Legal Question in Criminal Law in California

The usefulness or lack thereof of any given public defender, well, Your Mileage May Vary. If you are looking for him to edit and file your motion to suppress, he's more likely to do that if you give him a text file instead of expecting him to re-type the entire motion. It also might depend on whether your motion is or is not well drafted. But he might not do it at all. You get what you pay for.

No. Tactical decisions (aside from whether the defendant will testify) are the lawyer's to make, not the client's. The lawyer decides what motions are worth bringing and how they should be made. He is not an editor who merely fixes and files documents drafted by his client. This is true whether the lawyer is a public defender or privately retained.

Whatever you may think of your public defender, he probably knows his job a lot better than you do.

I agree with Mr. Hoffman. He is absolutely correct. Any client who thinks he knows more than the attorney is making a huge mistake. At the same time, any attorney that does not at least listen and consider what the client is saying is also making a mistake. However the attorney knows the law, not the client. Therefore the attorney makes the tactical decisions regarding the case.

If you don't like the way your public defender is handling your case, you can ask the court for a different public defender, or you can ask the court to appoint a private conflict attorney. However, you better have a good reason and sound legal reasoning to back you up. If you believe you can handle your case better then perhaps you will be able to use that same legal reasoning to ask the court to appoint you a new attorney. I wish you good luck with such an endeavor.

Public defenders get a bad rap and it is undeserved. They work hard and generally know the system and the law. They are overworked but when they focus on your case they generally get to the heart of the matter quickly.

You can always ask the court to let you act as your own attorney. They will appoint an attorney to serve as your legal advisor. Again, I wish you luck.

Good luck.

He doesn't have an obligation to file it if it is frivolous, in fact he has a duty not to.