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Notes -
https://abc7news.com/post/people-charged-felonies-san-francisco-could-released-due-lack-public-defenders/18054704/
There's a lot going on in this article. The San Francisco public defender's office is claiming that individuals must be released from incarceration if the office does not receive more funding to secure additional manpower. They also claim that this is due to frivolous cases being brought up by the DA, saying that their caseload has incr by 60% since 2021.
The DA claims that it is a cynical attempt to hold the city for ransom to secure more funding for the Public Defender's office.
It's interesting to me that the Public Defender's office chose 2021 as its metric, as I believe that represented the low-water mark of law enforcement activity in the US over the last decade.
Does anyone in the area have more context on this? It appears to be a very specific kind of infighting that seems very alien to me.
There is a recent precedent for this kind of thing: Appellate court affirms ruling, releasing defendants from Oregon jails who aren't promptly assigned a public defender
I have zero idea what staffing in the SF PDO is like, but a lack of defense attorneys is a problem in many places (despite all the leftist/woke people attending law schools, the percentage of graduates willing to do defense work seems to be dropping).
I don't think it's paradoxical - the more woke someone is the less they follow the old norms of "give everyone a fair chance and make sure the system doesn't abuse its power over people" and are more likely to be unwilling to defend really bad people. Sure, most of the work a defense attorney might face will involve protecting the rights of someone who's just a victim of circumstances, like Decarlos Brown. But sometimes you might be called to defend someone who you cannot in good conscience, like someone homophobic or racist. It's better to be able to pick clients and then take on a few pro bono cases to feel better about it.
I worry that we will start to see the same shift in Medicine.
They don't even do this. They want to go to work for NGOs and be "activists" and "raise awareness" and attend zoom meetings talking about white supremacy. Writing motions and appearing in court and doing jail visits and arguing with prosecutors and dealing with hostile judges? That's, like, hard work.
I can't speak to young attorneys not wanting to do real work, but I've definitely sensed a "grass is greener" mentality among several of them. It's usually that they're convinced that a particular line of work is boring and that there's something interesting and more glamorous out there. I've never done criminal defense, but I interviewed with the DA's office a number of years back and was told that the job was in the DUI division; I'd be doing nothing but drug DUIs, all day every day, and if I needed help I could ask the regular DUI guy for advice.
I think part of the problem stems from the fact that in law school you're constantly moving between different areas of the law, but when you get into practice you're mostly doing the same thing, and novel legal issues don't come up so much as novel factual issues. It's been at least a year since I've had to read any caselaw, but I spent last week going over hundreds of pages of contracting records from the 70s.
This is one of my "complaining about the kids these days" hobbyhorses: in criminal defense, there is a reason to be searching caselaw almost every day. Huge amounts of constitutional disputes revolve around tiny factual differences and finding caselaw with the most similar factual similarities and arguing by analogy why those should control instead of the cases favoring the State is the name of the game.
Being able to say to a prosecutor "here are 3 opinions with similar fact patterns and here's why I'm going to win a suppression hearing" is the best move towards a better plea offer (even if the argument is mostly bluster). Maybe the research leads to 0 and it's time for hard talk with the client that they have zero legal issues to stand on. Either way, that exact issue shouldn't need to be researched from scratch in the future and it should be incorporated as base-level knowledge for future cases.
There are plenty of areas of law where changes are slow and caselaw searches aren't crucial, like you say yours is. Criminal defense is not one, especially in more populous states where new decisions on criminal issues are a constant thing. And I cannot get newer attorneys to do caselaw searches. No matter how many times I hear, "I have a case with fact pattern Z, what do you think?" and respond with "I don't know, what caselaw have you found with something similar?," I keep getting blank stares like research never occurs to them. And research could not be easier now compared to the paper days of Shepard cites, or even the early 2000s electronic options.
This is not isolated to my office. I hear the same thing from other defense friends who have become supervisors or mentors. Plus it's merely one facet of the unwillingness to do work overall. Coupled with the overall dearth of candidates (something DA offices are contending with, too), it makes for frustrating times.
Is it really that you can't get them to do caselaw searches or that they just aren't experienced enough to know that they need to do them? I actually had to assign a newer kid some research into a motion in limine I was preparing a few weeks ago. He called me five minutes later with the disappointing news that I was wasting my time drafting it because he only got as far as the rules before seeing that it wasn't going to work, but he never complained about it or anything. But if they are pushing back on it it reminds me of a scene from The Wire where Herc calls the procedures "more bullshit" and Freamon says "This right here IS the job. When you came down here what did you expect?" Maybe it's because when I switched practice areas I harbored no delusions about what the job would entail, even though I didn't know what the job would entail. There's always an outside impression that's at least somewhat at odds with the workaday reality of any job. I'd honestly rather have younger attorneys who at least ask you what they should do. I've found it preferable to the ones who don't ask you anything and then turn in terrible work product, and then stay bad at their jobs long enough that they can't even ask some questions without eliciting "how long have you been working here?" as a response.
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