Governments employ public defenders because appointed and contract counsel systems fail.

Evidence

The states had three options in responding to their obligation to provide counsel for indigent defendants: they could establish offices of governmentemployed defense attorneys, or public defenders; pay private attorneys on a case-by-case basis to represent defendants; or contract with attorneys or firms to supply legal counsel in a large number of cases. The second approach has not worked well, because the rates that governments have paid have not been high enough to attract many good lawyers. If all attorneys in a jurisdiction are obliged to take a turn at criminal defense, defendants may well receive perfunctory representation by lawyers who have little familiarity with the criminal law. Indeed, a study of homicide cases in New York City found that, in a third of the cases, court-appointed lawyers spent less than a week preparing the case. Similar problems plague the third approach. In order to be cost-effective, the attorneys and firms under contract have to limit the time and effort they devote to each case. Many jurisdictions have therefore chosen the first approach: to employ public defenders to handle criminal defense. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 723

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the three indigent-defense models (public defender, assigned counsel, contract attorney) that recur throughout legal-system study.
• XREF: Connects to course coverage of Gideon v. Wainwright and indigent-defense obligations; the assigned-counsel failure data parallels broader critiques of underfunded justice. — connects to: Courts-appointed private counsel systematically underprepared criminal defenses. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 723; Inadequate defense counsel in capital cases produces wrongful convictions and exonerations — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 2050

Broader Connections

• Courts-appointed private counsel systematically underprepared criminal defenses. #expands (0.82) — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 723
• Inadequate defense counsel in capital cases produces wrongful convictions and exonerations #corroborates (0.78) — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 2050