hanlon, a civil rights attorney who lives in St. Louis, but spent much of his career in Florida and Washington, D.C., “but those standards stayed in effect for 50 years.�

Sometime this fall, Hanlon expects that to change. , in a project that got its start in Missouri, Hanlon and other attorneys and legal organizations have been working to develop new national standards that if properly applied will significantly reduce the workloads of overworked public defenders nationwide.

The goal is simple. If public defenders are overworked — and comprehensive studies in several states now say that is clearly the case — then defendants’ Sixth Amendment rights to effective counsel are in jeopardy. That leaves judges with a choice between two evils: Drop cases and theoretically put public safety at risk; or force defendants to get inadequate representation and put convictions at risk. That puts the entire judicial system in a constitutional crisis, Hanlon says. With proper data should come new standards, and the result will be the need to hire a whole lot more public defenders to balance out the system.

The seeds for change were planted in Missouri, starting in 2008, when the Public Defender Commission started placing caps on the number of cases its attorneys could take. At the time, Missouri had the second lowest funding for public defenders in the country. By 2010, Cat Kelly, the head of the public defender system at the time, was instructing her attorneys to refuse cases if their caseloads were too high.

That forced the entire legal system in Missouri, and state lawmakers, to pay attention to the constitutional crisis at hand. A report commissioned by the Missouri Bar found that: “Missouri’s public defender system has reached a point where what it provides is often nothing more than the illusion of a lawyer.�

The Missouri Supreme Court found, in a case that Hanlon argued, that the public defenders were right: a judge would be violating the constitutional rights of a defendant to appoint a public defender whose caseload wouldn’t allow them to give the defendant an adequate defense.

This is when Hanlon and others really got to work. They commissioned a comprehensive study of Missouri public defender case loads by the RubinBrown accounting firm. The results, , were eye-opening. Public defenders were spending nowhere near as much time as necessary to properly defend their clients.

Soon, Missouri implemented waitlists as a temporary solution, but an ACLU and MacArthur Justice Center lawsuit put an end to that. So did the Legislature when it came up with some more money for public defenders.

But the problem persists, and that creates an ongoing constitutional crisis in Missouri and most other states. Since the Missouri study, 16 other states have performed similar studies with nearly identical results, showing that poor defendants in America are simply not getting their right to counsel met because nearly every state underfunds its public defender system.

Hanlon expects the new workload standards to be released later this year, with the endorsement of the American Bar Association, the National Center for State Courts and the Rand Corporation. What comes next is what will take the heaviest lifting. Hanlon has formed a new national coalition called the Quality Defense Alliance to press Congress to find the funding necessary for states to implement the new, meaningful national standards that seek to balance out the judicial equation between prosecutors on one side and public defenders on the other, when it comes to making sure that indigent people have a fair chance to have their constitutional rights protected.

That funding, says Mary Fox, the head of the public defender system in Missouri, is key to making the new standards have the proper impact.

“The possibility of federal funding to increase resources for those eligible for indigent defense services in Missouri may bring us to the level of constitutional caseloads that we have never reached,� Fox says. “Resources alone, however, will not solve the problem.�

Part of what contributes to America’s mass incarceration crisis, both Fox and Hanlon agree, is that too many low-level charges threaten — and lead to — jail time, mostly for poor people. And so many of those defendants — such as those battling drug addiction — would be better served by being provided other social services outside the courts.

When Fox travels in rural Missouri, she often sees what she calls “addiction dockets,� where most of the defendants are before the court on drug crimes. Her public defenders can’t keep up in part because she struggles to hire enough of them in places like Hannibal and Lebanon and Ava and West Plains.

“In another 50 years, we’re not going to believe that we were jailing people who have a substance abuse order instead of treating them,� Fox says. “We have to rethink how we’re viewing addiction in our community.�

Indeed, Hanlon hopes the new public defender workload standards force the entire legal profession to take a good look at itself.

“We’ve all agreed to do something for 50 years that we never should have agreed to do,� he says, referencing the cocktail napkin standards that had no real meaning and are now being challenged state by state. “We helped feed the mass incarceration movement. There’s no excuse for not doing everything we can do to fix this problem.