Most criminal defendants cannot afford private counsel, so states provide indigent defense either through private court-appointed attorneys or public defender organizations. This study compares those two delivery models by examining outcomes for codefendants assigned to different attorney types within the same case.
🧭 What Was Compared:
- Private court-appointed attorneys versus a public defender organization
- Outcomes of codefendants who, within the same case, were assigned different types of counsel
📊 Data From San Francisco and How Assignment Is Identified:
- Uses administrative data on criminal cases in San Francisco
- Focuses on multiple-defendant cases where different defendants in the same case received different counsel types
- In these multiple-defendant cases, public defender assignment is plausibly as good as random, supporting a within-case comparison that controls for case-level factors
🔎 Key Findings:
- Public defender assignment reduces the probability of any prison sentence by 22%
- Public defenders shorten the length of prison sentences by 10%
- Results are estimated by comparing codefendants within the same case, leveraging plausibly random variation in counsel type
💡 Why It Matters:
- Provides direct evidence on the relative effectiveness of “make” (public defender) versus “buy” (court-appointed private counsel) models for delivering constitutionally mandated indigent defense
- Findings inform policy debates over how best to allocate and organize public defense resources while holding case characteristics constant
