If you can afford a private defense attorney, you probably should. Their case load will be considerably smaller.
That said? Public Defenders tend to be some of the hardest working and most passionate people out there. You generally don’t get into that unless you believe in justice (even just being a corporate lawyer who rubber stamps paperwork tends to pay significantly more) and they obviously have a LOT of experience in whatever you just did. And they tend to have a solid rapport with most judges because they see them potentially multiple times a week.
So… how about you not be a dick to the people putting the work in?
makeshiftreaper@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Yes it’s worth it. Even the worst, most overworked public defender has spent years of their life in school, deals with a system you’ve likely never interacted with on a daily basis, and usually has some level of altruism. The reason you hear about people who win by representing themselves is because it’s very rare for them to not get trampled by the system
snooggums@piefed.world 6 days ago
The biggest reason that a public defenders struggle sometimes is because they have more limited time and resources compared to private defenders who can generally scale effort with the amount of money thrown at them. That is mainly an issue with society’s priorities, since we throw far more money at prosecutors.
SpikesOtherDog@ani.social 6 days ago
I was privvy to info about prosecutors vs public defenders. It may not be true in every region, but it is at least in my town.
Prosecutors actually get less money to handle cases, but get to push off or decline to prosecute depending on severity and caseload.
Public defenders get more funding from many different levels of government, but even with that funding they are overworked with twice the staff.
I think prosecutors already have the case presented to them as well, and they are pressing charges. Defenders need to pick up where the police and prosecutors left off and either find a legal out or bargain with what the defendant has to get the best position.
Also, from what I have heard about pro se defendants is that it frustrates the court because the proceedings grind to a crawl to ensure the defendant understands enough of what is going on to not have them claim they were railroaded.