Talk:Public defender

Removed POV Tag
POV tag was added back in June by a non registered wikipedia user: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Public_defender&direction=next&oldid=134622906

There was no discussion regarding the person's reasons for adding the tag at the time of that edit. Without a supporting rationale from the anonymous user who added the POV tag it's hard to say that there is any real dispute. Because of this I went ahead and removed the tag. PBF —Preceding unsigned comment added by Prettyboyfloyd (talk • contribs) 18:55, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

I attempted to flesh out the article with some of the current issues effecting public defender offices in the US. I am a public defender so anyone who sees bias in the article based on that please take appropriate action.--24.126.240.60 01:23, 12 May 2005 (UTC)


 * The bias in your writing is not that bad. But I hope you do not write like that in your court documents (with so many spelling and grammar errors), or your clients will certainly be able to obtain easy reversals on appeal for ineffective assistance of counsel!  --Coolcaesar 06:55, 12 May 2005 (UTC)


 * It might be useful to have seperate articles on the various PD agencies, which could be used to differentiate between them. Here are some of the notable ones:

Alaska: http://www.state.ak.us/admin/pd/ Maryland: http://www.opd.state.md.us/ San Francisco: http://www.sfgov.org/site/pd_index.asp (This is the only elected PD in the country, and Jeff Adachi probably needs his own article) Bronx Defenders: http://www.bronxdefenders.org/ DC PD: http://www.pdsdc.org/

Of the Federal Public Defenders, the a starting point might be http://vae.fd.org/ (which was counsel on a number of terrorism cases)208.27.203.132


 * There is a ridiculous amount of spelling and grammar errors in this page which need to be fixed. Offkilter


 * I agree. Most of them come from that anonymous bozo who edited this article several times in May. He has some valid points, but his spelling and grammar are absolutely atrocious.  I hope he's not practicing in California---here, public defenders can be liable to their clients for malpractice (even though prosecutors have absolute immunity).  --Coolcaesar 00:48, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * Prosecutors in Cali don't have absolute immunity for administrative decisions, and PDs probably are not committing malpractice if they make spelling errors. But, maybe someone wants to put in some stuff about the impact of Booker on Federal PDs.


 * Some people get on the internet and lose all sight of spelling and grammar but information is always more important. What we really need is someone who has knowledge of a public defender system outside the US to flesh out this article. - Kuzain 16:57, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

What does "Plaintiffs Enable Nations In Southern areas to have fair trials." mean? Why is "PENIS" capitalised in this sentence? - 219.194.176.36 12:26, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Removed. Thanks.  --Nlu (talk) 16:01, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

From the first sentence... "indigent defendents who are unable or unwilling to pay...": Doesn't indigent mean unable to pay, essentially? I'd say the sentence is redundant, but a little more research informs me that indigent also is a specific legal term (meaning, presumeably, that one could be unable to pay and not formerly indigent, or could be indigent but possibly able to pay). My question: Can a person who can afford an attourney be granted the services of a public defender? If so, drop the indigent and just say "unwilling or unable to pay." If not, why not just stick with "unable to pay"? I realize this much ado about nothing, but as a non-lawyer, I think it important that legal terms are not used in an way where I could mistake them for normal English words.


 * I've removed "unwilling," since that's legally inaccurate.


 * Whether someone who is able to pay can be entitled to public defender services nonetheless depends on jurisdiction, I think. In California, if the judge has a doubt (does not need to be a reasonable doubt) of the defendant's competence to stand trial, he/she should suspend criminal proceedings against the defendant, have doctors examine the defendant, and appoint counsel (usually public defender) for the defendant even if the defendant is not indigent.  I do not believe that that is a constitutional duty, however -- merely what California wrote into its statutes.  --Nlu (talk) 21:01, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Worldwide View?
In Germany a public defender ("Pflichtverteidiger") is ordered by the court if the defendant has not got an other defendant by himself, even though if he has has to pay the court fees(e.g. he lost the trial) he also needs to pay the public defendant after he wents through all offical channels. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.35.235.124 (talk) 16:54, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Is the term "public defender" used in any other English-speaking jurisdiction outside the United States? If not, then there doesn't appear to be a worldwide view problem. I thought commonwealth nations typically used the term duty solicitor. --Whitenoise101 03:37, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

It doesn't look like there is. In that case there is no worldwide view issue because we already have an article on duty solicitors. --Coolcaesar 05:45, 14 May 2006 (UTC)


