Reducing Wrongful Convictions: Better Public Defense

The Bill of Rights guarantees you a right to a lawyer when you're on trial, even if you can't afford one. Unfortunately, the lawyers provided by the state are often less than effective. Most public defenders have more work than they canhandle, and are underpaid on top of it. I'm sure many do a fine job even so, but you can't reasonably expect first-class work in those circumstances. The public defender system should be improved, with more pay, more attorneys, and reduced workloads.

Worried about cost? Most states already provide specialized appeal attorneys to death row inmates, and those attorneys often find errors in the original defense lawyer's work. The state ends up with a worst-case scenario: all the cost of a death penalty trial, and no execution (assuming the execution itself to be of value, which we've shown it's not).

Why not save all those man-years of prison resources, not to mention possible lawsuits for false imprisonment, not to mention the moral cost of stealing years of someone's life? States should provide better defense attorneys during the trial phase! Yes, it will cost more on the front end, but we get a better, more trustworthy system of justice out of it.

Also, we need to update the requirements for being provided with a public defender. Even the very poor are in many cases still considered to be able to afford their own defense lawyer. That's both absurd and unamerican. Nobody should have to throw their lives and livelihoods away just to prove their own innocence!

Per the above Mother Jones article, we would need 6,900 more public defenders to get the current workload down to acceptable levels. Say we added 20,000 instead, to account for the additional cases that will be covered by allowing more people to be covered. Median salary for a public defender is around $50,000. So we're talking about spending a billion dollars a year, divided among all the states and the federal government. That's not trivial, but it's doable! For comparison, we spent that during the invasion and occupation of Iraq every eighteen hours.

If you don't have functional courts, you may as well stop pretending to be civilization. We have to stop trying to do justice on the cheap.