David Feige presented at last year's DPA Annual Seminar and is on the faculty for this fall's Litigation Practice Institute.
"The Romney administration should consider adopting a public defender system. Salaried public defenders are usually paid far less than the private lawyers who take cases by the hour; in Massachusetts, public defenders earn a starting salary of just over $15 an hour plus benefits. And though it's true that public defenders usually insist on carrying a smaller caseload than assigned counsel, a downside from the state's point of view, there is a good reason. Public defenders—most of whom represent the indigent for ideological reasons—care about caseload as well as cash. Ardent, committed public defenders like this are precisely who the state should be recruiting. And given that the single biggest predictor of the quality of a public defender's work is caseload, manageable caseloads are in the interest of any state looking to provide good, rather than constitutionally adequate, representation.
"Public defender offices provide additional benefits. Most offer ancillary services indigent defendants need including investigators, social workers, and lawyering that addresses homelessness, drug addiction, mental illness, and other problems that often bring defendants into contact with the criminal system in the first place."
