Well I was just wondering if the majority of prosecution lawyers tend to be more qualified or experienced than defence lawyers or maybe there is no difference so for example in the UK it is not unusual for a case to have a prosecution barrister for the Crown lawyer or a prosecution QC who presents the case but the defendant often just has a person referred to as a defence solicitor from a local company which does criminal and sort of defence work. Also sometimes both prosecution and defence have a barrister for the case or a QC but it is that someone is either a prosecution or defence lawyer or do they sometimes do the other? I seem to remember Sir Bernard Spilsbury who was a prosecutor but a time he became a defence lawyer. And sometimes there can be problems if someone giving the evidence is a determined prosecutor who has analysed the evidence but all the defence lawyer has to do is introduce doubt. Is this a fair analysis of the differences and things like this?
The question is framed too broadly. The qualifications of lawyers varies considerably from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Sounds like you are asking specifically about the English bar.
In the USA, prosecution is done by state-employed lawyers, usually a County Attorney or District Attorney office staff. They have steady jobs, government pay & benefits, but their pay is usually lower than that of successful private attorneys. They are often overworked, and settle a lot of cases (most of them) by plea agreements.
Most defense work is also done by state-employed lawyers, in the Public Defenders office. Because most accused people are poor, and can’t afford to hire their own lawyers. Especially for non-major crimes. Public Defender lawyers also get steady jobs, government pay & benefits, but are often very overworked, even more than prosecution lawyers. So they often settle cases via plea agreements.
Private lawyers usually work only for defendants who have money, or have families with money. (Though they do some pro-bono work.) They often specialize in specific areas of law. For example, there are many lawyers who specialize in defending drunk-driving cases. Often these lawyers are more experienced in this area than the prosecutors are. Because they have been doing this for a long time, successfully. (The unsuccessful ones don’t last; they usually move to other areas of law (like writing contracts, real estate sales, or wills.)
That’s a very simplified summary of the legal system in the USA, from a non-lawyer.
In England and Wales, petty crimes are typically tried in Magistrates’ Courts, where defendants can represent themselves or hire a lawyer to represent them. In such cases it’s also possible to hire a solicitor rather than a barrister, and to my understanding this is quite frequent. More severe crimes are tried in the Crown Court - whose London seat is the Old Bailey building, formally called the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales, so if you read in novels that someone is facing trial “at Old Bailey” it is, institutionally, the Crown Court sitting in London; the institutional framework is that, theoretically, there is only one Crown Court for all of England and Wales, and the various Crown Court buildings spread throughout the country are local centres where the Crown Court can sit depending on the case, but its practical result it is the same as if there were different Crown Courts in different cities.
For more severe crimes, defendants would usually be represented or assisted by a barrister (though I’m not sure if this is mandatory). In the past it was more common for the prosecutor to hire a barrister ad hoc on a fee basis, but more recently crown prosecutors are mostly permanent salaried employees of the CPS. In terms of formal qualifications, the CPS hires only qualified solicitors or barristers as prosecutors (CPS careers website here), so the formal qualification would be the same as that of a solicitor or barrister working for the defence.
Spilsbury wasn’t a lawyer; he was a pathologist, most famously in the Crippen case. As a Home Office pathologist, he usually appeared as a prosecution witness, but, as his Wikipedia entry notes, he did sometimes appear as a defence witness in cases in Scotland. So he’s not really relevant.
In theory, the defence has a much lighter burden than the prosecution. In practice, that isn’t really true because juries are predisposed to believe the defendant is guilty. After all, if you were innocent why would the state spend so much time trying to convict you? In the U.S., about 75% of criminal trials end in a conviction on at least one charge.
Prosecutors also have effectively infinite resources (the police to gather evidence in the field, crime labs to do forensic analysis, subpoena power before and after charges are brought), while private defense lawyers and US public defenders have very limited resources for investigation and retaining experts (unless the defendant happens to be wealthy).
To put that into perspective, my firm does civil litigation on behalf of institutional clients - large companies and their insurers, usually. Try a garden-variety personal injury case to a jury can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and at a minimum costs tens of thousands (including attorney’s fees). I am not sure what the average cost of a U.S. prosecution is but I suspect it is broadly comparable, except that prosecutors’ marginal fees are zero because they’re salaried.
