"Sorry if this sounds harsh, but you may want to re-evaluate your career choice."

Perhaps you misunderstood the tenor of my post. I am not complaining about investigating -- it is often very interesting. But the reality is that I (a public defender) am not given time to do it, nor resources to do it, nor training for it. And the law also does not give me much *authority* to do it. The police have guns and badges, and doors swing wide open for the DA, but a mere "defense attorney" does not have much authority and going to the court for its authority is often fruitless.

The biggest problems are not cross-examing an expert witness -- they are when evidence is not gathered at the scene and can not be discovered later. A typical example: Two guys get in a fistfight in a parking lot. Cops charge one. You ask the cop "Were there witnesses?" He says "Yeah, but we didn't bother writing down any names." On TV the attorney would have his hot-looking paralegal go the business and sweet-talk a copy of a great surveillance video and then they would stake out the bar for several weekends to find witnesses, and fall in love in the process.....

Me, I've got 300 open cases, zero budget and not even my own secretary. And senior judges tell me it doesn't matter, "because you'll get what you need via discovery....". I should also point out that murders are a tiny minority of cases and do get far more resources, which is natural since they face much harsher sanctions (in many places maybe death). But that does not make it easy to tell someone "Sorry, you're going to do 18 months because the judge won't approve a lab test and our budget is being spent on that Page 1 murder case."

I am under no illusions about the police dedicating their lives to "the search for the truth." But I am also under no illusions about me -- or most other defense attorneys -- being able to somehow levitate above "the system" and provide resources I simply don't have.

Besides, none of my cases yet has been thrown out due to "ineffective assistance of counsel" ;-)