My understanding is that federal public defenders have a really good reputation. It's at the state level that they're given obscene workloads and laughable sala

My understanding is that federal public defenders have a really good reputation. It's at the state level that they're given obscene workloads and laughable salaries. Forget superstar salaries, funding adequately-sized PD offices would be a massive improvement over the status quo. Ordinarily, it wouldn't cost that much to have a decent public defender system. Unfortunately, the entire system is built around people pleading to charges, and if every single defendant had high quality representation, the resulting flood of actual trials would paralyze the system.