It's worse than embarrassing, it's disgusting, it's shameful, it's kind of indicative of the breakdown of our societal norms - see politics for another area. A lot of those people were minorities, all of them must have been poor. We don't have equal rights for people who can't afford a lawyer. If you are a juror in a case, you have to consider if this is the situation. It never really hit me that I could be one of the people who could be faced with a situation like this - could I detect that non-existent defense lawyer, could I be strong enough of character to discuss that with the other jurors. I'm sure that for our entire history this has been something faced by poor and minority defendants, but I think it must be worse than in the past because of the plea bargain hunting by prosecutors and the increasing prosecution and filling of prisons.
We have maybe 3 levels of criminal justice in America. The larger group of people who can't afford a lawyer and have an overburdened public defender, regular people who can afford a lawyer, and then rich people who can afford endless money to challenge even reasonable evidence - think any celebrity accused of a crime. Prosecutors try to plea bargain cases, and poor people probably are told by their overburdened public defender to go along with it. If a lot of those people didn't plea bargain but went to a real trial, then the public defender wouldn't even be able to go to that many trials.
One of the presidential candidates this year was a prosecutor (Sen. Kamala Harris), and she was one of those who in some cases at least didn't seem to intervene in cases where there was proprietorial malfeasance.