AFAIK (IANAL) you have to be an accredited lawyer to appear before the judge unless you are a defendant defending himself. You can’t pick Joe the Plumber to be your defender, and the same I assume is true of prosecutors. So there’s a minimum qualification; even further, you have to pass the bar and get licensed - Alan Dershowitz in the Epstein series currently streaming mentions he had to assemble other lawyers to help Epstein with the earlier charges because he was not licensed to practice law in Florida.
In a previous thread it discussed whether a degree was needed (some states? Most states?) and passing the bar exam, or could you just challenge the bar exam… and then i assume some states honor some other states’ qualifications when issuing licenses?
Several TV shows (which of course is not real life) showed some legal aid lawyers as fresh out of law school or somewhat incompetent - which considering the conditions they work in, may not be far from the truth. The amount of time allocated per case apparently is often single-digit hours; which is why a deal is recommended. It’s often made out to be not a great job unless you have the zeal for it. I’d love to hear comments from people who really know…
I think with a few high profile exceptions, it is much cheaper to put on a criminal case than a civil case. The main costs for a civil case are experts, depositions, and (sometimes) travel. You can also get expensive things like electronic discovery or huge document dumps.
The average criminal prosecution involves no depositions, no travel, and experts already employed by the state (crime lab, for example). Most do not involve a ton of documents.
I’m not a lawyer, but I know a lot of lawyers – I’ve been working in IT at law firms for decades. Also married to one. Grew up with lawyer parents.
Every single criminal defense lawyer I know, and have ever known, used to be a prosecutor.
Also plenty of lawyers in litigation departments of big firms (not necessarily criminal litigation, just general litigation). It’s considered that lawyers get more trial experience, faster, working in a DA’s office than they would at a law firm.
So it seems to me that prosecutors and defense lawyers tend to be pretty much equally qualified.
a lot of people right out of law school and passing the bar are prosecutors/ADAs . For minor things like traffic tickets those guys/gals are usually very young.
The guy the movie Catch Me if You Can is based on claims he passed the bar exam without going to law school. Don’t know if I believe that.
In Florida, where I recently relocated, defense lawyers have to be specifically qualified before they can defend death penalty cases (e.g. have practiced for a minimum amount of time, done a minimum number of complex cases, have taken certain “continuing education” classes…), and defending a felony also requires certain continuing education credits first. I’m not sure how wide spread this is, but it wasn’t an issue in Colorado, where I moved from (although Colorado recently ended its death penalty).
Prosecutors, who work for the state, typically start at a low level (e.g. traffic or misdemeanors) before moving on to more serious felony cases.
In some (rare?) cases in Australia, this lead to the defense having more capable barristers than the prosecution. Union-represented defendants, where the union was willing to put up the money for the best defense, against state-funded prosecution, where paying top barristers for the prosecution meant taking the money out of the budget for something else.
It is quite common for both sides to make mistakes of one kind or another (strategic, tactical or procedural), but I can’t say that I’ve heard that it’s worse on one side or the other.
There are still four states (California, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington) where you can take the bar exam without having gone to law school (you have to apprentice with a lawyer or judge first). A minority have passed the bar exam, though I don’t know how that percentage compares with law school attendees.
Speaking of California, a celebrity attorney most active in the 1930s and 1940s, Jerry Giesler (a.k.a. “the attorney to the stars”) apprenticed to the famous Earl Rogers and sat for the bar exam, which in his day was entirely based on an oral exam by an expert panel. According to Giesler’s story, he studied like mad and waiting in increasing anxiety as the day of the bar exam dragged on without his being called in to the exam room. Finally at the tail end of the session he got in, was asked what law books he had studied, and that was it. He passed. 
Based on what my wife’s said to me over the years (she’s an attorney), that’s pretty accurate. Most government lawyers aren’t paid terribly well, they’re often facing a heavy case load (she mentioned hearing tales from a friend who was literally doing misdemeanor cases and finding out about them when she pulled the folder from the file box… at the courthouse when the actual trial was starting.
