professor bener wrote incredible tweetice studying public office throughout the state of -- tweetice studying public office throughout the states of california. why they are not equipped to properly handle all of the cases that they have and the challenges involved in it and what to do about it. next we have the public defender of fresno county. ken tagucci. he has fought a valiant battle. it is still going on on. a raging battle with the board of supervisors in fresno county and last year, they cut his staff by 12 attorneys and at the same time he was expected to handle more cases. and the county responded when public defender said he could not do any more cases by trying to outsource the responsibility of the public defender to low-cost bidders. next we have john truzano who comes from washington, d.c. he is the co-founder of the justice project and john recently co-authored a report about accountability of both prosecutors and judges and so he studied why misconduct curse and what steps need to be taken to ensure that it doesn't happen and finally we have sean levy. he did a serio

[laughter] so, you know, the things a you witnessed, amy, i'm going to ask professor bener to talk about what is the culprit here? are we talking about incompetent lawyers? lawyers who don't care? are we talking about a system that is set up for lawyers to fail? what were the findings that you made as a result of looking at public defender offices throughout california? >> i'm going to speak more to structural aspects of it. i think amy is speaking more of the cultural and human aspects of the job. our system as you know is based on the theory that any accused person who comes to court is presumed innocent. they are protected by that preassumption. that's why, in fact, we provide council for an indigent person whoke not afford counsel. unfortunately, it paints a rather discouraging picture because i found that there is a fundamental disconnect between that theory and actual practice in california and that disconnect occurs because the system, the indigent defense system is funded by local politicians. now these are public officials who must make decisions. they must choose among many wor