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I was at traffic court yesterday and before they got to my ticket they were processing actual criminal cases with defendants walking in the courtroom in hands a

• Forgeties79 2y ago
  Sadly public defenders are in wildly short supply, some articles I’ve read even describe it as a crisis. They simply can’t keep up with the caseloads.
  • LgWoodenBadger 2y ago
    We should use the same mechanism we use to fill jury pools.
  • stainablesteel 2y ago
    which leads to another problem, if we can't supply them, we need to reinvent our court system to become more realistic for people to defend their own case without having to worry about the nitpicks of "oh you didn't just say that did you now you're in more trouble you should have had a lawyer" laws aren't difficult to read nor understand, its however very tedious to make sure you're not missing something important from some chapter of a book you were unaware of. understanding the history of how cases TEND to be prosecuted and dealt with is another whole cultural side of things that are just not obvious to the layman. and this kind of information can and should be more accessible to people currently being processed through the system i think in the age we currently live in this is a realistic goal for improvement that would also humanize the process quite a lot
    • tiahura 2y ago
      As a lawyer, I feel like your comment is reflective of the general misunderstandings around this issue. Sit through a docket or two and you come to a few conclusions. 1. They're all guilty. This is a corollary of: prosecutors like shooting fish in a barrel, not prosecuting cases where they might have to actually work. 2. The role of the defense lawyer in 99% of these cases is to keep them from disrupting the proceedings. 3. Probation / alternative sentences don't work. A good horsewhipping in the town square and 90 hard labor on the farm would be a much more effective way to get through to these people (and thus ultimately more humane).
      • carapace 2y ago
        Even if what you're saying is true (and I grew up with dudes like you're describing) it's extremely important that those folks get due process. If we (the non-criminals) don't hold up the ideals of civilization then we lose the right to perform "justice" on these offenders, eh? I've heard dudes say, "the cops are just another gang", due process is how we make that not true. Further, a lot of the people who can't control themselves are /also/ victims: lead in the water and air, moms who took drugs during pregnancy (the most out-of-control kid I knew back in the day was a "crack baby", he was neurologically damaged before he was born.) Whippings and forced farm labor (you realize you're describing slavery?) are not a solution to criminality.
        • tiahura 2y ago
          people who can't control themselves are /also/ victims: We tried that approach for the last 60 years. Sit through a docket to witness for yourself its efficacy.
          • FireBeyond 2y ago
            Corporal and capital punishment don't reduce crime. All they do is give people - often people who have no involvement or had no impact from the crime - the feeling of vengeance. Except it's the criminal justice system, not the criminal vengeance system.
  • amalcon 2y ago
    This is a common class of problem with this kind of system. The state level public defender offices are mandated to exist since Gideon v. Wainwright, but the courts aren't really in a position to dictate budgeting. Legislatures could e.g. require budget parity with the prosecutor's office, but largely don't want that because helping accused criminals is politically unpopular.
• rayiner 2y ago
  > It was a sad reminder that the justice system is still very much imperfect, and the outcome of many cases depends heavily on whether you have money to pay attorneys I’m not sure that’s true. Prosecutors also throw far more resources into cases with expensive private attorneys. I saw the end results of the process from the appellate side (where the facts are fully developed), and I know lots of public defenders. I think what you’re overlooking is that 99% of those people are facially guilty. The police and prosecutors are lazy, they don’t want to prosecute marginal cases that don’t have rock solid evidence. My wife defended a murder case where they had almost continuous CCTV video of the defendant shooting the victim and driving home to his house. Just one camera angle after the other. And that was a sufficiently exciting case to warrant her big firm getting involved pro bono. I also see all these ACLU and Innocence Project mailings. Rarely do you see someone who isn’t guilty. Usually the case is about some legal technicality, or some principle such as whether teenagers should be prosecuted as adults or whether gang members involved in a fatal robbery should all be tried for murder when only one pulled the trigger. So what you’re seeing is the system doing the best it can with this huge volume of obviously guilty people. The public defenders I know are all on the lookout for the rare defendant who might be innocent.
  • ryandrake 2y ago
    Even "obviously" guilty people are entitled to competent, robust, and vigorous defenses (and whether or not this 99% are truly "obviously" guilty is an entirely separate HN thread). This is where the imperfection lies: These public defenders have such a huge case load that they cannot properly and competently defend their clients. If I could wave a magic wand, and we'd magically have 100X the number of public defense attorneys, each now having the ability to properly prepare for and litigate for their clients, even if those clients were "obviously guilty," why wouldn't I?
    • rayiner 2y ago
      Sure, but what does a competent defense look like when someone is caught on CCTV breaking into a cell phone store and stealing phones, and then the police find text messages of him fencing the stolen phones? The thing about "poor people crimes" is that they're either easy to prove because what's illegal is doing something you're not allowed to do. (Or they go unsolved, because they can't find who did the thing.) The reason "rich people" crimes are so expensive to defend is because those crimes often involve conduct that could be a crime or not depending on what various people were thinking at the time they did it, or whether it amounts to a pattern, etc. I agree with the principle that anyone accused of a crime that warrants a complex defense should get one, whether or not they can afford it. But that's a small fraction of all prosecutions. Society needs to be able to handle the guy who breaks into the cell phone store and was caught on camera in a cost-effective and efficient way.
• briffle 2y ago
  I know a public defender (in family law, so adoption, foster care, child endagerment, etc). The state pays her $75/h. Most people locally look at that dollar number and feel she is out of touch to complain, but she also has to: 1. have an office that is not her home that can recieve certified mail (and be signed for, no po boxes) 2. pay any staff out of that. 3. Maintain her own computers, and software and access to services needed 4. Hire her own PI's (if needed) out of her own pocket 5. Any other expert consultants out of her own pocket She also doesn't get any health insurance, or other benefits. And the best part, is the state has a formula they don't disclose, that determines how many hours work they think each case is appropriate for, and don't care how many she actually works. Every time she is paid, it includes a paper only invoice that she then gets to reconcile manually to see which cases are paid off, which are only partially, and which they forgot to pay that month.
