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