Courts: Public Defenders

When a citizens has been arrested for committing a crime, they are read their rights by the police. One of these rights is the to counsel if you cannot afford it. This right applies to both the State court, and the Federal court systems. The right to counsel is supposed to be an effective way for people to navigate the criminal justice system and have someone to guide them through what they should during this process. The court system offers the right to counsel if you cannot afford it, but it does not offer the best counsel that a person could get. What is offered is a public defender. A public defender is "a lawyer who is paid by the government to defend people who are accused of crime and are unable to pay for a private lawyer" (Merriam-Webster).

There are different types of public counsel that are there to represent people who cannot afford their own lawyers. These types of public counsel are the public defender, a contract defender, and assigned counsel. All of these lawyers are overworked and underpaid. In New York public defenders can have up to 100 cases at a time, and many different cases in one day. Instead of being able to give equal attention to every case, public defenders have to pick and choose what cases to spend more time on. In a YouTube video about New York public defenders (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3mhqrXVv_w), a public defender admits to spending more time preparing for cases that are going to trial, than the other cases that he has to work on.

The public defenders are most often paid by the State and have to put in more time than they are actually paid for.Different States also put caps on how much public defenders, contract defenders, and assigned counsel and get paid for different types of criminal cases. 2007 data shows that public defenders are paid $92 an hour at the Federal level and that they can be paid upwards of $70 per hour at the State level, even though most State public defenders are not making that much money and can make only about $39 an hour in some States (Arthur). While public defenders are necessary in the United States criminal justice system, people represented by them are disproportionately Black or from other minority groups. People also represented by public defenders are more likely to be convicted of the crime that they are charged with, get longer sentences. This means that Blacks and other minorities are more prone to getting convicted and longer sentencing. Public defenders are also only appointed to people charged with crimes in during their first initial trial and then the first appeal. Once both are over convicted people do not have to right to counsel for other trials or reviews that they may encounter in their time being  incarcerated. This leaves people, predominantly minority people, in prison for longer periods of time because they do not have the proper legal guidance to help them with other appeals that they may file with the court.