The Public Defender System and the Indigent's Right to Counsel

Abstract

The public defender system is an American answer to her Constitutional requirement of the right to counsel for the indigent. The social conditions and the political decision-making of San Diego county which resisted to the pressure from the United States Supreme Court to expand and implement the right in the 1960s and early 1970s, are compared to that of Los Angeles county which established the first public defender system at the turn of the century.