Adversarial is good. What the OP may be suggesting is: take a pool of lawyers, and have them be either prosecutors or defense lawyers, on any given day.
It has some practical issues (defense lawyers are not paid by the state, prosecutors are).
It has some practical issues (defense lawyers are not paid by the state, prosecutors are).
Many defense lawyers are paid for by the state. Not all, but most. But they aren't really paid equally in most cases: Defense lawyers provided by the state tend to be overworked and not have enough time to adequately help folks. I'm not sure anywhere has laws that mean they get as much money and time as the prosecution has to put towards a case. They aren't paid on par with private defense lawyers either, unfortunately.
An adversarial system is only good if both parties have similar support. When one side is obviously disadvantaged when the defendant is too poor to hire a lawyer outright, the benefits of the adversarial system are fewer.
A quick search turns up this[1] report from 2000 that says:
Over 80% of felony defendants charged with a violent crime in the country’s largest counties and 66% in U.S. district courts had publicly financed attorneys.
Having said that, the report is from 2000 and it seems the data is from the mid to late '90s. So things may have changed since then but I don't see any evidence of that.
I'm not sure that combining the prosecutor's and public defender's office would work, but having a system where the lawyers end up switching between prosecution and defense cases does seem like it may help avoid pushing them into extreme views for either side.
Similarly, I'd expect lawyers who were forced to alternate between prosecuting and defending to concentrate more on the mechanics of the process and less on the result.
Yes, a former prosecutor is a great person to get as a defense attorney. That's not the question I asked.
That said, it's not like the defense/prosecutor caseload would be the only thing to change if this hypo came to be. It wouldn't happen in a vacuum, no "suppose everything was the same tomorrow except everybody's calendar got mixed up!"
> At felony case termination, court-appointed counsel represented 82% of State defendants in the 75 largest counties in 1996 and 66% of Federal defendants in 1998.
Many defense lawyers are paid by the state: they're called public defenders.