The Reality of Public Defenders
2023 marked the 60th anniversary of Gideon v. Wainwright, a Supreme Court case that guaranteed “everyone, regardless of income, has a fundamental right to a lawyer”. The American legal system is therefore structured to have a fair fight in court between a prosecutor and a defense attorney, until the truth is revealed. For defendants who are unable to afford an attorney, Gideon created the role of a public defender. Public defenders are defense attorneys employed by the state working for underprivileged defendants, in order to fulfill the Fourteenth amendment. Public defenders have proven very useful, as majority of criminal cases (four out of five) in America are against individuals who cannot afford a private attorney and depend on publicly funded attorneys. However, the overload of defendants who need public defenders combined with the lack of funding has caused a multitude of issues for the system. Much of government funding for the legal system is given to the police, prosecutors, and prisons over public defenders, causing them to be underpaid and under-resourced. An example of a lack of adequate resources is that 40% of all public defender offices do not have a single investigator on their staff, which means they have no one to conduct detective work helping to prove a defendant's innocence. Additionally, there is an extreme shortage of public defenders, and therefore existing public defenders and given too many cases for them to properly prepare for. In fact, the average public defender in New Orleans only has seven minutes to work on their clients' cases.
Not only is this system incredibly difficult for public defenders, but it also negatively affects low-income individuals who need full attention and support from their lawyer. The fulfillment of the public defender system is not living out the original purpose of Gideon which was to provide adequate legal representation. Spending a minimal amount of time and dedicating few resources to a defendant's case often leads to wrongful convictions or unjust sentences.
In relation to unfair incarceration time, often pretrial defendants are locked behind bars before a trial due to no public defender being available. Public defenders are obligated to decline new cases if it is impossible for them to balance it with their current cases; however, judges are also required to uphold the law that every defendant has the right to legal representation. Therefore, defendants wait behind bars with no available public defenders to represent them. Recently, America has seen a dramatic increase in the number of defendants in jails without legal representation. Often, individuals are locked up for more time without a defendant than they would have for their individual minor offense, upon conviction; and some would have jail time despite ultimately being found innocent.
Public defenders are the sole voice for many individuals within the criminal justice system, and it is up to the country’s legislation to properly live out the promise guaranteed in Gideon v. Wainwright. The best solution as of now is to raise funding for the public defender system, and recent legislation has been introduced that will raise the salaries of public defenders to that of prosecutors.