An important difference between a public defender and a private defense attorney is in the area of communication and availability. The Office of the Legal Defender is similar to the Office of the Public Defender. However, legal defenders represent people that public defenders cannot represent due to conflicts of interest or other legal reasons. The Court-Appointed Attorney's Office provides a list of private attorneys who can be appointed to represent indigent individuals who cannot obtain a public or legal defender to represent them. These attorneys work under the Office of the Court-Appointed Attorney to ensure the availability of additional attorneys when the number of Legal Defender and Public Defender cases is too large.
Anyone accused of a crime is free to hire their own private lawyer to represent them. Public defenders work for the government, and the government pays them to represent people who don't have the necessary funds or means to hire private lawyers. A public defender works for the government, the same government entity that is also prosecuting him for a crime. A private lawyer is completely different.
A private lawyer works for himself, there, in private practice, he is trained to represent people in a private environment at a private level. When you go to their office and it's not a government office, it's not a court office, it's an outside office. The main difference is that public defenders often receive an enormous number of cases because they work for the government. A private lawyer can set their own rules, their own standards.
Private attorneys often provide a higher level of service to clients because there are private attorneys and you pay for them so they have more time and resources to dedicate to your case. Public defenders are, in fact, real lawyers. They studied law and passed the state bar exam, as did private attorneys. The government pays the salaries of public defenders, as it does to prosecutors, municipal prosecutors, lawyers who work for government agencies, judges, and judicial personnel. While studies show similar results between public defenders and private lawyers, the same is not the case for contract or panel lawyers.
Many lawyers want to be public defenders in states like California and in the federal system where public defense offices only hire highly qualified candidates. One of the advantages of working with a private lawyer is that the defendant can choose which lawyer to hire. Public defenders are salaried public employees, while contract and panel attorneys are private attorneys who handle cases on a contract basis. However, the court often has a list of private attorneys that can be called upon to represent defendants for a certain price. Despite increasingly severe fiscal restrictions on their offices, public defenders often provide representation that is at least as competent as that provided by private defense attorneys.
In some large metropolitan areas (in California and New York, for example), Public Defender offices are highly respected and provide their clients with representation that only a very experienced (and expensive) private attorney could. equalize. Many states and the federal government fund public defense offices to fulfill their constitutional obligation to provide lawyers to people who cannot afford them (called indigent defendants). This has led me to believe that if one were to find a good public defender, one would be equal to or better than the lawyer in terms of arriving at a reasonable result through the appropriate jurisdiction in which the real evidence is examined and not just a “mitigation package” prepared and requested by a so-called Juris Doctor.
Public defenders often offer representation that is at least as competent as that provided by private defense attorneys. It is true that many public defenders stay for a few years, gain intensive experience and then go to the supposedly greener pastures of private practice. For example, in the nine counties surveyed in the study, 76% of public defender clients were convicted, compared to 74% of private attorney clients.
