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In the United States, a public defender is a lawyer appointed to represent people who cannot afford to hire an attorney. The 1963 US Supreme Court case ''Gideon v. Wainwright'' held that the Sixth Amendment's right to counsel provision requires the government to provide legal counsel to indigent defendants in criminal cases.〔()〕 Different jurisdictions, however, use different approaches in providing legal counsel for criminal defendants who can't afford private attorneys. Under the federal system and most common among the states is through a publicly funded public defender office. Typically, these offices function as an agency of the federal, state or local government and, as such, these attorneys are compensated as salaried government employees. This approach provides a substantial majority of the indigent criminal defense representation in the United States.〔http://www.superscholar.org/careers/government/public-defender/〕 An example of this model is the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia. In addition to government-based offices, there are also a smaller but significant number of not-for-profit agencies, often referred to as a "Defender Service" or a "Legal Aid Society" that provide indigent criminal defense services. These entities tend to rely heavily on indirect sources, public funding, and charitable contributions to meet their operating costs. Notable not-for-profit public defense agencies in the U.S. include Gideon's Promise and The Bronx Defenders.〔http://www.ndsny.org/〕〔http://www.bronxdefenders.org/〕 == Founding and history == The Sixth Amendment of the United States Constitution provides that “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the assistance of counsel for his defense.” In the famous Scottsboro Boys case, ''Powell v. Alabama'', 287 U.S. 45 (1932), the United States Supreme Court held that the indigent defendants, unable to afford to hire their own attorneys and accused of what was then a capital crime, had the right to a court-appointed attorney flowing from the Sixth Amendment. The defendants in that case were nine black men accused of rape by two white women in Alabama, and the white judge had failed to appoint counsel. Accordingly, one of the underlying social concerns in Powell was guarding against the danger that innocent people would suffer false accusations motivated by racism, then end up facing the ultimate punishment because their poverty precluded them from obtaining guidance through the potentially unfair trial process. The Court's decision applied only to capital crimes. A decade later, ''Betts v. Brady'', 316 U.S. 455 (1942) narrowed the Powell holding. The soon-to-be-overturned Betts decision held that an indigent defendant, even in a capital case, had no right to court-appointed counsel unless the defendant was illiterate, of low intelligence generally, or caught up in a particularly complicated trial. The landmark case in the United States that helped pave the way for all defendants to be guaranteed an attorney in criminal proceedings was ''Gideon v. Wainwright'', . Gideon was a middle-aged Florida man who was charged with breaking into a bar and stealing money and beer. He argued at his arraignment that he could not adequately defend himself, and that a system that puts an uneducated person against a trained attorney is fundamentally unfair. On appeal, the Supreme Court of the United States agreed. Although there had been some provisions for free attorneys prior to ''Gideon'', it served as the catalyst for a wave of change. Following the landmark 1963 decision, the 1960s witnessed the creation of programs across the country to make this right available to most people charged with crimes who could not afford an attorney to represent them. Over half a century before ''Gideon'', the first person to ever propose the creation of a public defender's office was California's first female attorney, Clara Shortridge Foltz. In a time before there were public defenders, young, inexperienced attorneys were often ordered by courts to defend indigents ''pro bono'', and in that capacity, Foltz saw firsthand the inequitable results of that system.〔http://www.law.stanford.edu/library/wlhbp/clarapostcard.html〕 Foltz first proposed the idea of a public defender in a speech at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. As a result of her energetic lobbying, Los Angeles County hired Walton J. Wood to head the first public defender's office in the United States in January 1914. In 1921, the California Legislature extended the public defender system to all state courts.〔http://www.law.stanford.edu/library/womenslegalhistory/clarapostcard.html〕〔 〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Public defender (United States)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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