Not that I'm a libertarian, but if I was I would be inclined to argue the right to an attorney is specifically in place when the government initiates legal action against you. Outside of specific government action you have no right to an attorney -- you can't for instance sue the government and demand the government provide you with an attorney to do so.

The government may have wrongfully initiated the legal action, but this is not certain before the trial is over. Remember, in the case of guilt (context: when someone is guilty of violating an objective law, so this doesn't apply to all of today's laws), it is merely retaliating.

This stuff isn't just an academic issue: "Shrinking funding and access to resources for public defenders and court-appointed attorneys is only making the problem worse." (See: http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/Bad-Lawyering.php)

I support most of what the Innocence Project does, but I think that charity is the answer here (being a selfish person doesn't mean that I don't support charities; it just means that I don't think that such support earns me moral credit). If the government didn't pay for public defendants at all, I think that the Innocence Project might have an easier time raising money for more and better attorneys.

Hang on, so you're saying suspend publicly provided attorneys for people who can't afford them?

Is this one of those cases where they're more "free" because more of them are in jail?

No, I'm saying that they'd get better representation if people didn't think "the government has already taken care of the problem, so why should I donate?"

Imagine the effect of a government program intended to assist stranded motorists (suppose that the program maintained a fleet of trucks which carried common spare tires, gas, compressed air and the like). Fewer people would stop to help, and that program would function about as well as any other government program does, which is another way of saying that it would work a lot worse than any private roadside assistance program known today.

Either that, or it would become more like the private airplane market- totally inaccessible.

Legal representation can't be totally inaccessible unless the justice system removes the right to trials altogether. Representing yourself in court is possible, at least to some extent,^ and it doesn't require hardware like flying does. (Incidentally, this is also why it's a good thing to have libraries in prisons - the innocent can use them to learn more and help exonerate themselves.)

^I know that it's a very poor idea to represent yourself if you have any other option, but it's still better than being on trial in a 100% rigged system, such as the USSR had.

All this complexity regarding law makes me think of Phillip Greenspun's research into computer-aided law: http://philip.greenspun.com/research/area-exam.text

(Holy cow has this gotten off the original topic. Sorry everyone!)

It's an interesting topic though :).

I concede the point that it can't be totally inaccessible, but the it seems like farmers with hunting rifles going after professional soldiers. Sure, sometimes it works out or you get lucky, but that's not the norm.

Although come to think of it, the public defender situation isn't much better, is it.

There are rights and then there are rights. It's pretty easy to see the characterization of "free speech" as rooted in reason / "natural law", or given by God. It's harder to see the "right" to drink alcohol on such universal bases.

Something like legal representation isn't so much deeply fundamental as it is a pragmatic and institutional response to the problem of checking arbitrary prosecution. We would drop it if we could find some better way of checking those prosecutors.

Actually, many legal systems provide some way of getting free representation. The government is involved in many cases.

Similarly, many states will intervene to prevent their citizens from starving, even if they have to spend everyone else's tax money to do so.