Most criminal defendants cannot afford to hire an attorney. To provide constitutionally mandated legal services, states commonly use either private court-appointed attorneys or a public defender organization. This paper investigates the relative efficacy of these two modes of indigent defense by comparing outcomes of co-defendants assigned to different types of attorneys within the same case. Using data from San Francisco, I show that in multiple defendant cases public defender assignment is plausibly as good as random. I find that public defenders reduce the probability of any prison sentence by 22% and the length of prison sentences by 10%.

中文翻译：

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自制还是外购？在美国提供贫困国防服务

大多数刑事被告负担不起聘请律师的费用。为了提供宪法规定的法律服务，各州通常使用法院指定的私人律师或公设辩护人组织。本文通过比较同一案件中分配给不同类型律师的共同被告的结果，研究了这两种贫困辩护模式的相对效力。使用来自旧金山的数据，我表明在多个被告案件中，公设辩护人的分配似乎与随机一样好。我发现公设辩护人将被判入狱的概率降低了 22%，并将刑期缩短了 10%。