Role of a Public Defender

In 2015, Elliott Bennett-Guerrero, MD, began serving as the vice chairman in the Department of Anesthesiology at Stony Brook Medicine. In his spare time, Dr. Elliott Bennett-Guerrero performs philanthropic work by donating to a University of Colorado scholarship for law students desiring to become public defenders.

Unlike in private law practice, where a client pays for a lawyer with their own money and picks their attorney, clients who utilize a public defender’s services cannot pick who oversees their case. When a client commits a suspected crime, the court determines that client’s ability to pay for a lawyer. If the client cannot do so themselves, the court considers them indigent, and they assign the client a public defender.

Federal, state, and county governments pay for a public defender’s services, so they can provide them at no cost to indigent clients. Depending on the local policy, clients either receive vertical representation, whereby one public defender handles their entire case, or horizontal representation, with different public defenders handling each step.