 * I dunno, the reason I added the globalise template was that I though the article should be about about the general consept of having the government provide or pay for a lawyer for the defendant, and not just the the spesific US legal term. Basicaly I was writing a bio stub on a Norwegian lawyer who served as the "offentlige forsvarer" (literal translation "publid defender") of Mullah Krekar and so I linked to this article, but all it talked about was the US system, so I slapped the globalise template on it and wandered off elsewhere. Basicaly I though this would be the logical place to have an article about the general consept of having the government pay for or otherwise provide a defense lawyer to people (also the interwiki link to sv:Offentlig försvarare is misleading since that article does not mention the US version at all while that is all this article covers), though I guess I could have created Public defender (consept) or something and set up a disambiguation page instead, but it's not rely my area of extertise so it would just have been a stub-stub. --Sherool (talk) 06:02, 19 September 2006 (UTC)
 * The larger problem is that nearly all the work on sociology of the legal profession has been done in the United States, because only the U.S. has an educational system big enough to subsidize a community of scholars who actually dedicate their lives to studying such a thing. We have hundreds of books on sociology of the criminal justice system, prosecutors, and public defenders in the United States, but very few sociologists have bothered to do such work in any other countries.  And yes---I've looked extensively, as part of my ongoing research to develop the Lawyer article to featured article status.  --Coolcaesar 01:34, 20 September 2006 (UTC)
 * The template has been here for several months now. While I am mindful of the non-jingositic NPOV ethic, I think that we should either set up a disambiguation (thus encouraging further development of articles on indigent representation around the world) or, we should just remove the template. Unless there is a solution in progress for the problem which the template points out then the template is just a blemish on the page without a purpose. (Like if I wrote a message with my finger on my very dirty car that said, "I really need to wash my car!" ...but refused to wash it for months...) One potentially painless solution would be to put a message on top of the page with links to (extant or not) entries for the names for indigent defense counsel around the world...PBF 04:42, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Have removed the template after a discussion w/ sherool on our respective talk pages. Will attempt to address ww view issue by linking to international indigent defense articles [existing or not] will use this article or one like it, to come up with a list of other systems in the international context (I see that the article [lawyer] already has something similar.) If anyone has any better ideas I'm all ears. PBF 17:51, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Like or not folks, there are a lot of difference between PDs, which are often not apparent to non-lawyers. Unfortunately, this article is just chock-full of generalizations. For instance, in the jurisdictions that I practice in, a person charged with a felony on the state level might be represented by 1) an agency which is normally called the "Public Defender" (which is a fairly large state-wide agency); in case of a conflict 2) another state-wide agency that has lawyers that are charged with represented defendants as well as acting as guardians ad litem for children; or in case of two conflicts 3) appointed counsel that is paid on a per hour basis.  People charged with only misdemeanors are generally represented by a law firm that has a contractual arrangement with the state.  The quality of the representation is, obviously, subject to some debate because 1) standards of representation are always changing; and 2) clients sentenced to jail tend to blame their lawyers for everything.  (I think my jurisdiction has a good reputation for criminal representation, but someone in jail would disagree with me). 68.33.203.109

The part about "low pay" is stupid, but before deleting it, I am going to see if people can fix it. There has always been a "concern" that people are not paid what they should be. As to caseloads, a lot of these statistics need to be put into perspective. For instance, many cases are disposed of by dismissals (because, for example, the state fails to charge something that is a crime or fails to present a witness. Otherwise, just repeating a bunch of old-wives tales doesn't really provide any serious analys68.33.203.109

The CJA content is way too long. It should be removed, the CJA summarized and a link provided to the text of the act.
 * agreed66.99.221.227 20:56, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Restoring globalize tag
Though I recognize that the U.S. is by some way the largest user of the term, I have a couple of reasons for adding the tag back. One, that it's not the only user of the term: witness the Public Defender Service in England & Wales. And two, that the article as it stands barely specifies that it's talking about the U.S. Plenty of other countries have a federal structure, so this does need to be explicitly mentioned right up top. 86.132.138.159 (talk) 00:16, 25 January 2009 (UTC)


 * As I understand it several Europan countries have public defenders or something similar. I added a globalize tag, but it was removed with the comment that public defenders exist primarily in the US and Brazil. Unless this article uses som very restrictive definition of public defender I think that comment was incorrect. After reading the discussion above I understand that there is consensus for not having the globalize tag in the article, though I don't agree with it.Sjö (talk) 10:41, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Hmm yes there is a "Public Defender Service" in England and Wales- indeed they have a very flash office in my home town near the Magistrates Court- but this is a new development in England & Wales, and it looks like a pilot scheme it's only in four places. My understanding is that it was based on the American Model of doing these sorts of things. So any article about this (even one about the about the PDS service in England and Wales) has clearly got to look at the American tradition, since that is as much part of the context of how the England and Wales system developed as the tradition of the Duty Solictor. 7:41 GMT 23 Sept 2011 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 149.254.58.32 (talk) 19:41, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

What researches?
The paragraph Funding and staffing problems says: "Research has indicated that indigents receive the highest level of representation when assisted by a well funded professional office dedicated to criminal defense. Some of these studies have indicated that the outcomes for properly funded and independent public defender clients are on equal footing as clients of private attorneys in the same jurisdiction." Seems to be unreferneced.--朝鲜的轮子 (talk) 05:49, 29 May 2013 (UTC)