I did a bit of digging and found some (old) data to (largely) back me up! The Bureau of Justice Statistics released a report in 2000 [2] on "Defense Counsel in

I did a bit of digging and found some (old) data to (largely) back me up! The Bureau of Justice Statistics released a report in 2000 [2] on "Defense Counsel in Criminal Cases". The following points are for defendants in state court in the 75 largest counties. The report has data for Federal defendants, too, and the broader picture looks pretty similar for them. According to the report, only 5% of criminal cases are in Federal courts. - Felony defendants were represented by publicly-financed attorneys over 80%(!) of the time. - Defendants with public and private attorneys had similar conviction rates. They pled out at similar rates, too. - Defendants with public attorneys were more likely to get prison sentences, but got shorter sentences on average. - Defendants with private attorneys who were already in prison (i.e., convicted) talked to their lawyers earlier and more often. The part about prison just seems to be because that's where they collected the data. - Defendants with public attorneys got pretrial release a lot less often (50% vs 80%) than those with private attorneys. This looks to me like it's mostly about not being able to afford bail. - Workloads for Federal appointed attorneys rose faster than spending on them. I would guess the same to be true of state courts and for the trend to have continued to today. [1] http://civilrighttocounsel.org/ http://civilrighttocounsel.org/, the civil right to counsel I forgot in my post. [2] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/dccc.pdf https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/dccc.pdf 2000 appears to be the most recent report on this subject. It's possible they've collected more recent data elsewhere and I didn't turn it up.