How are criminal defense services delivered to low income people facing criminal charges?
• The staffed public defender model, with employees on salary. • The assigned counsel model, where individual private attorneys are appointed to provide defense services, either from an ad hoc list maintained by the courts or through some more systematic organization of services. • The contract model, where individual attorneys or firms contract to provide some or all of a jurisdiction’s indigent defense services. Today, the majority of indigent defense in the United States is provided through a public defender model, particularly in larger urban jurisdictions.
