I’m an attorney and I work as a public defender’s office in a liberal Indiana college town. At least in this county, you can get a public defender regardless almost regardless of whether you can afford private counsel; the judges routinely appoint PDs without asking about a defendant’s financial information. What is actually quite common here is that a PD will do loads of pretrial work on a case and then, shortly before trial, clients will hire private counsel. I guess so they can save money, or maybe because they’ve been talking to jailhouse “lawyers” who think they know more law than someone that actually went to law school.
In other counties, it’s just as others have described: there’s no dedicated public defender’s office, and “public defenders” are private attorneys who allow themselves to be appointed as counsel to indigent clients. The pay rate is shockingly low; some counties even have flat fees for each clients. Studies have actually shown that dedicated public defender offices offer better representation and at a lower cost.
Also, at least in Indiana, you can get a public defender for more than just criminal cases: juvenile deliquents, children and parents who are in trouble with the Dept. of Child Services (CHINS, Child in Need of Services, is what they’re called), parental terminations, paternity hearings, mental health commitment hearings, and divorce cases where someone is about to be held in contempt.
Or, as happened to a friend of mine, the defendant really can’t afford a lawyer. But once they’ve had a chance to tell their friends about the situation, their friends raise the money for them. Which can take time.
After his case was resolved (plea bargained down to probation and time served), he got a bill for the public defender’s time. I don’t think it was very much though.
Bricker already covered Virginia, but I can add this:
The worksheet takes into account dependants/household size.
If convicted, you must pay a max of $120 per misdemeanor count. We (the PD’s) fill out a timesheet that determines this, though it’s almost always over the $120 cap. The billing rate is $90/hour. There’s also a cap for felonies, but I don’t recall what it is at the moment.
Because of this, a lot of our clients think that we are secretly trying to get them convicted because that’s the only circumstance under which we get paid. Our paychecks come from a state agency, not from the locality. I don’t know or care what happens to the collected fees.
This middle-aged square could have gotten kicked out of the country if a cop had smelled (or claimed to smell) pot in her house or her car, while she lived in the US. Therefore, no illegal drugs were allowed in my house or my car and there were friends of my friends who were specifically Not Welcome, as they refused to understand “no drugs in my house or my car.”
Actions have consequences and sometimes the actions that screw you aren’t even your own.