Abstract
Public defenders being equally effective at gaining acquittals for defendants when compared to private counsel has allowed for an assumption that the public defender, and the promise made in Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), is working. But what does this acquittal rate tell us about the public defender office? Sadly, the comparison does not tell us much. The effectiveness of a public defender can only be truly determined by using a comparison to its counterpart in the adversarial system, the prosecution. In order for our public defender office to be deemed adequate or effective, it must be found to parity the prosecution, not to be an equivalent, or better than privately obtained counsel. This research set out to determine the parity that exists between the public defender’s office and district attorney’s office. It attempts to do so in a way that accounted for the cooperative nature of the work these two sides do, by comparing them as two distinct agencies, rather than simply using case outcome analysis, which has been the standard for the small amount of research that exists on this topic. The population used for this study consists of all of the public defenders and district attorneys employed in the County of Sacramento, California. This was a total of 240 attorneys, with 160 working for the district attorney, and 80 working for the public defender. The research concludes that as far as education and experience are concerned the public defender and prosecution are very similar, with some slight advantages going to the public defender. While this does not mean the public defender is equally situated with the prosecutor as far as resources, funding, and public perception, they are equal when looking at the variables of education and experience.