  • krustyburger 2y ago
    Wow. I had heard that public defenders certainly weren’t in it for the money but that’s worse than I expected. It seems like the biggest sink would be paying someone to staff the office. I think some coworking spaces are set up to be able to accept certified mail. Has she looked into that?
  • patrickmay 2y ago
    The simple, straightforward, and therefore politically impossible solution is to require parity in funding for the district attorneys' offices and the public defenders' offices.
    • FireBeyond 2y ago
      As someone who absolutely agrees with this in principle, I disagree with "simple and straightforward" - you need to look at case categories (felonies and classes thereof, gross misdemeanors and misdemeanors) for a view on expected effort, and then you need to look at "what proportion of those cases have private representation". And then this will always be a trailing metric. I mean, personally I think the simple answer is just blanket equal resources, but there's no motivation to make that happen, but certainly won't be without things like the above. Elected prosecuting officials is a bad thing, IMHO. The incentives are all wrong. They get elected and re-elected on "being tough on crime", which means convictions, which leads to the simple fact that the US abuses the concept of the plea deal enormously. Thousands of people who would otherwise be found not guilty (if not are factually innocent) accept plea deals just to be done with a process that can take years to resolve (not to mention money, or freedom, or both, in the interim). In other countries the use of the plea deal is generally fairly rare, and comes with stringent judicial oversight. Here it is often the first option. "Well, what would your client plead to?"
• Twirrim 2y ago
  Washington State defined its limits for public defenders as: Felonies: 150 cases per year Misdemeanors: 300 cases per year Juvenile cases: 250 cases per year So a total of 700 cases per public defender, per year. Assuming no vacations or sick leave, total working hours is about 2000 per year, so they could average not even 3 hours per case, and of course felonies are likely to eat up the lions share of whatever hours they could spend on them. You're not going to get effective representation from any public defender, even with the most competent lawyers in the world. They simply don't have enough possible hours to spend on any given case to provide competent defense.
  • alsetmusic 2y ago
    Check out the podcast The Kids of Rutherford County to hear public defenders talk about how impossible the work is; especially when you have an absolutely corrupt judge. It's goddamn maddening. https://www.propublica.org/article/kids-of-rutherford-county-podcast-episodes https://www.propublica.org/article/kids-of-rutherford-county...
• NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  If an alien landed on planet Earth to watch these cases as they unfold without knowing anything about the roles of the judge, prosecution, and defense, they would inevitably come to the conclusion that public defenders job is to assist in the processing of arrestees so that they can be sent to prison quickly and conveniently. > It was a sad reminder that the justice system is still very much imperfect, We don't have a justice system. We have a conviction system. When prosecutors run for office (haha!), they don't brag about all the times they thoroughly investigated an alleged crime and determined that the defendants were innocent and should have charges dropped, they brag about how many they've put behind bars. And, in some cases, it's turned out that those they bragged about were in fact innocent. Additionally, when appeals seem destined to exonerate someone already convicted, something like half of prosecutors will go to heroic lengths to protect those convictions even when forensic science makes innocence clear. > I would be terrified to face the US justice system without heavy weight defense attorneys Often, it's enough to have one at all. Public defenders will browbeat you to plead out, and if you insist otherwise, they'll just wink at you and you know they'll sleep through your trial. They exist to give the appearance of defense. The biggest and most important reform we might enact would be to disallow DAs from using plea bargaining for more than 3% of cases that come through in any given calendar year. The second biggest would be to outlaw bail bonding.
• openasocket 2y ago
  It sounds like what you were watching was a first appearance, though I could be wrong. Depending on the circumstances, the public defender may not have even been appointed to the case until the hearing. The public defender may not even have had an opportunity to talk to the defendant prior to that, and is going mostly on whatever the prosecutor filed. But that doesn't really matter that much for first appearances. The only real point of first appearances is to advise the defendant of their rights, the charges, take an initial plea (this is almost always a not guilty plea - negotiations for plea agreements generally don't start until after the first appearance), and officially assign a public defender to the case (assuming they are not hiring their own attorney). Depending on the jurisdiction and context a bond may also be set, or that may be in a separate hearing. In some jurisdictions a public defender isn't even present for first appearances, because there's so little for them to actually do. The stereotype is that the public defenders are all incompetent. But if you actually talk to judges or criminal attorneys you will get a different picture. Judges in particular tend to have a lot of respect for the public defender's office. Honestly, in all the hearings I've seen involving an incompetent defense attorney, they are more likely to be private counsel than from the public defender's office.
• tracker1 2y ago
  This is why I truly believe that both Prosecutors and Public Defenders should be from the same pool of lawyers and that they are "graded" on both types of cases for promotion, pay, bonus, etc.
• techjamie 2y ago
  Where I live the public defenders just try to convince all their clients to plead guilty and take the lower charge. Was sitting near a public defender with his client in the courtroom once and his lawyer just told him plead guilty and he'll get a light sentence. The client protested that he was innocent, lawyer told him to plead anyway because the bargain charge wasn't serious.
• kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
  I was nearly killed and sustained significant injuries by a driver who didn't obey the law. The crooked cop disabled his bodycam when interviewing a witness who saw everything close up. He only ticketed the driver for driving with a suspension and apologetically told him it wasn't his fault. The prosecutor was uninterested in what happened and, when the driver and cop didn't show up, ensured the punishment was the bare minimum wrist slap of an extra suspension. I didn't get the partial video until a month after the sham trial.