That said, most criminal attorneys aren’t exactly the Great Whites of lawyerdom either; most criminals don’t have a lot of money to pay with either. So they’re probably trying to chug through a lot of volume as well. Similarly, in civil court, most plaintiff’s attorneys who are working for the general public (i.e. ambulance chasers) aren’t exactly raking in the dough unless they’re the owners/partners of a large firm.
The real money in lawyering is in big corporate civil law. That’s where the attorneys make in the 200k and up range, and partners make even more. Criminal and being a plaintiff attorney aren’t high dollar things, just like being an assistant DA isn’t terribly lucrative either. I mean, I’m a mid-career IT pro, and I make in the same ballpark as the assistant DAs in my county.
That said, they’re all required to have passed the bar (i.e. be licensed by the state), so in theory, they’re all educated to a minimum standard and have shown proficiency by passing the bar exam. Depending on the state, that may mean that they’ve graduated in good standing from an accredited law school as well, but some may allow just taking the bar exam without having to prove you were educated.
My former boss in Colorado typically made more than a million dollars a year doing criminal defense. It can be incredibly lucrative when you become “high profile”. We charged flat fees: a sex crime might be $50-$75k. A murder would be $75-100k (a DUI, by comparison, $5-$10k).
You might think that these are amounts out of reach to most people, but when somebody is facing life in prison, they might take out another mortgage, or borrow from their entire family, to come up with the fee.
One of our clients was a maintenance man for an apartment complex who pulled out a gun and shot and killed a teenager who was threatening him; his extended family came up with the $75,0000.
Well yeah, but he was high-profile. Because of my job, I used to know a lot of criminal defense attorneys - and their bread-and-butter was being assigned counsel* , which at that time paid $25/hr for out of court work and $40 for in-court time (the rates are now $60/hr for misdemeanors and $75/hr for felonies). Sure , they charged more for private cases- but if they could have made a million dollars just taking private case, they wouldn’t have been on the assigned counsel panel to begin with.
- We don’t have a public defender’s office - indigent defense is provided through a combination of contracts with non-profit organizations and assigned counsel panels.
For the current and very high profile Claremont Serial Killer case that is currently wrapping up now in Perth, the accused (Bradley Robert Edwards) is utilising LegalAid. Which is equivalent to the US public defender as I understand.
However as the state prosecutor has an all star, top flight barrister team, the government determined the defense team should be equal in ability and capacity so they’ve appointed an external barrister who charges 5k/day and is apparently going to cost us (taxpayer’s) several million before all is said and done. Of course we’re paying for the prosecution as well.
So there must be some local standard of equity applied in these affairs. Whether it’s always applied, or only for high profile cases, or only for marginal cases where the threat of a poor defense could lead to a mistrial, I cannot be sure.
A free news article talking briefly about it:
One other huge advantage the prosecution has is the ability to pressure witnesses to testify in line with their version of events (or to not testify altogether), due to the ability of the prosecutors to prosecute these same witnesses for involvement with the crime.
Right. I’m sure Racehorse Haynes made plenty of money, but there was probably a small handful of other criminal defense lawyers of his stature in the entire state, while the vast majority were doing exactly what **doreen **suggests- not making big bucks.
Lawyering in general isn’t as high-dollar as you might expect. Partners at larger firms do make big bucks, but the majority of lawyers aren’t partners. It’s not necessarily a low paying gig, but it’s not like all lawyers are making big bucks- a lot are making salaries in line with other well paid professionals like IT people, physician’s assistants, middle-management, etc… Somewhere in the 75-125k range I’d guess. Which sounds great, but when you consider that most have law school loans to pay off, it’s not as awesome as it might otherwise seem.
The median, lower-quartile and upper-quartile lawyer wages in the US are $121K, $79K and $182K. Lawyers’ salaries are somewhat constrained by the fact that you can only bill so many hours, so the people who make truly big money are the ones who work at large firms and have large institutional clients which dozens or hundreds of attorneys perform work for. Really, the best-paid lawyers are essentially salespeople. However, those salaries are not always reflected in the statistics because their earnings are (usually) primarily in the form of partnership dividends rather than salary.
These figures have very little to do with criminal work, though; there are no giant criminal defense firms, except for firms which specialize in white-collar criminal defense which is really its own sphere.