Public defenders carry 3x the maximum safe caseload per ABA standards

A landmark RAND Corporation study found that public defenders across the United States regularly carry triple the caseload they can effectively handle, with some handling upwards of 10 times too many cases. The 1973 national standards -- still in use -- assume 13.9 hours per felony case, but the updated RAND guidelines recommend 35 hours, meaning public defenders are spending less than 40% of the time needed per case. The people harmed are the 80% of criminal defendants who cannot afford private counsel and depend on overloaded public defenders who may have only minutes to review their case before a hearing. In San Francisco, active public defender caseloads rose 47% from 5,039 in January 2019 to 7,421 in October 2025, forcing the office to declare unavailability for 11% of felony cases and 15% of misdemeanor cases. When a public defender is unavailable, cases are delayed, defendants sit in pretrial detention longer (at $100-$300/day taxpayer cost), and the pressure to accept plea deals -- regardless of guilt -- intensifies. An estimated 97% of federal cases and 94% of state cases are resolved through plea bargains, many negotiated by attorneys who had inadequate time to investigate the facts. This persists because public defense is funded at a fraction of what prosecution receives (San Francisco's DA budget dwarfs the public defender's), there is no political constituency advocating for better representation of accused criminals, and the Sixth Amendment right to counsel has no enforcement mechanism that would force states to fund adequate defense.