Comment by briffle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by briffle | Hacker News Reader

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I know a public defender (in family law, so adoption, foster care, child endagerment, etc).

The state pays her $75/h. Most people locally look at that dollar number and feel she is out of touch to complain, but she also has to:

1. have an office that is not her home that can recieve certified mail (and be signed for, no po boxes)

2. pay any staff out of that.

3. Maintain her own computers, and software and access to services needed

4. Hire her own PI's (if needed) out of her own pocket

5. Any other expert consultants out of her own pocket

She also doesn't get any health insurance, or other benefits. And the best part, is the state has a formula they don't disclose, that determines how many hours work they think each case is appropriate for, and don't care how many she actually works. Every time she is paid, it includes a paper only invoice that she then gets to reconcile manually to see which cases are paid off, which are only partially, and which they forgot to pay that month.

The simple, straightforward, and therefore politically impossible solution is to require parity in funding for the district attorneys' offices and the public defenders' offices.

As someone who absolutely agrees with this in principle, I disagree with "simple and straightforward" - you need to look at case categories (felonies and classes thereof, gross misdemeanors and misdemeanors) for a view on expected effort, and then you need to look at "what proportion of those cases have private representation".

And then this will always be a trailing metric.

I mean, personally I think the simple answer is just blanket equal resources, but there's no motivation to make that happen, but certainly won't be without things like the above.

Elected prosecuting officials is a bad thing, IMHO. The incentives are all wrong. They get elected and re-elected on "being tough on crime", which means convictions, which leads to the simple fact that the US abuses the concept of the plea deal enormously.

Thousands of people who would otherwise be found not guilty (if not are factually innocent) accept plea deals just to be done with a process that can take years to resolve (not to mention money, or freedom, or both, in the interim).

In other countries the use of the plea deal is generally fairly rare, and comes with stringent judicial oversight. Here it is often the first option. "Well, what would your client plead to?"

The fact that this isn't the case after 200 some odd years exposes us. We don't care about the right to a fair trial for people who don't have money, it's a lie we tell ourselves.

I think it should go beyond that, in that public defense and prosecution should come from the same pool of lawyers and they are graded by success on both sides by type/class of case.

The situation that you just described would be a pleasant improvement for many of the private sector sole proprietors and small business owners that I know.

Her situation sounds actually far more stable and easier than theirs in a variety of ways. Her client is likely quite well-established, and the risk of it "going out of business" or running into insurmountable funding issues is small. Her client will likely be feeding her a steady supply of work, without interruption, effectively forever. It doesn't sound like she has any marketing, advertising, or customer-acquisition overhead. She doesn't have the overhead of negotiating a contract and fees with each client. Her working conditions are likely quite safe and comfortable (as compared to those in the trades, for example).

I don't think she has much to complain about when compared to what those in the private sector have to deal with.

Are any of these unfortunate private sector proprietors the sole bulwark against their clients ending up in jail or prison, and always up against better-funded opponents?

You're comparing apples and something far, far different than oranges.

Don’t small businesses typically get to set their prices though? I realise there’s competition and suchlike but that seems like a pretty important lever that most businesses have but which the public defender described above does not.

Wow. I had heard that public defenders certainly weren’t in it for the money but that’s worse than I expected.

It seems like the biggest sink would be paying someone to staff the office. I think some coworking spaces are set up to be able to accept certified mail. Has she looked into that?

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