Public defenders are usually very dedicated and committed attorneys. In fact, they are usually more dedicated and more hard-working than many private criminal defense attorneys. 
They have to be after all, by becoming public defenders they are agreeing to take on five-times the workload of a private criminal defense attorney for less than half the pay. Most of the people who are willing to do that are motivated by a concerted dedication to indigent defense.
In any organization, however, you will always find “bad apples.” Some public defenders in some offices might just be “treading water” – i.e. using the job solely to gain experience and biding their time until they have enough to leave the public defender’s office and go out on their own. The real problem public defenders have is not lack of experience or lack of dedication, it is a lack of time (or limited time) and resources. The average public defender has a case load that is five times higher than the maximum case load recommended by the American Bar Association. Also, public defender offices have very limited resources to spend on investigations, gathering evidence, hiring experts and so on. A private defense attorney is likely to have far more resources to dedicate to these areas because he will expect you, the client, to pay for them up front.
Therefore, the “problem” with public defenders is not that they don’t work hard. It’s just that they have very limited time and resources to spend on each individual case, and having so many cases to handle there is only so much time that they have in their day for all of the clients that they get assigned to by the court. Since the most important case for any defendant is, of course, his own, the limited time a public defender has to devote to it often makes it seem as if they’re not working very hard on it. In fact, unless you happened to get one of those rare “bad apples” assigned to you, this is not the case. There working hard, it just that they don’t have enough time to devote to your case that a paid private attorney, who is representing YOU, and not the other 30 to 50 people in court that day, it’s just common sense.
If you need an experienced criminal defense attorney, who will take the time to focus on your specific case, call the Law Office of William Daley at 619-238-1905 for a free consultation.
