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Here's a serious question, what's preventing the pool of public defenders and the DA's from being the same people? Would lawyers in this position be influenced

Here's a serious question, what's preventing the pool of public defenders and the DA's from being the same people? Would lawyers in this position be influenced to throw defense cases for the sake of their police and judge buddies? Would they be willing to accept the potential professional consequences of having an abysmal defense record? Such a system could provide a lot of incentive for attorneys to maintain a more professional and appropriate relationship with law enforcement, but there may also be confounding factors I'm not seeing. Philosophically, DA's and public defenders fulfill a similar role in society. They both serve the public in fact-finding for criminal investigations through an adversarial process before a court of law. Depriving defendants of competent council severely undermines the entire process.

awillen 7y ago
This is a really interesting thought - even having DAs spend 10% of their time on the other side of the aisle would probably help ensure less of an us-vs-them mentality. Plus being on the other side once in a while would likely make them better at prosecuting the cases that they're working on.
socialist_coder 7y ago
DA's can actually do a lot to help these kinds of defendants from the DA side, because they can be more lenient, merciful, etc. The problem sometimes is that the boss DA is still the boss and can just tell any of his assistant DAs to go after people so he looks "tough on crime". So even if all the ADAs are very empathetic, they aren't the ones making every decision. I've listened to a lot of interviews with DAs and a lot of them actually do want to help these kinds of poor defendants, so they start out as public defenders. But then they realize that the real power is in the DA's office with sentencing and charging and such, so they switch over.
mirimir 7y ago
In my experience, former DAs make the best defense counsel. They know how stuff works. And they have friends.

awillen 7y ago

This is a really interesting thought - even having DAs spend 10% of their time on the other side of the aisle would probably help ensure less of an us-vs-them mentality. Plus being on the other side once in a while would likely make them better at prosecuting the cases that they're working on.

socialist_coder 7y ago

DA's can actually do a lot to help these kinds of defendants from the DA side, because they can be more lenient, merciful, etc. The problem sometimes is that the boss DA is still the boss and can just tell any of his assistant DAs to go after people so he looks "tough on crime". So even if all the ADAs are very empathetic, they aren't the ones making every decision. I've listened to a lot of interviews with DAs and a lot of them actually do want to help these kinds of poor defendants, so they start out as public defenders. But then they realize that the real power is in the DA's office with sentencing and charging and such, so they switch over.

mirimir 7y ago

In my experience, former DAs make the best defense counsel. They know how stuff works. And they have friends.